Opening Lines

In this second episode, John Yorke assesses the criticism levelled against James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans - primarily that it is responsible for the widely held, inaccurate, view that indigenous Americans were inevitably disappearing during the period the novel is set, and that that false narrative was used to justify colonisation. Also, John delves deeper into the aut...

Published in 1826, the American writer James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans is set during the French and Indian War, in 1750s North America. The story follows a group of British colonists trying to cross frontier land – and examines the complexity of the relationship that existed between the colonialists and the land they were - in essence stealing – the native American’s. The bo...

Ian Sansom, sitting in for John Yorke, takes a look at Joy In the Morning, the 44th Jeeves and Wooster novel by PG Wodehouse. Published in 1946, it revolves around Bertie Wooster’s attempts to avoid a series of social and romantic calamities. The omniscient Jeeves, of course, remains the great calm at the centre of the novel’s storm, devising ingenious solutions just when disaster seems inevitable...

John Yorke explores the revolutionary techniques developed by Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility and uncovers why her work is so endlessly adaptable to modern tastes. Austen innovated ‘free indirect style’, which blends third person narration with a character’s internal thoughts and feelings. Novelists have been using her creation ever since. She also had a gift for dialogue which allows her to...

John Yorke explores the romantic framework of Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, as well as the reasons for its enduring appeal. It’s a novel that explores the cost of love, and in it, Austen develops writing techniques that revolutionised this new form, which are still in use some two hundred years later. With contributions from Professor John Mullan, and poet and dramati...

The opening lines of Pride and Prejudice are not only among the most famous in all of literature, they also place marriage front and centre as the key theme within the novel. “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Austen writes, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” So many of the characters and their actions are driven by the search for a good marriage...

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has not only captured the hearts of generations of readers, it also helped change the way that novels are written. This most beloved tale of Regency romance, featuring the brilliantly quick-witted Elizabeth Bennett and the haughty figure of Fitzwilliam Darcy, allows us into its characters’ heads and hearts in newly sophisticated ways that set the template for so m...

According to its introduction, The Princess Bride is a long, sprawling book by the great Florinese writer S. Morgenstern that renowned screenwriter and novelist William Goldman has been obliged to abridge so that his son doesn’t have to struggle through all the boring bits. But as John Yorke reveals, all is not as it seems in this metafictional novel from 1973 that Goldman himself went on to adapt...

John Yorke takes a look at an enduring classic of children’s literature, The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Published in 1908, The Wind In The Willows is about nature – both human and animal. It is, on the face of it, a children’s book packed with beloved characters. But hidden beneath the bucolic adventures and Grahame’s beautiful evocation of the landscape, there is a desperate longing...

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...