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Jeanette Winterson

Philip Dodd talks to the novelist Jeanette Winterson about her new memoir, 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?' in which she searches for her birth mother.

Philip Dodd speaks to the novelist Jeanette Winterson about her new memoir, 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?'

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's novel, 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit', told the story of a young girl adopted by a Pentecostal couple. Written when Winterson was 25, it won the Whitbread First Novel prize and became an award-winning television drama. The book was seen at the time as semi-autobiographical. Now, in her new memoir, Winterson looks back at her childhood growing up in a now vanished Northern community and at her search to find her birth mother.

Michael Goldfarb the reviews the new film directed by George Clooney, The Ides of March. Based on the play by Beau Willimon, the film tells the story of behind-the-scenes politics during a Presidential election campaign in America.

And many scientists are seeing further and understanding more than ever before, through experiments like the search for the Higgs boson and the Large Hadron Collider. Physicists Frank Close and Tara Shears discuss whether this is a golden age for physics.

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45 minutes

Last on

Thu 27 Oct 2011 22:00

Broadcast

  • Thu 27 Oct 2011 22:00

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Free Thinking

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