Book In

What really happened in the Marabar Caves? This is the central mystery of A Passage to India, EM Forster’s most celebrated novel, set in colonial India in the early 20th century. An Indian doctor, Aziz, wants to show some English visitors the real India, and takes them on an expedition to the strange caves which are a short trainride from the city of Chandrapore. He goes into one of the caves with...

Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American is set in Vietnam in the 1950s – the French are trying to hold on to colonial power and are supporting the south in its struggle against a communist insurgency in the north. America is not yet involved militarily but is taking an interest. The novel tells the story of an American agent called Pyle who is supplying advice and explosives to a shadowy group wh...

At Book In, we continue our discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel Brideshead Revisited. We look at the characters of the Marchmain family - the children Sebastian, Julia, Bridey and Cordelia, and the parents, Lord and Lady Marchmain, and at how Charles Ryder interacts with them, and we also talk about the extraordinary creation of Anthony Blanche who is so important both as a friend of Seba...

Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel. Magnificent but flawed, he wrote it while recovering from an injury during the Second World War, and the lush, sumptuous world of Oxford in the 1920s which he portrays is in stark contrast to the drab reality of life in the army. He later said that he regretted the richness of the language he had used, and declared that the novel was about...

Another from the archives while Rupert is away scaling mountains. We'll be back soon! Emma is one of only six novels that Jane Austen completed, and yet she is among the very greatest of all English writers. How did an obscure spinster living in a modest house in Hampshire come to create these extraordinary books, and what is it that is so special about them? Rupert and Charlie look at arguab...

Our first ever episode re-released: Rupert and Charlie discuss The Great Gatsby, Scott FitzGerald’s wonderful novel of love, loss and broken dreams. Published 100 years ago, the book is extraordinarily modern and speaks to a contemporary audience as powerfully as it did to the jazz generation of the 1920s. Charlie talks about the multi-layered nature of the book with its time shifts and multiple v...

Two brothers live in a squalid bedsit in west London. The room is crammed with junk. They befriend Davies, who is homeless and a tramp. He moves in with them, and they offer him a job as a caretaker for the property. But the job falls through, because Davies can’t get his papers, which are in Sidcup. Harold Pinter’s brilliant play tells the story of these three lost men, and how power shifts betwe...

Tom Stoppard was glamorous, charismatic and brilliant, and his plays are among the finest written in English since the Second World War. Perhaps his most accomplished work is Arcadia, first performed in 1993, with a stellar cast including Rufus Sewell, Penelope Keith, Harriet Walter and Bill Nighy. The play contains two separate groups of people, one from the early 1800s, and the other from the pr...

Tune in for Book In’s review of Emerald Fennell’s film Wuthering Heights. The advance publicity promised a modern and original take on Emily Bronte’s classic novel - does the film deliver this? Fennell is well known for her fondness for portraying themes of repressed sexuality and sado-masochism - does this work in Wuthering Heights? Do Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi capture the extraordinary comb...

The Great Tradition - which are the greatest novels we have done in the podcast?  What are the greatest novels in the English language? On Book In, we’ve covered quite a few over the last few months, and now we take a step back, and try to assess their quality. The critic F R Leavis, who we have referenced frequently in the podcasts, had his views, trenchantly expressed in his famous work The Grea...

Charlie and Rupert continue their discussion of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. What effect had the First World War had on the rarefied circles in which Clarissa Dalloway moved, and were those experiences different to the rest of society? The novel ostensibly takes place within the confines of a single day in June 1923, but within this framework, Woolf tells the stories of her characters over many...

At the age of 40 Virginia Woolf was a prominent figure in post first world war London. She had published several novels, and was a well known commentator and critic. She came from literary aristocracy - her father was Leslie Stephen, who had married William Thackeray’s daughter, and with her husband Leonard Woolf, she was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, which included her sister Vanessa...

In the second part of Book In’s episode on Thomas Hardy’s great novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, Rupert and Charlie look at the character of Michael Henchard - the qualities which enabled him to rise, and the faults that led to his fall. But is he the victim of his own downfall, or is it the case that in Hardy’s world the universe is random and cruel, and tragedy and misery are the inevitable cond...

Thomas Hardy lived an extraordinary life. He was born into poverty and obscurity in rural Dorset in 1840, yet when he died in 1928, he was rich and world famous. His funeral at Westminster Abbey was a quasi-state occasion, with all the leading politicians and writers of the day attending, and thousands of people lining the streets of London in tribute. As a child, he remembered his grandmother rec...

Rupert and Charlie continue their discussion of Great Expectations. They take a look at what was always one of Dickens' great preoccupations, the operation of the law in the book, and the brilliant character of Jaggers the lawyer and his sidekick, Wemmick.  The prison hulks on the Thames from which Magwitch escapes were well known to Dickens as a child, and the descriptions of the court, wher...

Published at the height of his powers in 1860, Great Expectations is Charles Dickens’ penultimate novel, and one of his very greatest. Its characters are unforgettable - Miss Havisham, self-imprisoned in her wedding dress and with her wedding feast laid on the table in the forbidding Satis House; her ward Estella, haughty, ice-cold and unreachable, the agent of Miss Havisham’s intended revenge on...

In the second of the episodes on Jane Eyre, Rupert and Charlie take a look at some of the main characters in the book. The behaviour of Mr Rochester is basically weird - he locks up his wife in the attic, dresses up as a female gypsy fortune teller, and flirts with Blanche Ingram when he's really in love with Jane. Why does he do this? Why did he marry Bertha in the first place? And why does...

Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte's most famous book and one of the most celebrated, controversial and loved novels ever written. Millions who have never read it know about the mysterious Mr Rochester, the mad wife he kept locked up in his attic, and the image of her throwing herself from the battlements of Thornfield as she burned it to the ground, Mr Rochester blinding and maiming himself as he...

In 1816, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was staying on the shores of Lake Geneva with his young wife Mary, and his friends Lord Byron and John Polidori. It was the year without a summer, and, confined to the house by the terrible weather, they each agreed to write a ghost story. Over the next few weeks, the 19 year old Mary produced Frankenstein, one of the most consequential and influential books...

Small Things Like These is a short novel by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. It tells the story of Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small provincial town in the mid 1980s. As Christmas approaches, he delivers some coal to the local convent, and by chance discovers a girl there who is being kept in a coalshed. It is clear she is in distress and Bill is faced with a choice - should he do nothing, o...

Charlie and Rupert look at three great poems associated with Christmas - In the Bleak Midwinter by Christina Rossetti, a section from In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and The Magi by W.B.Yeats. Rossetti's is a much loved and beautiful Christmas Carol, Tennyson's is a highly crafted meditation on some of the great themes of the mid C19th, and Yeats' a more primal reflection on fa...

The tale of the miserable Ebeneezer Scrooge, and how he came to find humanity, generosity and love, is probably the most famous Christmas story ever written outside the Bible. It is a ghost story and a classic morality tale; the book firmly established Christmas as a time for family, for joy, for generosity, presents and huge lunches, as well as a time of forgiveness and a chance to mend ones ways...

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 p...

Sylvia Plath was an American from a prosperous middle class background whose life was changed for ever when she met Ted Hughes at a party in London. He kissed her on the spot, and they were married four months later, on June 16th, deliberately selected as it was Bloomsday in Joyce's Ulysses. Their relationship was tumultous; Hughes had multiple affairs and Plath suffered from severe depressio...

Book In introduces the Books in Greatness Scale - or BIGS. Charlie has developed a method of ranking books according to their greatness, with each being awarded a score out of 10. He explains the system, and he and Rupert award marks out of 10 to all the books they've covered so far. Who is the more generous? Who took it upon themselves to declare that Hamlet may not be a 10? Is The Great Gat...