Opening Lines

Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey, was the first full book she wrote. She was in her early 20s at the time and it was accepted by a publisher but the novel wasn’t published in her lifetime. In this second episode John Yorke looks at the story behind the genesis of Northanger Abbey - how a young woman with only three years of formal education came to write such an accomplished work, what prompt...

Northanger Abbey was Jane Austen’s first book, although it wasn’t published until after her death. It tells the story of Catherine Morland, an impressionable young woman who is introduced to fashionable society when she’s taken by a wealthy neighbour to Bath. There, Catherine’s imagination catches fire when she’s initiated into the thrills of Gothic fiction by new friend, Isabella Thorpe – a prett...

When Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, novels as a form were still in their infancy. Many tended to be long-winded works, instructing readers on how to live a moral life. With this short and fast-paced rollercoaster of a book, Walpole blew that idea out of the water, introducing his audience to a completely new kind of fiction, featuring supernatural happenings, suspense, and...

In the winter of 1847, the Star of the Sea sets sail from Ireland for New York. Among the refugees are a maidservant, a bankrupt aristocrat, an aspiring novelist and a maker of revolutionary ballads. It reads like a Victorian gothic novel, with murder and intrigue at its heart. Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor was published in 2002 and attracted multiple plaudits as well as literary awards. O’Co...

John Yorke looks at the background to A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and assesses the appeal of this worldwide best seller by Marina Lewycka. Two feuding sisters unite to thwart their newly widowed father’s impending marriage to Valentina - a voluptuous gold-digger from Ukraine who loves green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine and who’ll stop at nothing in her single-minded pur...

John Yorke looks at The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final play and a landmark in 20th century theatre. It’s 1903 and Liubov Andryeevna Ranyevskaya has returned to the family estate in southern Russia. As the head of this aristocratic household she faces a dilemma. The family is in serious financial difficulty and they have the choice of either selling the entire estate, or accepting the propos...

John Yorke looks at The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final play and a landmark in 20th century theatre. It’s 1903 and Liubov Andryeevna Ranyevskaya is returning to the family estate in southern Russia. As the head of this aristocratic household, she faces a crisis. The family is in serious financial difficulty and it seems inevitable that the estate will have to be sold to pay their debts. A lo...

Charles Darwin’s ideas changed our understanding of the world perhaps more than those of any other British scholar. His famous voyage on HMS Beagle ended in 1836, and he had developed his findings into his theories on evolution and natural selection within six years. It was not, however, until 1859 that he shared these revolutionary ideas with the public in On The Origin of Species, a book far dif...

John Yorke looks at Treasure Island, the great swash-buckling adventure by Robert Louis Stevenson that inspired almost every pirate tale to follow. Stevenson wrote the story to amuse his stepson on a wet holiday in the Scottish Highlands, with the original title The Sea Cook. Looking back at his time as a boy, narrator Jim Hawkins recounts his thrilling adventures on land and at sea in the pursuit...

In the months that followed the end of the Second World War, very few people in the West knew the true power of the atomic weaponry that had forced the Japanese surrender. John Hersey’s article Hiroshima would change that. Released a year after the bombs were dropped, the New Yorker piece was journalistic dynamite and sold out in hours. Published in one instalment - taking up the whole edition of...

John Yorke takes a look at The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark. Published in 1963, two years after the success of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it’s set in the summer of 1945. A group of young women live, love and lodge together in the shabby but respectable May of Teck Club in the months between VE Day and the ending of the war 99 days later with the final victory in Japan. It’s a rivetin...

John Yorke looks at King Lear, the brutal tragedy that some claim is Shakespeare’s greatest achievement. When Lear, the 80 year old king of ancient Britain, decides that the time has come to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, he unwittingly sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events that will tear apart both his family and his realm. He banishes his faithful youngest daughter, Cordel...

John Yorke looks at King Lear, the brutal tragedy that some claim is Shakespeare’s greatest achievement. When Lear, the 80 year old king of ancient Britain, decides that the time has come to divide his kingdom among his three daughters, he unwittingly sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events that will tear apart both his family and his realm. In this first of two episodes, the focus is on the...

The series that examines books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke looks at the 1968 theatre novel Next Season by Australian writer and director Michael Blakemore. Based on Blakemore’s lived experience as an actor in English repertory theatre in the late 1950s in Stratford-upon-Avon, the novel has been described as one of the true great theatre novels. The novel follows young Australi...

The series that examines books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke looks at the 1962 theatre memoir Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff. The text is a comic account of Hanff’s attempts to break into New York theatre in the early 1940s, which found a new audience after the success of Hanff’s later epistolary memoir 84, Charing Cross Road. Underfoot in Show Business is a dispatch...

John Yorke looks at Casino Royale, the novel by Ian Fleming that introduced James Bond to the world. First published in 1953, Fleming’s thrilling novel plunges us immediately into the murky underworld of high stakes gambling. Today we may be more familiar with Bond as portrayed in the movies, but here we discover a more nuanced character. James Bond is vulnerable and at times filled with self-doub...

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...