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
16 episodes
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...
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Episode 15
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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...
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Episode 14
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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...
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Episode 13
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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 ...
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Episode 12
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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...
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Episode 11
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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...
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Episode 10
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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...
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Episode 9
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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...
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Episode 8
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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...
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Episode 7
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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 ...
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Episode 6
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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...
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Episode 5
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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...
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Episode 4
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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...
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Episode 3
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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...
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Episode 2
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59:55