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\\u2018Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening\\u2019, wrote George Orwell in 1940. In Orwell\\u2019s Roses Rebecca Solnit explores how the writer\\u2019s love for growing things, especially flowers, seeps into his work. She reflects on how he uses pleasure, beauty and joy as powerful acts of resistance. And how far these can counter the political and environmental challenges we face today.

The father of science fiction, H.G. Wells was also driven by a desire to reform the society he lived in at the turn of the 20th century. The biographer Claire Tomalin brings to life his early years in The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World. He was born into poverty and achieved international fame, but never lost his boundless curiosity for the world around him, and the possibilities of science to change it.

The journalist Peter Hetherington asks why land reform is not higher on the government\\u2019s agenda. In Land Renewed he looks at the competing elements in the reshaping of the countryside and aiding nature\\u2019s recovery, including protecting valuable farmland, encouraging more local food production, re-wilding and \\u2018re-peopling\\u2019 remote places. But he argues it needs a wider vision to re-work the countryside for the benefit of all.

Producer: Katy Hickman