Book In
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 from school to degree level.
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
67 episodes
Sense & Sensibility - Jane Austen
As Georgia Oakley's film of Sense and Sensibility is released, Book In looks at Jane Austen's novel. It was the first that she published, but already her genius for satire, social comedy and the extraordinarily subtle expression of human relati...
In conversation with Iain Dale - Have I Said Too Much?
Iain Dale is one of the country's leading broadcasters. His evening radio show on LBC attracts millions of listeners, and for 30 years he has been at the centre of British politics as a publisher, radio host, author, podcaster, bookshop owner, ...
Re-Release - Philip Larkin Poems
We're swotting up for our next series this week, so sadly haven't had time to record a new episode. Instead, we're re-releasing one of our classics from the archive. Philip Larkin wrote some of the greatest poetry in English in the ...
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Classic Booker Prize Winners: Offshore - Penelope Fitzgerald
In the early 1960s, a group of old barges and minor naval craft have been converted to houseboats. They are falling apart and so are their owners. The boats creak, leak and occasionally sink, and the people who live on them struggle with life, ...
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Classic Booker Prize Winners: Possession - A.S. Byatt
A.S.Byatt wrote Possession as a completely self-indulgent project, with no thought of commercial or critical consequence. It sold millions and won the Booker Prize in 1990, introducing her to a mass audience and turning her into a literary supe...
Classic Booker Prize Winners: The Siege of Krishnapur - J. G. Farrell
The Siege of Krishnapur is set in India in 1857 during the Indian Rebellion (or what used to be known as the Indian Mutiny). The small British community are besieged by the rebellious Indians, and as food and medicine gradually run out, and cas...
Classic Booker Prize Winners: Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - Part 2
In the second part of the Book In episode on Midnight's Children, Charlie and Rupert look at the way Salman Rushdie places the novel in the context of the extraordinary political and social changes created by the birth of the Indian nation. How...
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Classic Booker Prize Winners: Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - Part 1
On the stroke of midnight of August 15th 1947, the nation of India became independent from Great Britain. Saleem Sinai, the central character of Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children, is born at exactly the same moment, and in this monumen...
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In conversation with Jesse Norman - The Winding Stair
Jesse Norman joins Book In to talk about his brilliant novel The Winding Stair, about the rivalry between Francis Bacon and Edward Coke as they battled for power in the court of King James 1st. In this special edition of Book In, Jesse talks to...
The Odyssey - Film Review
Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey has been the blockbuster cultural event of the summer. Within a few weeks of release, it has already grossed nearly $1bn, putting it on course to become one of the most successful movies of all time. But ...
Early C20th Poets: W.B. Yeats - An Irish Airman, Rough Beasts and Golden Birds
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” – the famous lines from W.B Yeats’ visionary and apocalyptic poem The Second Coming are as resonant today as they were when he wrote them in the aftermath of the First World War, with Europe decimated...
Early C20th Poets: W. B. Yeats - Innisfree to Easter 1916
In the early 20th century, as the nation of Ireland emerged from the turmoil of centuries of struggle, oppression, poverty and famine, one figure above all others was both prophet and judge of the tumultuous process. In his early years, W...
Early C20th Poets: W.H. Auden
W H Auden wrote some of the most beautiful and complex poetry of the 20th century. Best known to modern audiences as the author of “Stop all the Clocks”, read by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral, he grew up in Yorkshire and the Midlan...
Early C20th Poets: T. S. Eliot - The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Marina
In the second episode on T.S.Eliot, Book In looks at the poems he wrote after The Wasteland, as he moved towards a conversion to Christianity. In the Hollow Men, he returns again to the desolation and spiritual emptiness of the West after the F...
Early C20th Poets: T. S. Eliot – Prufrock, Preludes and La Figlia Che Piange
The first poem that T.S.Eliot published, in 1915, was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and two years later, it was included as the title poem in a collection called Prufrock and Other Observations. It was a sensation; breaking dramatically ...
Early C20th Poets: Thomas Hardy
At the age of 55, and at the height of his fame, Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels and decided to devote the rest of his life to poetry. He was disillusioned with the commercial requirements of novel writing, and had been upset by the adverse...
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Great Sporting Books
Sports Books: Open - Andre Agassi, Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby, Great Cricket MatchesBook In take a look at three books on sport. Open is the autobiography of Andre Agassi: one of the greatest players of all time, Agassi was driven by his ...
World Cup Special
It’s World Cup time again! As hope springs eternal for Harry Kane and Co, and as the nation becomes obsessed by whether England should play Rashford or Gordon, and how to fit in Jude Bellingham, Rupert and Charlie choose their own teams from th...
The Odyssey - Homer
Around the 8th century BC, the inhabitants of Greece began to write things down. Amongst these were some of the poems telling of ancient times which bards had passed from generation to generation, and the greatest of these poems were the Iliad ...
C20th Novels: The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis
By the mid 1980s, Kingsley Amis was generally considered to be finished as a novelist. Devastated by the collapse of his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard, he was hugely overweight, drinking far too much and renting a basement flat from his fir...
C20th Novels: A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
What really happened in the Marabar Caves? This is the central mystery of A Passage to India, EM Forster’s most celebrated novel, set in colonial India in the early 20th century. An Indian doctor, Aziz, wants to show some English visitors the r...
C20th Novels: The Quiet American - Graham Greene
Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American is set in Vietnam in the 1950s – the French are trying to hold on to colonial power and are supporting the south in its struggle against a communist insurgency in the north. America is not yet involved m...
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C20th Novels: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - Part 2
At Book In, we continue our discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel Brideshead Revisited. We look at the characters of the Marchmain family - the children Sebastian, Julia, Bridey and Cordelia, and the parents, Lord and Lady Marchmain, and...
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C20th Novels: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - Part 1
Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel. Magnificent but flawed, he wrote it while recovering from an injury during the Second World War, and the lush, sumptuous world of Oxford in the 1920s which he portrays is in stark contra...
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