Ari wells was absolutely red a to take an interest in science, but he was also interested in everything else. He would go into libraries, and he didn't do so well science, because he was always following other subjects. And he produces these early science fiction novels, the war of the worlds and all the time. The time machine is the first ona. Some some time later, after he has gone off the provinces to be a schoolmaster, after he nearly died having been kicked on the football field, but he had times when he was half starved. Am and e, it was writing the time machine that made his first published, a first proper published story. Isn't it wonderful
‘Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening’, wrote George Orwell in 1940. In Orwell’s Roses Rebecca Solnit explores how the writer’s love for growing things, especially flowers, seeps into his work. She reflects on how he uses pleasure, beauty and joy as powerful acts of resistance. And how far these can counter the political and environmental challenges we face today.
The father of science fiction, H.G. Wells was also driven by a desire to reform the society he lived in at the turn of the 20th century. The biographer Claire Tomalin brings to life his early years in The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World. He was born into poverty and achieved international fame, but never lost his boundless curiosity for the world around him, and the possibilities of science to change it.
The journalist Peter Hetherington asks why land reform is not higher on the government’s agenda. In Land Renewed he looks at the competing elements in the reshaping of the countryside and aiding nature’s recovery, including protecting valuable farmland, encouraging more local food production, re-wilding and ‘re-peopling’ remote places. But he argues it needs a wider vision to re-work the countryside for the benefit of all.
Producer: Katy Hickman