Woman's Hour - 16/10/2008

With Jane Garvey. Elizabeth Jane Howard is the author of a number of highly acclaimed novels including the Cazalet Chronicles. She talks to Jane about her new novel Love All, which is about the absence of love, something she herself has experienced. She'll also be talking about her eighty years of writing which she describes as 'shelling pees into a colander.' Recent studies estimate that one in 200 of us are compulsive hoarders- incapable of throwing out the masses of clutter that surround us. Jane finds out about the condition and talks to one woman who suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of her husband's hoarding. In recent weeks the global economic crisis has dominated the US elections. But one question that Barack Obama and John McCain have had to address is abortion. Abortion has been legal in the US since a decision of the Supreme Court in 1973 - Roe Vs Wade. Since then it has become a key moral issue against which voters of the left and right have measured their elected leaders. The selection of Sarah Palin energised the religious right, but how important will the so-called 'values votes' be? A study, which was carried out on commuters, shows that men in the north of the country have markedly less clean hands than their southern counterparts. Jane talks to Val Curtis, Director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Including drama: The Color Purple by Alice Walker (9/10).