Opening Lines

John Yorke explores one of Shakespeare's best loved comedies, Twelfth Night. In the first of two episodes, he untangles a complex plot and shows how we can still find it funny. But is it really a comedy? John finds sadness behind the laughter in a play that ends with a melancholic song as the rain begins to fall. We're introduced to characters who fall in love with each other in a confusion of mis...

Somewhere between autobiography, memoir and novel, the Irish writer and poet Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy was published in 1958. It’s the story of the teenaged Behan’s three years in an English Borstal – the youth detention centres of their day. As an Irish Republican, Behan’s views of the English are challenged, relationships are formed, and his journey to becoming one of the most celebrated write...

John Yorke takes a look at Ian McEwan’s 1997 complex thriller Enduring Love. It's a bold novel, set in the aftermath of a tragic accident, but the substance of the story is formed from a beautifully simple yet complex premise – everyone sees that accident in a totally different way. The central character, Joe Rose, is stalked by a stranger, Jed Parry, whom he meets purely by chance at the scene of...

John Yorke examines Victor Nekrasov’s novel Kira Georgievna, a bestseller in 1960s Russia. Set in Moscow, Kyiv and rural Ukraine, the eponymous Kira Georgievna is a successful middle-aged sculptor, originally from Kyiv, who must choose between three different lovers. She’s married to a much older painter while also enjoying a casual affair with a young man who’s working for her as a model. But Kir...

John Yorke takes a look at Aldous Huxley’s 1923 satirical novel, Antic Hay. It's a comic novel, set in post-war London and a wicked satire on the glittering hedonism of the 1920s. It tells the story of a collection of upper middle-class characters desperately trying to find meaning in their lives after the catastrophe of the First World War. Aldous Huxley is most famous for his classic dystopian s...

John Yorke delves into James Hogg’s masterpiece of Gothic horror, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Presented as a ‘found document’, the confessions give a chilling insight into the mind of a murderer. This novel is a horror story, a mystery thriller, a psychological study of religious extremism, and at its heart lurks a serial killer. Despite being first published in 1824...

The series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke examines Porgy by Edwin DuBose Heyward. Porgy was published in 1925 and concerns the love affair between Porgy and Bess. Set within the poor black community of Charleston, South Carolina, the book was later adapted into the blockbuster musical Porgy and Bess. The writer Du Bose Heyward was white and, ever since...

The series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work. John Yorke examines Porgy by Edwin DuBose Heyward. Published in 1925, Porgy was an immediate hit and was later adapted both for the stage and the blockbuster musical Porgy and Bess. In this first of two episodes about Porgy, John looks at the story at the heart of the original novel and the background of the remarkable man...

John Yorke looks at Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gaslight.  A big hit on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue and an even bigger success on Broadway, Patrick Hamilton’s drama of the mental abuse of Bella Manningham by her husband Jack lives on, sometimes unacknowledged, as the source of the term Gaslighting - one person’s attempt to make another doubt their sanity.     Best known for his novels such...

In the second of two episodes about Georges by Alexander Dumas, John Yorke looks at the central theme of the book - race. Although a mixed race man, Alexandre Dumas very seldom addressed the issue of race in his work. Georges is the only novel in which it plays any part. Published after the abolition of slavery in France but before France banned slavery in its colonies, the central themes of Georg...

In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke examines Alexander Dumas’ forgotten classic; Georges. Georges was one of Dumas' earliest novels and in this first of two episodes about the book, John shows us how it set the template for many of those that followed. It's a swashbuckling, page-turner full of plot twists, cliff hangers and larger-than-life cha...

John Yorke explores the way the celebrated 19th century writer Alexander Pushkin’s 400-line narrative poem, The Bronze Horseman, gives us an astonishing image of the unequal relationship between ruler and ruled. This ground breaking poem, which is one of the great landmarks of Russian literature, shows us how the empire building passion of one ruler, the tsar Peter the Great, with his grand design...

John Yorke explores the themes and impact of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story Yentl. Written in the 1950s but set in the orthodox Jewish community of late nineteenth century Poland, the story was made into a successful Hollywood film starring Barbara Streisand. Yentl, a young orthodox woman, rebels against the constraints of a woman’s life and disguises herself as a young man in order to be abl...

John Yorke looks into Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence. In this second of two episodes about the book, he looks at what drove Lawrence to use the language that got him into so much trouble and made the novel infamous. He outlines the book's other transgressions and what happened at that famous, ground-breaking trial in 1960. John Yorke has worked in television and radio for nearly 30 years,...

John Yorke looks into Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence. In this first of two episodes about the book, he outlines the simple story at the heart of this most controversial of novels. Although it’s chiefly known for its graphic descriptions of sex and its liberal use of four letter words, John asks if the book is actually much more than a titillating tale about a passion that crosses the class...

In this series John Yorke shares a lifetime of experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories that have made a mark. John Yorke has been working in television and radio for nearly 30 years. From EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless, he has been obsessed with telling big popular stories. He has spent years analysing not just how stories work but why t...