Who Will Call Me Beloved?
BBC Radio 4

Like the actor Emma Watson, whose “self-partnering” was made much of in last week’s newspapers, Tania Hershman is single and proud of it. She is writer-in-residence at Manchester’s sprawling Southern Cemetery, and it was here that Who Will Call Me Beloved? (11 November) found her wandering among the graves, talking unselfconsciously to their inhabitants and exploring her own and other people’s attitudes to memory and loss.

Given Hershman’s professional calling, it was inevitable that Southern would be “a place of”. Equally foreseeable was her interest in the language – much of it determinedly euphemistic – by which the dead were commemorated. Happily there followed a deeply idiosyncratic meditation on the gravestones of people who seemed to have got through life without a significant other and who were recalled only in “affectionate memory”.