he denies all the charges against him. our correspondent, helena lee, was in court and sent this update. judge deborah taylor has told the jury at southwark crown court, that rolf harris is going to be released from stafford prison on bail tomorrow. the jury already have been told that rolf harris was convicted and sentenced in 2014. she told the jury this morning, the fact i have given him bail does not have any bearing on the decision you will make in due course. she also told the jury that rolf harris has of course been appearing during this trial through video link. he will now appear in person for the remainder of his trial from monday. rolf harris is facing four counts of indecent assault charges, historical allegations, between 1971 and 1983, all relating to three victims, three alleged victims between the ages of 13 and 16. the court is hearing evidence today from the second of those alleged

victims, and she claims he assaulted her at a sports event in cambridge when she was 16 years old. the trial continuing, but to recap that news, rolf harris is going to be released from stafford prison tomorrow, on bail, and due to appear at his own trial here from monday. the court will not be sitting tomorrow and rolf harris denies all the charges against him. the headlines on bbc news: theresa may has launched the conservative manifesto, saying politicians need to be upfront and straight about the challenges ahead. one woman has died and 22 other people were injured after a motorist drove into pedestrians in the centre of new york. donald trump says he's being subjected to the greatest witch hunt against a politician in american history after a special investigator was appointed to examine claims of collusion with russia. now it's time for meet the author.

a great house with a great wall around it. we are in mid—17th century england at a time of religious strife when many lives are touched by danger and intrigue. then we are in the same house three centuries later in the grip of the cold war and living through the whole story of the berlin wall from start to finish. and witchwood, the house, a stage where some of the dramas of our own time are played out. peculiar ground is a fiercely ambitious novel by lucy hughes—hallett, stretching across centuries and telling the tale of tolerance and strife, imprisonment and the instinct to be free. welcome. the house, witchwood,

is in a way the central character of this book. did it come first? did you have the idea of a place, an enclosed place, in which all this might happen? yes, absolutely. and, as you say, the house is, it's not perhaps the central character, but it's the character that holds all of the story together because although the berlin wall does play quite a large part in this novel, but very few of my characters are allowed to go to berlin and i found as i was writing sometimes they needed to go off to london and to germany and i had to keep bringing them back for the story. it had a technical purpose that was very useful. but it has also got a sort of moral purpose in a way because it is enclosed at the very beginning of the story.

mr norris is laying out the landscape and the wall is being built and it is in a way a prison. yes. there is a moment in the book when mr norris, the landscape designer, is talking to his friend the architect and they ask each other, "is this a paradise we are making here or is it a prison?" and i wrote that rather sort of off—the—cuff as you do in a long book, it's just one line. it's the theme of the book. afterwards i thought, yes, that is what it's about. it's about inclusion and of course it's about all sorts of other things like falling in love and having children and dying and doing all the things that humans do, but in so far as there is a theme that can be summed up in the sentence it is a book about walls and what happens when you try to wall yourself in and you may make a garden or you may find yourself trapped inside. it's also a story about how we are doomed to repeat the awful

experiences of humanity again and again down the centuries. absolutely, yes. i mean, there was a moment when i was writing the first draft, of actually the last section of the book in which people are walking out of london in 1665 to escape from the plague and the roads out of london are crammed with refugees, migrants. and as i was writing that section, the newspapers were full of pictures of roads crammed with migrants trying to walk their way into safety and a better life in europe. and i hadn't set out to write a book about the migration crisis but, as you say, history repeats itself. history repeats itself in all kinds of ways because at the time when we first encounter the house, the grounds are being laid out, it is just before the restoration in the 16605 and it's a time of darkness, of a lot of espionage, of a lot of betrayal and violence. it was a much more turbulent

time for individuals. i think when you look back at history people tend to remember it as a dark time. absolutely, i think in the sort of popular imagination charles ii is the merry monarch and he comes back and the theatres reopen and they are tossing oranges around and everyone is having a lovely time, but one has to remember that all those people are living in the aftermath of a full generation of civil war. everyone has got something to hide, everyone is suspicious of everybody else. so in the first and last sections of my novel, which are set in the 1660s, i wanted not to explicitly, but just to suggest that tension, that feeling of things going on behind closed doors, and mysteries. you are dealing the whole time with what is unsaid, which is as important in the kinds

of situations you are imagining here, as what is said and what is put on the table. yes. i did an awful lot of crossing out. the way i write is to write a draft and then go over and over and over it and each time it gets shorter. so a lot of what might have been explicit in the first draft has vanished from the finished book. and i think that in a way that is the rest of the iceberg so you are left with a visible tip. but it's important to the finished product, i think, that at some point i did know what was being said. and i cut it out. you excised it. and that is what produces tension, it is what produces fear, it is what produces i suppose alarm and a feeling of threat. yes, and in the 17th century, there is quite a lot of magic.

i don't believe in the supernatural at all, everything has a rational explanation, but the supernatural of one era is simply the unexplained so that there are things going on which seem particularly alarming because we don't understand. that might be because science has yet progressed far enough to explain, or it might be because indeed someone is deliberately keeping a secret. or because in part we have an affection for the unknown and the need for the unknown, not simply giving a name to the inexplicable, but there is something attractive about the feeling that things are going on in a way that we can't quite understand. yes, i think one of the great things about fiction whether as a reader or a writer, it allows you to live a life that is slightly larger and more interesting than your own.

i am struck by the title. peculiar is a very interesting word to use about this house, a solid, a wonderful place to live with wonderful grounds as we see them being laid out at the beginning of the book, and of course the confining wall. why "peculiar"? well, it's a phrase from a hymn. "we are a garden wall around a sacred place, peculiar ground." and the word "peculiar" has changed its meaning over the three centuries covered in this story and it has always meant set apart, different. it has now become to mean odd and a bit weird, but in its original meaning it simply means reserved, enclosed, set apart from the rest of the world. so the house is peculiar, but it also contains in it everything about humanity that we recognise.

yes. the thing that holds us all together. great country houses are very useful as a novelist or for film—makers or whatever for the same reason that pubs are. everyone has to go to the pub an inordinate amount because if you can get your characters together under one roof then things can start to happen between them. and a great country house is of course a place for parties, a place in which a rich and glamorous life can be led, but it's also a business, it's a place where a of people can work. far too many novels are just about who is going to bed with whom, a very interesting question, but we do actually spend our lives, most of us, most of the time, working and i like to show the gamekeepers gamekeeping and the foresters looking after the trees. we get to know the life of witchwood very well indeed in peculiar ground. lucy hughes—hallett, thank you very much. thank you.

it has been a mixed day out there today. we had sunshine, scattered showers and more persistent rain. this area of low pressure has pushed into the south—east of england, bringing outbreaks of rain. that rain is pushing across norfolk, lincolnshire and the isle of wight. further north and west, clearer skies and showers around. this is how they ended the day in devon. this image captured by one of our weather watchers. any showers so should ease away across northern and western parts of the country. clearer skies here and here we see chilly temperatures first thing friday morning. further east, cloud and outbreaks of rain working way it

up and outbreaks of rain working way it up the east coast of england. further west, we could see i touch of grass frost. the odd misty patch verse thing. it should clear away quickly and showers pushing into the western isles of scotland. elsewhere, a good deal of sunshine to start the day. cloudy skies and outbreaks of rain. but the west, it isa dry outbreaks of rain. but the west, it is a dry and bright start. temperatures up in double figures. patchy rain lingering across the south—east of england, uncertainty about the westward extent of this rainfall but it looks like it will push northwards. these eastern counties of england could well see some outbreaks of rain through the day. elsewhere, sunshine and showers, similar to today. temperatures in the mid to high teens but feeling cooler around the east coast where you have cloud and rain. during saturday, that rain pushes further north. but further

south across the bulk of the uk, another day of sunshine and scattered showers. dry weather in between any of the showers that have your brolly on stand—by, 18 degrees at best. into the second half of the weekend, high pressure moves in. that will squeeze away the majority of those showers. you could still catch a shower across western parts but the bulk of the country, sunday the better day of the weekend. largely dry, light winds and temperatures 13—20d. it is looking mixed with further unsettled conditions at times to the course of next week. hello, i'm ros atkins, this is outside source. the pressure isn't easing up on donald trump. former fbi director robert mueller has been appointed to investigate claims of collusion between russia and his campaign. president trump, for his part, says

he's the victim of a witch hunt. brazil's president is facing claims he was recorded discussing payments to silence a former speaker of parliament. we'll speak to our reporter in sao paolo. one person is dead and at least 20 are injured after a car plowed into a crowd of pedestrians in times square. the mayor of new york says its not terrorism related. music we will