The Two Loves Of Anthony Trollope (BBC1); The Private Life Of A Masterpiece (BBC2); Anyone who travels by train these days is used to people pulling out a laptop computer from a briefcase and working during the journey.

Little did I know, before The Two Loves Of Anthony Trollope, that the author of The Barchester Chronicles was doing much the same thing, using old technology, in Victorian times.

He didn't like to waste a moment of his time. In the course of his employment by the Post Office, he was called upon to travel around the country. The railway carriage became his office, a chance to put pen to paper and write novels. This, as Trollope put it, "made these hours more accountable than reading alone could do".

He made himself a portable wooden writing table, which he'd balance on his knees in the railway carriage and write in pencil. A sort of 19th Century laptop. Later, his wife Rose would then copy out his scribblings in pen and ink.

As he worked for the Post Office for 33 years, he had to fit his writing around his proper job. He was fastidious in his daily schedule - up at 6am, write 250 words every 15 minutes for three hours. As soon as he'd written the end in one book, he'd start a new one.

At times, this TV biography of the writer seemed an all-too-obvious commercial for the BBC's current Sunday night adaptation of his book He Knew He Was Right, complete with generous clips from that drama.

It also threw up some fascinating facts about the son of an unhappy marriage who was uncouth, rude and unliked during his schooldays. So much so that while at Winchester College he contemplated suicide.

Trollope was determined that his marriage to the strong, faithful Rose would be more successful than his parents' union. Devotion and duty were the keys to keeping marriage alive, he maintained.

That didn't stop Victorian England's busiest man of letters forming a close relationship with a pretty 22-year-old Boston girl, Kate Field. He was 45 when he first set eyes on her and an element of mid-life crisis must have come into play.

She was totally different to his wife, with her independence and spirit reflected in some of his strong female characters. He wrote about their relationship in his autobiography, but ruled it couldn't be published until after his death.

Trollope himself did his bit for female emancipation by introducing the pillar box to England. Before that, women had to show letters to their father, then give them to a servant who gave them to the post carrier. Thanks to public post boxes, they could write directly to their male admirers.

There's also a remarkable story to be told about Van Gogh's painting The Sunflowers - "the most famous painting in Britain" that hangs in the National Gallery in London.

We learnt it was the eighth in a series of 11 sunflowers paintings. The first copy he painted of it sold for £22.5m in 1987, which was ironic as the artist couldn't sell any of his work during his lifetime.

The painting of the vase of flowers also symbolised the tension with fellow artist Gauguin, who summed up their relationship by saying that they agreed on very little - and certainly not painting.

Published: 03/05/2004