Opening Lines

Ian Sansom celebrates the evocative portrait of London on the brink of war that Norman Collins paints in his 1945 novel London Belongs to Me. The book centres around the lives of the inhabitants of 10 Dulcimer Street, a down-at-heel south London boarding house, and spans the two years from December 1938 to December 1940. Deftly mixing comedy and tragedy, Collins invites us into the lives of these...

The novel Kramer Versus Kramer was published in the US in 1977 and was an instant bestseller. Its story of a marriage, a divorce and a fierce custody battle tapped into the highly charged debates of the time about changing sex roles, marriage and parenting. It was immediately optioned by Hollywood, and the film came out in 1979 starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Attitudes to custody at the...

Patrick Ashby died nine years ago. Now, out of the blue, he returns home to claim his inheritance. Except, of course, it’s not Patrick but an imposter, Brat Farrar. In this episode of Opening Lines John Yorke examines Josephine Tey’s classic 1949 novel that set the standard for so many crime writers to come. He examines the themes of the book and Tey’s life, itself a story of multiple identities a...

John Yorke examines the radical 1891 play Spring Awakening by German dramatist Frank Wedekind. A cautionary, nightmarish portrait of teenage angst and rebellion against oppressive social structures and family pressures, the play’s explicit content was so shocking that it was not performed for 15 years after its publication. In the decades since, it has often been cut or censored. Wedekind’s origin...

John Yorke examines the radical 1891 play Spring Awakening by German dramatist Frank Wedekind. A cautionary, nightmarish portrait of teenage angst and rebellion against oppressive social structures and family pressures, the play’s explicit content was so shocking that it was not performed for 15 years after its publication. In the decades since, it has often been cut or censored. Wedekind’s origin...

John Yorke looks at CS Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, the third in a trilogy of science fiction works. Published in the aftermath of the Second World War, it offers a bleak vision of a world where unchecked scientific research is masking much more sinister aims. A couple, Jane and Mark Studdock, are set on different paths, both threatened by external and internal forces on a dark journey int...

John Yorke looks at C.S Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, the third in a trilogy of science fiction works. Published in the aftermath of World War Two it offers a bleak vision of a world where unchecked scientific research is masking much more sinister aims. A couple, Jane and Mark Studdock, are set on different paths, both threatened by external and internal forces on a dark journey into a dys...

Ian Sansom, sitting in for John Yorke, takes a look at The History of Mr Polly, the satirical novel by HG Wells. Published in 1910, it tells a story of one man’s comic, sometimes poignant struggle to find his place in the world. Mr Polly is an ordinary man, with an irrepressible longing for the extraordinary - a man caught in a frustratingly mundane world who finally and magnificently rebels again...

John Yorke looks at Albert Camus’ classic, The Plague. Published in 1947 it’s often thought to be an allegory for the Nazi occupation of Paris where Camus was living during the war. But the huge rise in its popularity during the pandemic speaks to the book’s enduring appeal. A seemingly simple narrative is actually a complex and layered exploration of how man responds to tragedy and finds meaning...

John Yorke examines Kate Atkinson’s 1995 Whitbread award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum. An epic tragi-comedy, the novel tells the story of protagonist Ruby Lennox, who is born above a family pet shop in York in the early 1950s and grows up in post-war Britain. Through Ruby, the reader is transported back and forth through the centuries as she recounts the stories of four generation...

John Yorke examines Kate Atkinson’s 1995 Whitbread award-winning debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum. An epic tragi-comedy, the novel tells the story of protagonist Ruby Lennox, who is born above a family pet shop in York in the early 1950s and grows up in post-war Britain. Through Ruby, the reader is transported back and forth through the centuries as she recounts the stories of four generation...

In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke takes a look at Rumer Godden’s children’s book Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, with the help of Dame Jacqueline Wilson. We meet two tiny Japanese dolls - Miss Happiness and Miss Flower – delivered as a Christmas present. They are strangers in a strange land, subject to social forces and customs they don’t rec...

John Yorke looks at Nancy Mitford’s depiction of the lives and loves of the English upper classes as a group of friends and acquaintances gather in the Cotswolds for Christmas. It’s a sharply observed, mostly gentle, satire of the aristocratic type that Mitford herself knew so well. This was her second novel, written in 1932. She became, and remains, famous for her subsequent bestsellers The Pursu...

John Yorke looks at Peter Benchley’s environmentally themed novel The Girl of the Sea of Cortez. Peter Benchley is best known for his debut novel Jaws which become a huge global bestseller when it was published in 1974 and was further seared into the public consciousness by Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation the following year. His next two novels – The Deep and The Island – were also thrillers se...

The Lay of the Land, by the American novelist Richard Ford, is the third of what became a series of five books about Frank Bascombe. Now in his mid-50s, Frank has left sports writing behind and works in real estate in coastal New Jersey. But life is not settled - Frank is in remission from cancer and, previously divorced, his new marriage is facing problems of its own and relations with his grown-...

As we approach its hundredth anniversary, John Yorke explores the long-vanished world of German writer Alfred Döblin’s Expressionist masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Set in 1928 at the height of the Weimar Republic, the novel centres around Franz Biberkopf - ‘transport worker, housebreaker, pimp, manslaughterer’ - who is determined to go straight following his release from prison. Weather repor...

“I have made up my mind that I must have money,” says the character Bella Wilfer in Charles Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend – and she is one of many characters in the book for whom “money, money, money, and what money can make of life” is an overriding concern. Dickens was deeply concerned with the increasing levels of inequality he saw around him in 1860s London, a city at the he...

Our Mutual Friend was the last novel that Charles Dickens completed, and was written at a point of significant turmoil in the author’s personal life. It's a hugely ambitious and sophisticated novel, drawing the wild complexities of 1860s London life into its purview and marrying realism with mythic symbolism to great effect. Identities shift, deception battles unceasingly with the truth, while the...

Little Dorrit, written by Charles Dickens in the 1850s, is among the author’s most ambitious novels containing a massive sweep of themes, characters and locations. At its heart though is the confined space of the Marshalsea Debtors Prison, where the blameless Amy Dorrit chooses to live with her incarcerated father William, who takes pride in being the longest serving prisoner in the place. In the...

Little Dorrit, written by Charles Dickens in the 1850s, is among the author’s most ambitious novels containing a massive sweep of themes, characters and locations. It may be set 30 years before its creation, but the book feels in many ways ahead of its time, exploring themes of freedom and entrapment – both physical and psychological – in ways that would appeal enormously to later figures includin...

Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times is perhaps best known for its portrayal of school inspector Thomas Gradgrind, who states clearly and repeatedly at the outset that it’s facts that matter, and education should be all about filling children up with these facts as if they were vessels rather than human beings. In this, the second of two episodes introducing Hard Times, John Yorke looks at how Dicken...

Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times is set in a northern factory town at the height of the industrial revolution, far away from the writer’s normal stamping ground of London - but it certainly doesn’t lack the overlapping plots, the wide array of characters and the incorporation of melodrama, humour and tragedy that we associate so closely with the author. Dickens had travelled north himself as a jo...

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, is one of the most well-known and influential pieces of writing in Western literature. Initially presented as a true account, this tale of adventure, desert island shipwrecking and survival has been re-told and re-packaged for different audiences, different generations and different times - rom The Swiss Family Robinson to Lost In Space, and Lord...

Set in the turbulent years of 20th century India, Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day brings us a story of family and political upheaval in the blistering heat of Old Delhi. John Yorke unpicks the threads that hold both family and community together until they fray and fall apart. From an opening in the 1980s we are taken backwards and forwards in time to find loyalties and tensions amongst sib...

Set in the turbulent years of 20th century India, Anita Desai’s novel Clear Light of Day brings us a story of family and political upheaval in the blistering heat of Old Delhi. John Yorke unpicks the threads that hold both family and community together until they fray and fall apart. From an opening in the 1980s, we are taken backwards and forwards in time to find loyalties and tensions amongst si...