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Front Row: Rotters in literature, John Keats' poem To Autumn,  The Art of Innovation at the Science Museum

Rotters in literature, John Keats' poem To Autumn,  The Art of Innovation at the Science Museum

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Rotters in literature, John Keats' poem To Autumn,  The Art of Innovation at the Science Museum

We explore favourite rotters in fiction and ask why so few of them are women.

Favourite rotters in fiction - why are so few of them women? And we celebrate 200 years of john Keats' poem To Autumn

We look at rotters in fiction: do women have equal status with men when it comes to being bad in books? Rotters have populated the novel since Robert Lovelace first appeared in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa nearly two centuries ago. But what exactly is a rotter, how do rotters differ from cads and, when women are rotters, are they given equal treatment by both their writers and their readers? John Mullan, Professor of Literature at UCL and critic Alex Clark discuss the rotter's progress.

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun…”

It is 200 years, to the very day, since John Keats wrote To Autumn, distilling the sights, sounds, even smell of the season and capturing its essence in three carefully crafted stanzas that are among the best-loved in the language. We hear a reading and Alison Brackenbury explains how the poem works and her response to it as a poet.

The Science Museum and BBC Radio 4 have been collaborating on an exploration of the relationship between art and science over 250 years. The result is The Art of Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter, which is an exhibition, a book and a 20-part radio series. Dr Tilly Blyth, Principal Curator, and one of the programme presenters tells Stig about Joseph Wright’s famous painting of a scientific lecture; how Turner captured impact of the emerging age of steam and how artists tackle depicting science that can’t be seen.

Presenter: Stig Abell
Producer: Simon Richardson

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Rotters in literature, John Keats' poem To Autumn, The Art of Innovation at the Science Museum

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