Book of the Week
Radio 4

In Book of the Week (weekdays, 9.45am) - about the Restoration of Charles II - the historical detail was manically slathered on. Within seconds, we heard that as Charles made his triumphant way from exile across the white cliffs, "country girls with lace bodices hitched up their smocks and ran to throw flowers", and that, overwhelmed (one can imagine his face - or rather the face of Robert Downey, Jr in the role: Pan with a lovely, brown moustache), the monarch clutched his red-feathered hat, complaining his head was "bursting". By the time he got to Deptford, "100 maidens scattered herbs" and joined 1,700 penitents queuing for him to stroke their faces, while 1,000 more waited for him to hang miniature gold angels strung on ribbons around their necks. On his rare days off, Charles played tennis obsessively, with a cork ball and a racket as small as your hand, stopping only momentarily to feed the Russian ambassador's pelican, housed in a new menagerie in St James's Park.

Over on Radio 3, Composer of the Week (weekdays, 12 noon) insisted that similar entertainments in Vienna, a century or so later, were equally popular with aristocratic visitors, the royal menagerie and concert halls having dog­gedly acquired a polar bear, three kangaroos and Beethoven. The latter had a short neck, beautiful conk and only set down the piano parts in his compositions "here and there", preferring to extemporise or just go on memory.

This series of COTW was extra-specially crammed, indulging in the occasional pulse-racing cliché ("It's all set against the backdrop of his turbulent later years . . .") and trailing future programmes dedicated to the "noble and passionate genius" whose jumps in mood from
arrogance to ingenuousness probably made him a very likeable human being. (I look forward to the episode "set against the background of his turbulent love life", during which many sexpots will "want him without reserve" - something that, as you know, medically speaking, only happens when a woman listens to the Third Symphony.)

Other things we learned: that as he went deaf, the maestro missed the "call of the humble quail" more than anything else, and that
he made the Waldstein Sonata so tricky not to be cruel and trip up the performer (as Chopin sometimes did), but as a specific illumination of what human fingers are capable of ("Almighty God," he once wrote, "you know my soul is filled with a love of humanity and a desire to do good"). We heard Maurizio Pollini's recording of the piece, and the great man cried out briefly in the middle, as though comforting himself through how hard it was.

The previous afternoon, in a doc celebrating the anniversary of Lord Byron's swim across the Hellespont (Back to the Hellespont, 9 May, 4.30pm, Radio 4), 300 members of the Rotary Club gathered to follow their hero. The swimmers' love ran over: "Byron was not quite clear who he was or where he was. He was quite insane in that respect. But very sexy." We learned that he "did not have a club foot - it was a malformation of the right calf muscle and the right Achilles tendon, which caused the foot to be pulled upwards. You can tell this from his surgical boots!" And we also learned that Byron liked being in water so much that he insisted he
had been a merman in a previous existence, and all those swimming the Hellespont since 2003 have been watched over by the wooden horse left behind from the set of the Brad Pitt movie Troy. Got all that? Now, pass us a smoke.