He was one of the founder members of the fabian society. Veatris reb would give dinners to which, you know, she could invite the prime minister,. She can invite anybody she wanted to and including wells peter. One of the points you make in your book is that we have an absolute confusion in government departments at the moment around land. Lots of different government departments are involved in the landscape of britain. And i wonder if we had a culture in which radical figures, political figures, players, senior civil servants were able to mingle and converse quietly together about the problems facing the country... things might be better organized than they are now.
‘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