The Essay

Are you sitting comfortably? Despite his bad posture, novelist and academic Ian Sansom explores our complex physical, mental and emotional relationship with the chair. Chairs can symbolise who we are, like Ian's comfy old overstuffed armchair, and in 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears', the little bear asks 'Who's been sitting in my chair?' which Ian reads as "Who am I?" Van Gogh painted two empty chairs after his famous fall-out with Gauguin; Henry Thoreau, out in his cabin at Walden Pond, had just three chairs 'one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society'. Ian has 26 chairs in total, but not a 'named chair', which is the 'scholar's burnished throne'. Apart from beds, we share more intimacy with chairs than with any other piece of furniture, but often their symbolism is most powerful when empty, because Ian believes that empty chairs always imply people.

Novelist and academic Ian Sansom steps into the history of wardrobes, to discover not only how and why we store clothes in large upright wooden boxes, but also why wardrobes feature so largely in fairy tales, memoirs and stories. From E. Nesbit's 'The Aunt and Anabel' to C.S Lewis's 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe', via Guy De Maupassant's tragic tale of a child in a wardrobe, Rimbaud's poem about a wardrobe with missing keys, and Roman Polanski's short film about two men who carry a wardrobe out of the sea; Ian explores the symbolism of wardrobes as a place where secrets are stored, imaginations inspired, consciences hidden, and our 'selves' reinvented.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...5. Philip Hoare is quickly at the water's edge in Sholing, well before the waking hour. Then meetings with many animals are recalled.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...4. Kirsty Gunn is in Sutherland, debating whether to ford the chilly River Brora on an afternoon hike.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...3. John Walsh reckons that 'below' it feels wintry; yet ascend near a village called Steep and spring beckons. But where is he?Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...2. Ross Raisin recalls the Yorkshire Wolds, getting greener all the time, and scene of some famous new paintings by David Hockney.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Five writers set out on foot to sample the transforming qualities of Spring. They report back with tales that are climatically confused - it could be warm or chilly out there ...1. Michele Roberts pounds the pavements of Poznan and is reminded of Persephone under scudding clouds.Producer Duncan Minshull.

Radio 3 presenter Sara Mohr-Pietsch celebrates a composer whose music has particularly inspired her: the remarkable twelfth-century abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen - perhaps the earliest actual "composer" in the history of Western music.

Radio 3 presenter Martin Handley celebrates a composer whose music has particularly inspired him: Malcolm Arnold, creator of symphonies of great emotional depth and complexity - as Martin discovered as a teenage violinist, playing Arnold's Second Symphony with the composer conducting.

Radio 3 presenter Lucie Skeaping celebrates a composer whose music has particularly inspired her: the Elizabethan Thomas Ravenscroft, a contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote songs that became incredibly popular - or, like Shakespeare, borrowed from the popular imagination and made it his own.