Front Row

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 scie