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Mary Shelley's Frankenstein continues to be a source of fascination for readers, with its macabre exploration of what it means to be alive. The seeds of the story were first sown two hundred years ago when the poet Lord Byron initiated a ghost story competition during a group summer holiday in Europe. Novelist Benjamin Markovits celebrates the anniversary by uncovering some of the less well known literary products of the contest.

Also in the programme; Vietnamese rapper Suboi challenged President Obama to beatbox last week, she describes the hip hop scene in Vietnam, and Liberian writer Hawa Jande Golakai considers her uneasy relationship with her hometown of Monrovia. It’s also two hundred years since the British government bought the Elgin Marbles – a collection of classical Greek marble sculptures, which had been acquired by the Earl of Elgin from the Parthenon in Athens. They now reside in the British Museum but are a source of ongoing controversy and restitution claims from the Greek government. The British historian Professor Paul Cartledge remembers his first visit to their original home on the Athenian Acropolis.

With Tina Daheley.

(Photo: statue of Frankenstein in Switzerland Credit: FABRICE COFFRINIAFPGetty Images)