If you can't walk, see, move or breathe unaided, you can still fly through the galaxies as a brain ship, encased in titanium, and totally in charge of your own environment, serving the sentient world in intergalactic transport. You can be a hospital ship, a charter flight for actors, and a transporter of 30,000 babies in embryo. Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang is a pre-feminist novel about why women in space need never be confined except by their own bodies. For those who really want to fly.

What trouble can lichen cause? If it gives you longer life, and only some people can afford it, that's a lot of trouble. And when the people who've been given the longer life first are women, how are the others going to feel? Why should women have more life? What will they do with it? How will society change? John Wyndham's great novel Trouble with Lichen from 1960 is a classic work of British science fiction from a master story-teller, one of his best, and most far-seeing, because this future is still ahead of us.

Podcasts from August 2011 to August 2012 

First Series (22 August-30 December 2011)

"Forgotten Fiction A-Z"

Margery Allingham
John Buchan
Colette
Monica Dickens
Laura Esquivel
Kate Fox
John Galt
Helene Hanff
Molly Izzard
Tove Jansson
Rudyard Kipling
C S Lewis
A G Macdonell
Adam Nicolson
Peter O'Donnell
Barbara Pym
Arthur Quiller-Couch
Mary Renault
Vern Sneider
Angela Thirkell
John Updike
Laurens Van der Post
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Dornford Yates

Second Series (5 January-26 July 2012)

"Five Great Reads in British Political Fiction"

Erskine Childers
Constance Maud
Rose Macaulay
Nancy Mitford
George Orwell

"Five Classic Detective Novels"

T H White
Dorothy L Sayers
Josephine Tey
Ngaio Marsh
Margery Allingham

"Five Appalling Fictional Women"

Jane Austen
G B Stern
Storm Jameson
Dornford Yates
Eudora Welty

"Five American Working Women"

Louisa May Alcott
Edith Wharton
Willa Cather
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Barbara Kingsolver

"Five Great Epic Poems You've Never Read"

Beowulf
Edmund Spenser
John Milton
Lord Tennyson
Alexander Pope

"Nature Writing"

Robert Gibbings
Oliver Rackham
Kathleen Jamie
Robert Atkinson
Roger Deakin

Want to know more? Send me a mail at kate.brussels [at] yahoo.com.

Splish, splosh, let's go swimming. Oh look, an otter. A jellyfish! No, that's pondweed. Mind the pike. Did it bite your nose or was that a leech? Oops, a rock, down we goooo. Roger Deakin's Waterlog swims around Britain, in wild water and posh pools, arguing with water bailiffs and enjoying the tickle of sunny water on his toes. For armchair paddlers.

Birds, birds, more birds and precious few home comforts. Robert Atkinson's Island-Going is about sailing and camping in the roughest of weathers in the Outer Hebrides in the 1930s, looking for some very tiny birds and animals, summer after summer. North Rona, Handa, the Shiants, St Kilda, and Sula Sgeir are visited, docketed, deeply appreciated, and left to their own devices again. Millions of puffins, thousands of predatory greater black-backed gulls, and really rather large numbers of the elusive Leach's fork-tailed petrel. Bring your own sleeping-bag.

Kathleen Jamie's Findings is a book of nature writing so hard to pin down, we just need to think about the key words; poet, kitchen window, hills, cycling, skulls, ospreys, peregrines, corncrakes, binoculars, weathercocks, the fragility of the body and its parts, and looking closely at whatever you missed the first time. For naturalists with soul.

Let's go for a walk: through time, through mud, through woods, up roads, past hedges, through rivers, round ponds, over moorland, down dales, on high roads and low roads, to the sea, all laid out and explained by the brilliantly readable Oliver Rackham in his History of the Countryside. Walking boots not required, not yet.

Robert Gibbings's picaresque account of a meander down the Thames, from source to Windsor Castle, in a home-made punt and with a microscope, is a blissful immersion into inter-war natural history. Sweet Thames Run Softly holds hundreds of stories about plants and wildlife, swan maidens included. For those who embrace the mud as a brother.

Wigs, flounces, fans, sprites, epic card games, and the calamitous consequences of the cutting of a lock of hair: Alexander Pope's satire on the heroic epic, The Rape of the Lock, is neo-classical fun and games. it's also a sly social commentary on women's lives and the wasted days in the lives of the rich and bored. For those who like to take counsel as well as tea.

Tennyson's The Princess is a Victorian chivalric farce, packed with lyric poetry, knightly errantry, cross-dressing, and the ludicrous concept of a women-only university. Gasp at the foot-stomping rage of a king whose son has been jilted. Smile at the spectacle of a woman teaching philosophy. Be gravely pleased by the submission of Princess Ida to her prince's persuasions. For readers who take their lecture notes wearing classical drapery.