Despre acest podcast
Brothers Rupert and Charlie Fordham discuss all things English Literature. From Chaucer to the present day, covering drama, novels and poetry, they cover all the classics and much more, from the UK, Ireland, the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Informative but lighthearted, Book In is suitable for all readers, and will be helpful for students from school to degree level.
Both Rupert and Charlie have been keen readers all their lives and both studied English at university. For many years Charlie taught English at GCSE and A-level.
Episoade
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- Contemporary Female Authors: The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood · 56 min · Episodul 70Margaret Atwood's famous novel The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1984, a year laden with significance for dystopian views of the future. Some sort of violent, apocalyptic…
- The Tempest - William Shakespeare · 1 h 9 min · Episodul 69The Tempest is Shakespeare's last play, and many have seen its central character, Prospero, as representing Shakespeare himself, preparing for his departure from the stage. But…
- The Winter's Tale - William Shakespeare · 1 h 4 min · Episodul 68When Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale, he was an older, though not old, man. It was one of what are often called his late plays, and along with The Tempest one of the two…
- Autumn Poems – Keats, MacNeice, Frost – with Pip Torrens and Andrew Crean reading · 55 min · Episodul 67As the exceptional summer of 2026 fades into memory, we look at three autumn poems. John Keats’ To Autumn is the finest of his Odes and one of the greatest poems written in…
- Sense & Sensibility - Jane Austen · 58 min · Episodul 66As Georgia Oakley's film of Sense and Sensibility is released, Book In looks at Jane Austen's novel. It was the first that she published, but already her genius for satire…
- In conversation with Iain Dale - Have I Said Too Much? · 52 min · Episodul 65Iain Dale is one of the country's leading broadcasters. His evening radio show on LBC attracts millions of listeners, and for 30 years he has been at the centre of British…
- Re-Release - Philip Larkin Poems · 55 min · Episodul 64We're swotting up for our next series this week, so sadly haven't had time to record a new episode. Instead, we're re-releasing one of our classics from the archive. Philip…
- Classic Booker Prize Winners: Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald · 1 h 6 min · Episodul 63In the early 1960s, a group of old barges and minor naval craft have been converted to houseboats. They are falling apart and so are their owners. The boats creak, leak and…
- Classic Booker Prize Winners: Possession - A.S. Byatt · 56 min · Episodul 62A.S.Byatt wrote Possession as a completely self-indulgent project, with no thought of commercial or critical consequence. It sold millions and won the Booker Prize in 1990…
- Classic Booker Prize Winners: The Siege of Krishnapur - J. G. Farrell · 1 h 7 min · Episodul 61The Siege of Krishnapur is set in India in 1857 during the Indian Rebellion (or what used to be known as the Indian Mutiny). The small British community are besieged by the…
- Classic Booker Prize Winners: Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - Part 2 · 1 h 3 min · Episodul 60In the second part of the Book In episode on Midnight's Children, Charlie and Rupert look at the way Salman Rushdie places the novel in the context of the extraordinary political…
- Classic Booker Prize Winners: Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - Part 1 · 1 h 3 min · Episodul 59On the stroke of midnight of August 15th 1947, the nation of India became independent from Great Britain. Saleem Sinai, the central character of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's…
- In conversation with Jesse Norman - The Winding Stair · 42 min · Episodul 58Jesse Norman joins Book In to talk about his brilliant novel The Winding Stair, about the rivalry between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke as they battled for power in the court of…
- The Odyssey - Film Review · 55 min · Episodul 57Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey has been the blockbuster cultural event of the summer. Within a few weeks of release, it has already grossed nearly $1bn, putting it on…
- Early C20th Poets: W.B. Yeats - An Irish Airman, Rough Beasts and Golden Birds · 46 min · Episodul 56“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” – the famous lines from W.B Yeats’ visionary and apocalyptic poem The Second Coming are as resonant today as they were when he wrote…
- Early C20th Poets: W. B. Yeats - Innisfree to Easter 1916 · 46 min · Episodul 55In the early 20th century, as the nation of Ireland emerged from the turmoil of centuries of struggle, oppression, poverty and famine, one figure above all others was both…
- Early C20th Poets: W.H. Auden · 1 h 3 min · Episodul 54W H Auden wrote some of the most beautiful and complex poetry of the 20th century. Best known to modern audiences as the author of “Stop all the Clocks”, read by John Hannah in…
- Early C20th Poets: T. S. Eliot - The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Marina · 53 min · Episodul 53In the second episode on T.S.Eliot, Book In looks at the poems he wrote after The Wasteland, as he moved towards a conversion to Christianity. In the Hollow Men, he returns again…
- Early C20th Poets: T. S. Eliot – Prufrock, Preludes and La Figlia Che Piange · 1 h 4 min · Episodul 52The first poem that T.S.Eliot published, in 1915, was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and two years later, it was included as the title poem in a collection called Prufrock…
- Early C20th Poets: Thomas Hardy · 1 h 6 min · Episodul 51At the age of 55, and at the height of his fame, Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels and decided to devote the rest of his life to poetry. He was disillusioned with the…
