In Front Row tonight: The Last Kingdom, the BBC's epic new drama series about the Vikings' invasion of Anglo-Saxon England. Nina Ramirez reviews.

Kirsty Lang visits a huge exhibition at the British Library of literature and music from West Africa - from the great African empires of the Middle Ages to the cultural dynamism of the region today.

The director Guillermo del Toro, who has made films in many genres - fairy tale, horror, monsters - embraces the Gothic in his latest, Crimson Peak, and tells Kirsty how, for a Mexican such as he, ghosts are an every day reality.

More than 200 poems by the great 18th century haiku author and painter Yosa Buson have just been discovered in a library near Kyoto. Stephen Gill, a poet and translator who lives nearby reports on the significance of this find.

Kirsty speaks to Robert Seethaler whose A Whole Life describes the world of a man of few words in the Austrian Alps. A slim novel, it condenses the story of Andreas Egger into the episodes that shaped his life, amid the magnificent and dangerous mountains that take the lives of those he loves. His novel is part of the Radio 4 series, Reading Europe and can be heard next week every night at 22.45pm. Show less