For BBC Radio Four, David Owen Norris brings Jenkyns together with scholars Deirdre Le Faye and Samantha Carrasco at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton, Hampshire, in the South of England. The result is a rare insight into the family life of Jane Austen through her favourite songs, as performed by a specially selected group of musicians.

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Some of the songs included are:

A romantic song by Robert Burns, to which she changed the words, so that the final words referred to herself -”the charms of your Jane.”

A tragic French song, “Les Hirondelles”, which ends with imprisonment and death. Jane’s sister in law Eliza had lived in France, and her first husband was guillotined in the Terror.

“The Ploughboy” – a popular song of the time, witty, and with a politically subversive message about corrupt politicians who are only interested in money, and manage to buy their way into power.

“Goosey Goosey Gander” – Jane had a lot of nursery rhymes, and was constantly surrounded by boisterous nephews and nieces.

This program was produced for the BBC’s domestic British audience, and broadcast on its UK news and speech network Radio Four.

• Jane Austen’s iPod, BBC Radio Four program page

This week’s edition of BBC Radio Four’s ‘Analysis’, produced for the domestic UK audience, investigates this phenomenon. The program contains an e-mail interview with Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri (pictured) – one of the Shi’ite world’s most senior and respected clerics and one of Iran’s most outspoken critics of President Ahmadinejad’s government.

In this interview, he calls on Iran’s clergy to work with political activists to bring about reform, urging them to be “in step with the people”. Grand Ayatollah Montazeri is at the forefront of a surprising alliance that is emerging in Iran – between hard-line secularists and orthodox Muslim clerics.

The BBC’s Edward Stourton asks whether this alliance could cause the collapse of the Islamic Republic as we know it and lead to a greater separation of Islam and the Iranian state.

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• Read the full text of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s email
• BBC Radio Four’s ‘Analysis’ program
• More ‘Best of the BBC’ on The World

The Reunion is a series from the BBC’s Radio 4. Each week it reunites a group of people intimately involved in a moment of modern history. In this edition, host Sue MacGregor looks back to the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa.  She gathers together the key individuals involved in secret talks which led to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

MacGregor is joined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who led the Free Mandela Campaign throughout the 1980s; Dr Niel Barnard, who was the head of South Africa’s National Intelligence Service and who had dozens of clandestine meetings with Mandela; Professor Willie Esterhuyse, an Afrikaner academic who liaised between the government and the ANC; Aziz Pahad, who was a core member of the ANC and led many of its delegations; former President Thabo Mbeki, who was a lead negotiator for the ANC; and journalist and political commentator Allister Sparks, who chronicled the negotiations in a revealing book.

Former President FW de Klerk also contributes to the program, describing the surprise that he and other cabinet figures felt when they learnt of the years of secret meetings.

More at BBC Radio 4 .