Open Book - 28/06/2009

Mariella Frostrup talks to the novelist Adam Thorpe, who uses Robin Hood as the central character of his new novel, Hodd. He explains why his version of Robin Hood is far from the romantic hero of popular legend. Martin Bell, the journalist and former MP, joins the historian Quentin Skinner to consider a new translation of Machiavelli's The Prince, the manual for would-be rulers everywhere. They discuss what Machiavelli's advice can offer the contemporary politician, and what the Italian writer would have made of recent political scandals. Kathryn Hughes offers an appreciation of the comic talents of Jerome K Jerome, the author of Three Men in a Boat, 150 years after his birth.