Front Row

In his new film Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Sam Neill stars as a grumpy New Zealand farmer forced to go on the run with a Maori kid who thinks he's a gangster. He discusses the film, his acting mentor James Mason and starring in one of the lowest grossing feature films ever. Frederick Forsyth has announced he's stopping writing, partly because he's now too old to travel to the settings of his thrillers. Sharon Bolton, who researched the Falkland Islands from Britain for her novel Little Black Lies, and Stephanie Merritt, who visited Paris and Prague for her historical fiction thrillers, discuss whether writers must travel to their books' settings to really capture the feel of a place. Nicholas Marston, Professor of Music Theory and Analysis at King's College, Cambridge talks about a recently discovered musical 'doodle' by Beethoven which might tell us more about his most celebrated works, the Emperor Concerto. Writer Michael Bird has written a book called Vincent's Starry Night which sets out to ignite young p