Of all weathers, snow is the one that has always affected the author Marcus Sedgwick the most.

Five years ago, he and his partner bought a mountain house, an old chalet d’alpage high in the Haute Savoie of eastern France.

Marcus Sedgwick muses on why snow is so powerful to our imagination and so transformative.

This episode explores how snow has inspired artists, musicians and filmmakers looking at the vividly 'cold' paintings of Bruegel, Schubert's beautiful but bleak Winterreise, and Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice created as he walked from Munich to Paris in late November to visit the dying Lottie Eisner.

Abridged by Katrin Williams

Read by Jonathan Firth.

Producer: Julian Wilkinson

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in December 2016. Show less