Arts & Ideas Folgen

Rana Mitter assesses the shortlist for this year's Booker prize and speaks to nominee Jhumpa Lahiri. Joanna Bourke and Paul Schulte examines the history of chemical warfare and our ambivalence to it. Plus Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper celebrate the publication of the long awaited final instalment of Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his journey from the Hook of Holland to the Bosphorus and beyond.

Ian McMillan, Judith Palmer and Don Paterson introduce the winning entries in this year's Proms Poetry Competition - and welcome some of the winners on stage to read their poems. The reader is Samantha Bond. Recorded in front of an audience at this year's Proms Plus events at the Royal College of Music. In Association with the Poetry Society.

Former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and poet Paul Farley on the work of one of the most popular and influential of the Thirties poets, Louis MacNeice, the BBC producer who worked with Benjamin Britten and W.H. Auden and whose most enduring work, Autumn Journal, is set amid the upheaval of the period leading up to the Second World War. MacNeice died fifty years ago this week. There's also a Proms appreciation of fellow Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney whose death was announced on Friday. Ian McMillan presents. Recorded in front of an audience at the Royal College of Music as part of this summer's Proms Plus events.