Open Book - 30/05/2010

Mariella Frostrup's guests include the bestselling writer Bill Bryson. He talks about his latest book At Home, in which he takes his readers on a tour of the Norfolk rectory where he lives with his family - and uses this as the starting point for a wide-ranging history of domestic life. An eclectic and highly personal tour of the past, the tour of the rectory's passage takes us to from the Eiffel Tower to Thomas Edison, who not only aspired to fill out homes with light, but also with furniture made entirely out of concrete. Whilst the kitchen becomes the location for an exploration of history of the spice trail and in the bedroom we encounter sex and death. Novelist Margaret Drabble celebrates the centenary since the publication of the first in Arnold Bennet's Clayhanger trilogy - a neglected classic set in Arnold Bennet's own birth place, the Potteries. And the sport that has become an art - how boxing prose packs a punch. How and why writers have written about boxing since Homer's The Iliad with award winning writer Thomas Hauser whose latest novel fictionalises a nail biting championship fight. Producer: Hilary Dunn.