Book In
Book In is a podcast in which brothers Rupert and Charlie Fordham discuss all things English Literature. From Chaucer to the present day, covering drama, novels and poetry, they cover all the classics and much more, from the UK, Ireland, the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Informative but lighthearted, Book In is suitable for all readers, and will be helpful for students doing GCSE, A-Level and university English degrees as well.
Both Rupert and Charlie have been keen readers all their lives and both studied English at university. For many years Charlie taught English at GCSE and A-level.
Episodes
24 episodes
Poets: Sylvia Plath
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 ...
•
56:35
.png)
The BIG Scale
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 ...
•
Episode 22
•
45:52
Booker Prize Winners: Lincoln In The Bardo
In 1862, with the Civil War nearly a year old, Abraham Lincoln's son Willie died of TB aged 11. He was buried in West Oak Cemetery in Washington DC, and a grieving and devastated Lincoln went at night to visit his son's coffin, and physically h...
•
Episode 21
•
1:00:46
The Traitors Special: Literature's Greatest Traitors!
As Celebrity Traitors reaches its climax on BBC1 this week, Rupert and Charlie count down the Top 10 greatest traitors in literature. Who are the literary equivalents of the TV show's camp and hysterical Alan Carr, the all or nothing, over the ...
•
Episode 20
•
52:02
Booker Prize Winners: Milkman - Anna Burns
Milkman tells the story of an 18 year old girl living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The novel is set in the late 1970s, at a time when large parts of the Catholic community were in effect run by the IRA, and most families would have ...
•
Episode 19
•
56:39
Booker Prize Winners: Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel - Part 2
In part 2 of Wolf Hall, Rupert and Charlie look at the way Hilary Mantel writes about the seismic changes occurring in England in the early 1530s. Her London is filled with Europeans - traders, artists and diplomats - and economic, financial an...
•
Episode 18
•
44:28
Booker Prize Winners: Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel - Part 1
Wolf Hall is Hilary Mantel's radical and profoundly original reimagining of the story of Thomas Cromwell. Born the son of a blacksmith, Cromwell rose to become Henry VIII's chief lieutenant and enforcer, and was the man who engineered Britain's...
•
Episode 17
•
49:17
Booker Prize Winners: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida - Shehan Karunatilaka
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the Booker Prize in 2022, the first and only time it has been won by a Sri Lankan author. Set in the late 1980s, in the chaos and brutality of the Sri Lankan civil war, it tells the story of Maali Almeida, w...
•
Episode 16
•
54:03
6 Books We've Recently Read
In this episode, Rupert and Charlie each choose 3 books they've read recently and enjoyed. Charlie discusses whether Shakespeare really wrote the plays, with "Shakespeare is a Woman and Other Heresies" by Elizabeth Winkler, and looks at two boo...
•
Episode 15
•
57:28
The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
The critic F. R. Leavis said that the four great English novelists were Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. In the final episode of the Book In series featuring these writers, Rupert and Charlie look at The Wings of the Do...
•
Episode 14
•
1:02:55
Middlemarch - George Eliot - Part 2
In the second episode of Middlemarch, Rupert and Charlie look at the timeless story of Bulstrode the banker and his downfall, and at the various groups of people - amongst them doctors, farmers, politicians, gossips and vicars, who make up Midd...
•
Episode 13
•
56:39
Middlemarch - George Eliot - Part 1
Written in 1871, George Eliot's masterpiece Middlemarch looks back 40 years to an England in the period just before the Great Reform Act. The characters whose stories it tells are unforgettable - the lives of the ardent and empathetic Dorothea ...
•
Episode 12
•
1:01:58
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Published in 1899, Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow, a sailor, who is sent on a mission up the Congo River to find out what has happened to the brilliant agent, Kurtz. The story is closely based on Joseph Conrad's own time in the Con...
•
Episode 11
•
1:07:53
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The slow burn love affair between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy is one of the best known and best loved stories in the English language, fuelled by multiple films, TV series and spin offs in recent years. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's r...
•
Episode 10
•
1:01:31
Update on the Podcast - How it's Going, and What's Coming Up
A short episode to update everyone - we started Book In a couple of months ago, with a plan to do 8 episodes and see how we got on. The response has been terrific, and so now we're planning what to do next. Tune in to find out, and also to lear...
•
Episode 9
•
14:44
MacBeth - William Shakespeare
In 1606, James 1st had been King of England for three years. Most of his Stewart ancestors had met bloody and violent deaths, so for Shakespeare to write a play about the murder of a Scottish King was a bold move. The play was MacBeth; dramatic...
•
Episode 8
•
1:03:13
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Hamlet is one of the most famous, most performed and most analysed pieces of literature ever written. Every generation sees something of themselves in the anguished and tortured figure of the Prince of Denmark, as he grapples with his conscienc...
•
Episode 7
•
55:28
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the first poem in Lyrical Ballads, the groundbreaking volume of poetry published by Coleridge and Wordsworth in 1798, and composed and written during the year the two young men spent together in the Quantock ...
•
Episode 6
•
1:04:53
The Wasteland
Published in 1922, T.S.Eliot's poem The Wasteland is a definitive text of modernism, and one of the towering cultural achievements of the twentieth century. Revolutionary, obscure and beautiful, it took the literary world by storm, and was enth...
•
Episode 5
•
1:05:31
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Emily Bronte was one of six children brought up on the bleak Yorkshire moors, and was described by her sister Charlotte as “not a person of demonstrative character”. Yet in her late twenties, this solitary and introverted woman wrote one of the...
•
Episode 4
•
1:05:33
Emma - Jane Austen
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...
•
Episode 3
•
1:03:38
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Rupert and Charlie look at George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Austere, prescient, terrifying and ultimately profoundly moving, the novel has exercised an extraordinary hold on the western consciousness with its portrayal of a soc...
•
Episode 2
•
59:55