Prize-winning author Meg Rosoff was born into a nice Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts, where the emphasis was on doing well at school and learning the piano. She knew her passion for horses was never going to result in actually having one, but managed her obsession with annual trips to pony camp. In Pony Tails (Thursday, 11.30am, Radio 4) she argues persuasively that the animals have a particular appeal to women either before or after their child-bearing years. She got back in the saddle again at the age of 48. “It was like being an alcoholic and coming back to drink,” she says. In the programme, Rosoff visits a conference on pony books in Cambridge and finds other women like herself who still find that the classic horsey story – which often involves spotting the potential in a beast that nobody else fancies – speaks to their depths in a way that no other fiction quite does.
The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Here, as one of the voices on Moving Pictures (Monday, 4pm, Radio 4) reminds us, the guards would probably shout at you if you got too close. Which would be a shame because – as another of the expert voices corralled by presenter Cathy FitzGerald says – in this kind of art there is simply no area of the canvas that the artist hasn’t thought carefully about and which doesn’t tell you something about life at the time it was painted. To appreciate that, you have to get closer than you would be able to in real life.
Now, thanks to Google Arts & Culture app – which offers you access to a high-resolution version of the picture on your computer or tablet while you listen to the programme – you can get microscopically close. Experts explain what the workers in the fields would have been eating, what particular animal-tormenting game was going on in the background and the significance of the ships back there in the haze. And sound effects add the sound of scythes, the wind in the corn, and the tweeting of the birds. As the commentary teaches, these aren’t strictly necessary: this scene of apparent pastoral peace would in fact have been filled with the sounds of industry, labour and gluttony.
“Once I sniffed cocaine to see what it was like. I don’t gamble except on horses and I drink very much less than everyone else I know. That is the limit of my wickedness.” Thus speaks Fleur Forsyte, the brittle flapper heroine of John Galsworthy’s family saga The Forsytes Returns. Catch the first feature-length episode on Saturday afternoon (2pm, Radio 4) as well as 15-minute hits every weekday at 7.45pm before next Saturday’s finale. Meat Loaf, Johnnie Walker’s guest for Sounds Of The 70s (Sunday, 3pm, Radio 2), is two words. I have had this confirmed at first hand by overhearing his wife refer to him as “Meat”.
