RADIO CHOICE

MARY GODWIN eloped to Europe with the married poet Shelley when she was just 16. They lived on the run to evade scandal. It was during this exile, one summer in Switzerland, that Mary (pictured) wrote her Gothic classic Frankenstein, published 200 years ago this month. She eventually married Shelley, lost three of her children and became a young widow when Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia. Her story is told in Fiona Sampson’s biography IN SEARCH OF MARY SHELLEY (RADIO 4, 9.45AM (FM), 12.30AM).

THE week-long series HOW TO SURVIVE THE ROMAN EMPIRE, BY PLINY AND ME (RADIO 4, 10.45AM, 7.45PM) follows the various goings-on in the household of the lawyer and author Pliny the Younger. Kieran Hodgson plays Pliny, with Joanna Scanlan as his

mother, Marcella. We get a day-to-day picture of life in first-century Rome — with visits to the market and the baths — and a bit of Roman history thrown in for good

measure. It is, sadly, rather too pedestrian, but it does have its moments.

n POETRY by Seamus Heaney, read by Sean Campion, features in a RADIO 3 IN CONCERT

(7.30PM) recorded at London’s Kings Place on Saturday. The choir known as The Sixteen perform a mass by Monteverdi, plus work by Iberian Renaissance composers, in a concert on the theme of time past.