wembley is slowly returning to normal. but this night will not be forgotten in a hurry. if you cut through all the hype, this was one of the great heavyweight contests. anthonyjoshua is still improving, still learning, and that is a frightening thought, especially for his next opponent. mercedes driver valtteri bottas claimed the first victory of his formula one career at the russian grand prix. but there was disappointment for his teammate lewis hamilton. our f1 reporter tom clarkson is in sochi. every sport loves to have a new hero. and formula one got one today, when bottas swept aside. eyeing a maiden f1win, today was valtteri bottas‘s time to shine. with team—mate lewis hamilton off the pace this weekend, it was up to the finnish driver to take the fight to ferrari. he had to to get past two of them on the grid and he dispatched them in two corners.

the second of those corners proved tricky for the british driverjolyon palmer, whose race ended in a tangle of tyres. the seemingly unflappable finn, so comfortable leading for so long, flapped with his first win in sight. this mistake allowed sebastian vettel to hunt him down over the remaining few nerve—racking laps. it was edge of your seat stuff. sebastian vettel‘s ferrari hustled, but the prize would be won by valtteri bottas — a grand prix winner of the 82nd attempt. yes! brilliant! well done. some questioned if valtteri bottas would play number two to lewis hamilton this season. today, at least, he was very much number one. bottas delighted with his work. but

questions remain about what happened to lewis hamilton this weekend. he was nowhere in practice, qualifying, the race. and if he is going to stand any chance to defeat sebastian vettel then he needs to come back with victory in spain, in two weeks. that is the message that he needs. john higgins has the advantage over defending champion mark selby in the final of the world snooker championships in sheffield. in the opening session, selby took the lead twice in the opening three frames but only to see higgins draw level at 2—2, and in doing so hit a break of 1m in the fourth frame. higgins then ran away with the final four frames after the interval to lead 6—2 going into this evening's session. well, let's take you live to the crucible now for the latest from that evening session.

first to 18 frames... selby reacted well. 6—3 down. higgins, fourtime selby reacted well. 6—3 down. higgins, four time champion. last one, 2011. compelling contest. that's all from sportsday. i'll be back with more sport on the bbc news channel through the evening faith and reason, and the gothic imagination, the ingredients of sarah perry's bestselling novel, the essex serpent. we're in the 1890s and cora seaborne, newly widowed, leaves london for the country, where she encounters a community terrified by the apparent return of a fabled monster. her interest in nature leads her to believe that it's real. the local vicar believes it's the product of a pagan imagination. they argue a good deal. they also, more or less, fall in love. it's a rich tale of obsession, mystery and belief. welcome.

i suppose it's a story, really, about fear, isn't it? it is. and it's a story about the way that fear affects from people in different ways, according to their age, their gender, their preconceived ideas about the world. and how an imagined, or unimagined, monster can be very different to different sets of people. there's a sense in which it's a period which reflects some of the obsessions of our own? very much so. one of the things i wanted to do was, in perhaps a slightly mischievous way, wrong—foot the reader, who might feel that they're reading a victorian novel, set in the world of crinolines and fainting wives, pea—soupers, and instead find themselves reading about the trades union congress, the london underground, the birth of feminism, scientific developments. so i wanted to invite the reader to interrogate how far we've come since the end of the 19th century and whether the end of the 19th century was actually more modern than we ever allow ourselves to think. and at the heart of the story is the argument, really, between two people who also then have a romantic attachment. the vicar, who is married, and the newly widowed woman who arrives in the country. of course, they have a very different response to this apparent appearance of a serpent, a monster in the midst

of the community. she thinks it's a natural event, because she wants it to be a dinosaur. he says it's all got to do with a breakdown in faith. yeah. a very interesting collision. it is. i think that's another reason why the end of the 19th century are so interesting for me. i think debates around science and reason, the extent to which faith and science are antagonists, and whether or not they can support each other. or if they are? or if they are, precisely. it's something that is very much part of the dialogue now and is a debate that's been going on for a very long time. what i wanted to do was disrupt the idea that a man of faith like will would be a man of superstition and fear. actually, he's presented as being a man of reason. and that a man of science, like cora, or a woman of science, like cora, would be the reasonable and rational one. actually, she is rather given

to emotional display and not getting things quite right. well, indeed. and the distinction is not as clear as we might first think? exactly. the intriguing thing about your story is that there is the excitement of how to interpret this phenomenon that apparently has turned up in the community. but alongside it is, if you'll forgive me putting it like this, in this phrase, an old—fashioned love story? i wanted to present a relationship that seemed to be somewhere on a slightly indefinable spectrum, between an intellectual curiosity and an argument that comes between intellectual opposites. emotional intimacy and romance, at what point does it switch from one thing to another? i think it's important to say to people that haven't read the book yet, perhaps, that although you have these ideas running through your head and you wanted to communicate the nature of this argument to the reader, in the end, it's a story. i mean, it's a story about a community that is gripped by fear and excitement. that is what draws the reader in? i hope so. more than anything else, i'm a storyteller. i'm a great spinner of yarns. i'm given to boring on at great length about anecdotes around family and friends, things that have happened to myself. that's what a good novel does.

ideally, however high the ideas, however much you want to interest or educate, really it should be about a cracking story that can pass the time on a wet weekend. but it's also true that what you display in this book, which is a wonderful read, enthralling read, is an affection for the gothic imagination. i mean, it's a kind of gothic novel, isn't it? very much so. i'm very, very interested in what he gothic actually is. interestingly, you could lock three orfour academics in a room, with no bread or waterfor ten hours, and not let them out until they have agreed on a definition of the gothic. they'll starve, because it's something that people are constantly debating. the gothic is a feeling. it's a sensation, is not a genre. it's the feeling that there is something that we don't quite understand. "am i mad, or did i just see that thing? if i am mad, is that worse than a monster?" we all have fears that we, to some degree, enjoy. i mean, we enjoy treading on the edge of an abyss, in a way, in our minds, don't we?

that's what we all do. we do. i think what a really good gothic novel does, what i wanted to try to emulate, his arouse in the reader similar sensations to those felt by the characters. so, a successful gothic novel will leave the reader feeling as unnerved and as uneasy as the characters who are encountering these fears themselves. so, a reader of a gothic text like dracula would be invited to think, what is it that i desire that i ought not to desire? so, you're drawn into the book like one of the characters. what kind of cracking stories did you grow upon? i sense that you've a love for the victorian novel, just by the way you attack this period. i mean, attack in a sense of being a writer who immerses himself in it? yes. i had a very interesting background. my parents were members of a strict baptist chapel and i was brought up with very little access to popular culture. so, actually, i was raised on the king james bible, which is one succession after the other of cracking yarns. well, if you want to write good english... exactly, in terms of exposure to cracking ideas,

extraordinary prose, but also one story after another of heroism, and betrayal, and mystery, and strangeness, and magic, all incorporated in this one book. because we didn't have a television and i didn't go to the cinema, and all the rest of it, i immersed myself instead in what was available in the house, which tended to be 19th century literature, foxe‘s book of martyrs, bunyan, and what all of these have in common is storytelling. yes. and so did you always know you were going to be, in some form, a storyteller? i did, very much so. in a way that i find very difficult to convey how intense this feeling is. the analogy i always use is that most women i know have always known that they would one day be a mother. i have always known, in that sort of visceral, "there's no point in my existing if i don't do it" kind of way, that i will tell stories in some way. whatever period i would have been born into, i would have been a storyteller of one kind or another. what you've done in this book,

of course, is to play with, but also to respect, a tradition. i mean, you enjoy writing a story, telling a story of the kind that you grew up reading. you're not interested in experiment. i mean, you want to obviously do something original with your characters, and have them stepping outside stereotypes, of course, but you are also paying homage to a storytelling tradition that you love? that's right. what i wanted to do simultaneously pay homage to and interrogate it. for example, one of the things i did was shy away from the kind of language we associate with 19th—century novels. so, nobody rides in a carriage. they call a cab. people do not speak to mama and papa, they speakto mum and dad. they go to a pub, rather than to an inn. in that sense, i was very much enjoying the tropes of 19th—century fiction and gothic fiction, whilst also disrupting the reader and saying, you know, this is not a dusty period. this is not a dusty novel. it's modern, its contemporary.

well, i think anybody reading this book would come to the conclusion that you might have been quite happy at that time. do you think you would have been? yes, i was born 100 years too late, i suspect. sarah perry, author of the essex serpent, thank you very much. thank you. now, the weather. good evening. a big contrast from south to north across the uk today. in the south the uk this afternoon, dark skies and rain, but completely different at the other end of the country. lovely sunny spells here on the shores of the moray firth. the reason for the contrast is low—pressure working its way into this south—west. north of lincolnshire and manchester that is essentially fine and dry overnight, but no worries about it being particularly cold.

lowest temperatures on the edge of scotland. some places in double figures. bank holiday monday, the southern half of the uk will see the lion's share of the showers, some of those will be heavy with the odd rumble of thunder. some early showers in the north, but for the most part it will be dry, bright and breezy. some showers and cloud around in the afternoon, but temperatures 12 or 13 degrees, with showers on the heavy side and rumbles of thunder. northern england for the most part, fine and dry, but 11 degrees on the north sea coast. 15 to 16 in northern ireland and 17, 18 in the west of scotland. it stays breezy for all areas through the evening. showers slowly drifting away towards the near continent. that easterly breeze will dragon a fair bit of low cloud on tuesday morning. most places by then should be frost free.

the main area of low—pressure drifts south on tuesday, we start to see high pressure from moving and. wind will come in from the east generating low cloud, and it could stay cool and grey on the eastern coastal areas, ten to 13 degrees. inland it could be drier and greater, 16 or 17 degrees. on wednesday a lot of cloud across the south of the uk with an easterly breeze. further west the temperatures are higher at around 1a or 15. this is bbc news. the headlines at 8pm: theresa may says no to vat rises if she wins the election, but signals scrapping a pledge not to increase income tax or national insurance. 0n the tenth anniversary of madeleine mccann‘s disappearance, her parents say they still have hope she'll be found. one of the world's best known

mountaineers, ueli steck, has died in an accident on mount everest. counter—terrorism detectives have arrested a woman who was shot during a raid in north london on thursday. president trump says pressure on north korea over its nuclear programme is working — and says china is helping. president xi, i believe, has been putting pressure on them also, but so far perhaps nothing has happened and perhaps it has. one of the world's best known mountaineers, ueli steck, has died in an accident on mount everest. also in the next hour: chelsea keep their four—point cushion at the top of