message thatjeremy corbyn will raise your taxes. there has been so much publicity from headteacher saying that budgets are not sustainable. he is picking up on that. education has been well funded over the last 20 years, it has gone up over the last 20 years, it has gone up over inflation, so the cuts being talked about, 6.5%, although they are swingeing now, we will still be spending more per child used to be. the problem is that school costs are continuing to rise. they have to find some way to square the circle. it will be interesting to see whether this is going to be the kind of thing that people are terribly keen on and where it comes from really matters because if you keep saying we will tax big companies, big corporations, big international corporations, the whole reason didn't pay so much tax is because they are based in many different tax jurisdictions. we will look at the

daily star. just quickly. we forgot to mention anthonyjoshua, the movie! this‘ll be the rags to riches story, and what a story will be. we know the ending, which was his win. this is a classic bit of british tabloid journalism, the keywords being that fans demand the movie he made, which isjustified an entire front page! it is not my thing, but the numbers on that's watching the broadcast of the site are enormous. if harvey weinstein was one of the fans watching it could get made. it would be a british rocky, one that still lives at home with his mum. would be a british rocky, one that still lives at home with his mumlj

wonder how they both feel today. rough. that's it for the papers this you hour. you will both be back at 11.30pm. next, it's meet the author. 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 is 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 all got to do with a breakdown in faith. yeah. at 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 thinking is 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'll 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 i9th—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 i9th—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. good evening. a big contrast from south to north across the uk today.

in the south, this was the cue in cornwall today, leaden skies and rain. completely different at the other end of the country. the reason for the contrast is an area of low pressure that has been working its way into the south and west. it has been a breezy day and continues to been a breezy day and continues to be pretty breezy overnight. there is afair bit be pretty breezy overnight. there is a fair bit of rain still to be had over the southern half the uk. north of manchester, it is essentially fine and dry overnight. it will not be particularly cold. for bank holiday monday, the southern half of the uk will see the lion's chair of showers, some of them to be happy with the odd rumble of thunder. for the north, it'll be a dry, bright and breezy day. by the middle of the afternoon still showers around,

temperatures at 1213 degrees and some of those showers to be on the heavy side. some spells of sunshine, they say. northern england fine and dry. 1a of 15 degrees if you head further west. you could get 18 degrees on the western part of scotland. it stays breezy for all areas through the evening. the showers will drift away to the near continent. the easterly breeze will drag in low cloud by dawn on tuesday. by which stage most places should be frost free. some of the cloud is slow and will be grey. as the main area of low pressure drifts away to decide on tuesday, this area of high pressure from scandinavia will become the big influence on our weather. the wintle coming from the east, generating the low cloud and it could stay grey and cold on the eastern coastal areas. further

inland it is drier, brighter and warmer. wednesday, a lot of cloud around the southern half of the uk, still the easterly breeze, again, further west, the temperatures are about bit higher. —— that bit higher. this is bbc news. the headlines at 11pm: theresa may says no to vat rises if she wins the election, but signals scrapping a pledge not to increase income tax national insurance. on the tenth anniversary of madeleine mccann's disappearance, her parents say they still have hope she'll be found. donald trump says he hasn't ruled out military action against north korea after the country's second ballistic missile test in two weeks. one of the world's best—known mountaineers, ueli steck, has died in an accident on mount everest. and we'll cast an eye over tomorrow's front pages in half an hour.

the telegraph reports on calls for facebook to pay for policing digital crimes.