Opening Lines

John Yorke looks at The Manxman by the Sir Thomas Hall Caine, a love story set on the Isle of Man. The novel broke sales records and changed the book industry forever when it was published in 1894. Hall Caine was globally famous, hugely successful, adored by readers and feted by royalty. The story was adapted for film by Alfred Hitchcock, translated into 12 languages and performed on stage. Yet to...

John Yorke explores a work that every Italian will know – I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni, known in English as The Betrothed. In this the second of two episodes, John looks at the context for the story told by Manzoni in The Betrothed. Written in the early 19th century, and set in the 17th century, at a time before Italy became a unified country, Manzoni deliberately used a historical perio...

John Yorke explores a work that every Italian will know – I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni, known in English as The Betrothed. A classic of Italian literature, The Betrothed follows the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, who plan to marry, only to be thwarted by a Spanish noble, Don Rodrigo, who has his eye on Lucia. Told against a backdrop of 17th century Lombardy, before Italy bec...

John Yorke looks at the 1952 psychological suspense novel from French crime-writing team Boileau-Narcejac. The plot centres around travelling salesman Ferdinand Ravinel who conspires a plot with his mistress Lucienne to murder his wife. After the icily dark bathtub murder, Ravinel’s wife Lucienne’s body strangely disappears- and so begins Ravinel’s psychological unravelling. Noted for the ingenuit...

Originally composed about 2000 years ago, the Mahabharata is one of the world’s greatest pieces of storytelling, as well as a foundational Hindu text. Woven through its central account of a great dynastic family conflict and bloody war is the story of the gods and their relationship to humankind, as well as spiritual, philosophical and practical instruction about how to live one’s life in the best...

Originally composed about 2000 years ago, the Mahabharata is one of the world’s greatest pieces of storytelling, as well as a foundational Hindu text. Woven through its central account of a great dynastic family conflict and bloody war is the story of the gods and their relationship to humankind, as well as spiritual, philosophical and practical instruction about how to live one’s life in the best...

John Yorke continues his exploration of Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson’s much-loved account of rural life. Lark Rise to Candleford is one of our best loved evocations of rural England, but it is also an evocation of rural poverty, and of the emerging opportunities for young women as a new century dawned. It tells the story of a girl growing up in a poor rural hamlet in rural Oxfordshire i...

John Yorke explores Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson’s much-loved account of rural life. Lark Rise to Candleford is one of our best loved evocations of rural England, but it's also an evocation of rural poverty, and of the emerging opportunities for young women as a new century dawned. It tells the story of a girl growing up in a poor rural hamlet in rural Oxfordshire in the 1880s. Eventual...

John Yorke takes a look at If On A Winter's Night A Traveller, a novel by one of the most translated Italian writers of the 20th century, Italo Calvino. Published in 1979, this dizzying work of metafiction takes you on a journey into the very nature of reading. The novel begins with you, the Reader, going into a bookshop to buy a copy of If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You sta...

John Yorke takes a look at Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal work, Democracy in America. First published in 1835, it is arguably one of the most influential books ever to pervade American public discourse, quoted by almost every political leader - both from the red side and the blue. It’s a two-volume work (the second volume was published in 1840) that explores American society through the eyes of a...

The series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke considers Alexander Dumas' great swashbuckler, The Three Musketeers, and his creation of a classic hero in D'Artagnan and an unforgettable villain in Milady de Winter. In the second of two episodes about the book, John examines how Dumas created this enduring page-turner. He also looks at aspects of the novel th...

The series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke examines Alexander Dumas’ classic, The Three Musketeers. It's one of Dumas' most famous works and contains one of literature's greatest heroes in D'Artagnan and one its most dastardly villains in Milady De Winter. In the first of two episodes about the book, John shows us how Dumas was able to create such enduri...

In December 1974, Bruce Chatwin headed south from Buenos Aires to write an account of his journey through Patagonia. On the surface it was based on a series of encounters with the dispossessed - exiles, refugees and outlaws and those who had made their home on the southernmost tip of South America - but Chatwin’s real interest lay in the internal journey behind their stories and the nature of huma...

Hailed as the best non-fiction account of the city, Venice was published in 1960 and became an international best seller. It was the first in a series of city ‘portraits’ by Jan Morris that included Oxford, Hong Kong and Trieste. She went on to publish over 40 books including her monumental account of the British Empire, Pax Brittanica. John Yorke delves into how Jan Morris defied boundaries in Ve...

John Yorke takes a look at Mother Courage and her Children, Bertolt Brecht’s play written in 1939 on the eve of World War Two. Set in an earlier time when the Thirty Years War was raging across Europe, Mother Courage and her Children deals with some of the great themes of conflict and capitalism, looking at the way that one mother tries to survive with her family intact. Brecht grew up in Germany...

John Yorke takes a look at Mother Courage and her Children, Bertolt Brecht’s play written in 1939 on the eve of World War Two. Set in an earlier time when the Thirty Years War was raging across Europe, Mother Courage and her Children deals with some of the great themes of conflict and capitalism, looking at the way that one mother tries to survive with her family intact. Brecht grew up in Germany...

John Yorke delves into Tim Winton’s beloved novel, Cloudstreet, published in 1991. Set in a suburb of Perth in Western Australia, the novel spans the period from the end of the Second World War until the mid 1960s and made the young Winton, who wrote the book in his 20s, both a literary and popular phenomenon in his own country. It tells the story of two large white working class families – the Pi...

John Yorke delves into Tim Winton’s beloved novel, Cloudstreet, published in 1991. Set in a suburb of Perth in Western Australia, the novel spans the period from the end of the second world war until the mid 1960s and made the young Winton, who wrote the book in his 20s, both a literary and popular phenomenon in his own country. It tells the story of two large white working class families – the Pi...

John Yorke takes a look at Caradog Prichard's ground-breaking novel, One Moonlit Night. First published in Welsh in 1961, it broke new ground for its portrayal of taboo subjects such as sexuality, suicide and mental illness. Thirty four years later it was translated into English by Philip Mitchell who described his first encounter with the material in the original Welsh as 'a mind-blowing, life-ch...

John Yorke continues his examination of E M Forster’s best-loved novel A Room with a View, first published in 1908. Set in Florence and Surrey, A Room with a View is both a coming-of-age story and an intoxicating love story, as teenage Lucy Honeychurch has to choose between two very different men, and between following convention or following her heart. It is a book full of muddle and misunderstan...

John Yorke examines E M Forster’s best-loved novel A Room with a View, first published in 1908. Set in Florence and Surrey, A Room with a View is both a coming-of-age story and an intoxicating love story, as teenage Lucy Honeychurch has to choose between two very different men, and between following convention or following her heart. It's a book full of muddle and misunderstanding, as well as come...

The series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke examines what lies at the heart of Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina. ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ It’s one of the most famous opening lines in world literature, and the book has been called the greatest novel ever written. First published in 1878, and translat...

The series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke explores the themes at the heart of Leo Tolstoy’s great nineteenth century novel, Anna Karenina. In the second of three episodes, John looks at the secondary great love story in the novel, that of Kitty and Levin, and how it is built into and reflects the structure of the story. As Anna and Vronksy’s affair play...

The series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke explores Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, one of the world’s greatest novels. In this third and final part on Anna Karenina, John focuses on Tolstoy and his world, in order to come to an understanding of the true sense of his achievement in writing a novel that has been at the forefront of world literature since it...

John Yorke explores one of Shakespeare's best loved comedies, Twelfth Night. In the second of two episodes, he explores the setting of the play and how the whole plot turns on the ambiguities thrown up by a woman dressed as a man. We’re introduced to characters who fall in love with each other in a confusion of misplaced desire. Viola is shipwrecked in a strange land and has lost her twin brother...