Re-Release - Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Next week - Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. While we finish our reading for next week's episode, we hope you'll enjoy revisiting our February recording on Dickens' classic, Great Expectations. Join us next week for Demon Copperhead, we'd love to hear any thoughts or questions you have on the novel in the meantime. 

Maggie O'Farrell's novel Hamnet was a massive international bestseller and a critical triumph. Published during Covid in 2020, its account of the tragic death of Wiliam Shakespeare's son Hamnet at the age of 11 is profoundly moving. O'Farrell was very clear that it is a work of fiction. In the book, Hamnet's twin sister Judith is perilously ill with the plague, but Hamnet finds himself able to swap places with her, and die so that she might live. Shakespeare and his wife Agnes live more or less separate lives - he in London and she in Stratford. In O'Farrell's version, she has a semi spiritual connection with nature and the forest, and understands how to use herbs and plants for medicinal purposes. Shakespeare's father John is a damaged and violent man. And in the novel, Shakespeare writes Hamlet partially as an act of atonement for his guilt at being absent as a father and a husband. How much of this is true? Does it matter if it's not? Is O'Farrell's writing uniquely brilliant and descriptive, or is it the product of too many creative writing courses? And what on earth is rue? Join us on Book In as we look at this hugely popular book. Georgie Fordham is the reader. 

Margaret 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 event has resulted in the United States being taken over by an autocratic, quasi religious police state, now called Gilead, in which the role of women has been largely reduced to reproduction and domestic service. They are required to wear coloured dresses - red for the Handmaids who are the childbearers, green for the Marthas who do the housework - and any sort of social contact is strictly controlled. The Handmaids are impregnated by high status men known as Commanders, while being physically held in place by the Commander's wife, in an event known as the Ceremony. The central character, now known as Offred, initially appears to accept this state of affairs, but gradually becomes aware of the existence of an underground resistance movement which may offer a means of escape. Atwood's novel explores issues of feminism, and sexual and gender relationships, and its vision of women being denied any form of individual identity or the means to express opinions or feelings was heavily influenced by the Iranian revolution of a few years before, and finds echoes in the situation that women find themselves in in Afghanistan today. The book has many echoes of Orwell's great novel, brilliantly capturing the claustrophobia and fear that living in a tightly controlled surveillance state involves. But does the novel convince? Are its religious aspects a warning of the consequences of indulging the kind of intolerant religious groups gaining traction today? And has the feminist vision  Atwood presents become superseded by the MeToo generation? Join us on Book In to find out. Rose Fordham is the reader.

The 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 truth is more complex and nuanced; Prospero is indeed a visionary and powerful figure, manipulating the fates of the characters who have been shipwrecked on his island. But he is also tetchy, angry, petty, vindictive and cruel. He assembles all his enemies on the island and forces them to confront their treachery; they are forgiven, and Prospero gives up his magic powers to return to the real world. The character of Caliban has given rise to centuries of debate about slavery, freedom, colonialism and appropriation. And in The Tempest we find some of the very greatest of Shakespearean speeches and language. Join Rupert and Charlie as they look at one of the greatest of Shakespeare's plays. 

When 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 great plays he wrote at the end of his career. In these plays, he experimented with new forms of expression and genre. They seem to stretch traditional genres of tragedy or comedy, and develop a more transcendent sense of magic and mystery. At the end of The Winter’s Tale, the female courtier Paulina perhaps speaks for Shakespeare when she says, ‘It is required/You do awake your faith…’. The Winter’s Tale seems to draw on and reflect back on many of his previous tragedies, and indeed comedies, as it fuses comedy and tragedy into a new genre, romance. In this podcast we will discuss the shocking suddenness of Leontes’ jealousy. We spend time on the most famous stage direction not just in Shakespeare but surely in all of world literature. We’ll discuss how Time appears on stage, and with a snap of his fingers moves the action forward 16 years. We’ll try not to get too melancholy as we discuss the young lovers, and the beauty of Florizel’s declaration of love to Perdita, which is not a staple of weddings or Valentines but deserves to be. And we’ll explore the strangest aspect of all in this strange and wonderful play, the statue, and how it comes to life. Indeed, it is required you do awake your faith.

As 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 English. At the moment of fruition, decay begins; from the high point of life, comes death; and in that moment of equipoise there is an ecstasy as well as a melancholy at the passing of life and of beauty, beautifully captured in Pip Torrens’ wonderful, understated reading. Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal is a sprawling, journalistic account of the autumn of 1938, and he describes the changing of the seasons and the transience of his own emotional life and relationships, against the background of London as it comes to terms with the advent of war and the rise of Nazi Germany. Andrew Crean reads with clarity and sensitivity. And Robert Frost’s short verse Nothing Gold can Stay – just eight lines of three or four words each – is an extraordinarily powerful poem whose apparent simplicity is cratered by one devasting line. Join Rupert and Charlie – and their outstanding guest readers – as they look at these three seasonal poems.

As 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, social comedy and the extraordinarily subtle expression of human relationships is evident from the first page. Marianne has sensibility, and throws herself at life; unimpressed with the worthy but pedestrian Colonel Brandon, she is thrilled by the arrival of Willoughby, who leaves her house during a rainstorm "to make himself more interesting".  Elinor has sense; she watches her sister fly too close to the sun, and is there for her when she falls, all the while quietly waiting for the shy but suitable Edward Ferrers to become available. The relationship between the two sisters is at the heart of the novel, and mirrors Jane's own relationship with Cassandra. Rupert and Charlie look at the book through the prism both of the current film and also Ang Lee's masterful 1995 version, with Emma Thompson's Oscar winning script. 

Iain 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 politics as a publisher, radio host, author, podcaster, bookshop owner, political candidate and TV pundit. He has interviewed everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Andy Burnham, and in his brilliant and highly entertaining autobiography "Have I Said Too Much?" (to which the answer is clearly "no"), he tells the story of his life and career. He talks about his childhood on a farm, his early political adventures at the University of East Anglia, and his progression through the ups and downs of the political world. In this special edition of Book In, Rupert interviews him about his autobiography. How does he see thefuture of broadcasting in this country, and what will be the role of the BBC? What makes a great radio presenter? What books would he take to a desert island? What kind of music does he like? And is AI music really worth listening to? Join us on Book In to hear Iain talk about his fascinating life.

We'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 Larkin wrote some of the greatest poetry in English in the second half of the twentieth century. Brilliant, famous and successful, he chose to live as a librarian in Hull, largely avoiding the public gaze, and watching the world from the edge of England. His simple language and easily accessible work have made him hugely popular, and his ability to use everyday scenes and events to convey profound ideas and feelings on life, love and death are deeply moving, and achieved in part through superb poetic technique. And yet, while he had multiple relationships, he never really found love; in one of his poems, he says "Life is first boredom, then fear", and both feature heavily in his work. Complicated, irascible, misogynistic, borderline racist, increasingly reactionary as he grew older, he is not on the face of it sympathetic for a modern audience. So why does he remain as popular as ever? What were his attitudes to sex and to death? How does he achieve his technical mastery? And how does Charlie ruin for ever Rupert's love of one of his most celebrated poems?Join Book In to find out. 

In 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 occasionally sink, and the people who live on them struggle with life, relationships, money and mental health issues. Penelope Fitzgerald’s marvellous novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1979, describes lives lived on the edge, between water and land, marriage and separation, getting by and financial ruin, and life and death. London, too, is poised between the greyness and discomfort of the post-war period, and the explosion of life and energy in the 1960s. In only 180 pages, she creates a rich and varied cast of attractive and vulnerable women, hopeless husbands, small time crooks, male prostitutes and feral children. Damp is everywhere and disaster just around the corner, yet Fitzgerald’s novel contains warmth, humour and beauty; the elegiac paintings of the Thames by Whistler provide an atmospheric backdrop, with the spirit of Dante haunting the story. Fitzgerald herself had a husband who could not provide, and spent much of her own life in abject poverty, including a spell on a houseboat which sank, taking all her worldly possessions with it. She only came to writing in her sixties, and in this late period produced several novels which are as fine as anything written in the second half of the 20th century. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss one of the best, Offshore.