Eastern airs

On Private Passions this week the writer Amitav Ghosh gave us a refreshingly different version of what has become a Radio 3 staple. No Mozart, Mendelssohn or Monteverdi for Ghosh, who speaks five languages including Arabic and Bengali, was born in Calcutta and has lived in Delhi, Oxford, Alexandria, Brooklyn and Goa. Instead, his musical choices were all about fusion and cultural exchange. Perhaps most surprising was an ‘Oriental Miscellany’ from the late 18th century, played on the harpsichord and sounding initially quite baroque until you realised that the fingering was much more complex, more layered, infinitely more interesting. The composer William Hamilton Bird had for the first time given Hindustani folk tunes a Western notation.

Ghosh, whose novels are often set during the opium wars in China, was invited on to the programme as part of the India season, which is popping up on radio and TV throughout the BBC. It’s a clever way to bring some kind of unity to the BBC’s mission. Ghosh’s novels, although set very firmly in the past, have something to say about our own time. ‘The rhetoric of the first opium war,’ he says, ‘is exactly like the rhetoric of the Iraq war. It was all about free trade, freedom, with an evangelical taint.’

Jeremy Corbyn may be the MP of the moment but I’d like to bet that before too long it will be Rory Stewart, Tory MP for Penrith and the Border since 2010, who’ll be hitting the headlines. He has leadership potential written right through his CV. Stewart was the subject of this week’s Archive on 4 and although I usually leave politics out of this column I was intrigued to hear what he might have to say about his first five years at Westminster.