Avsnitt
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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 the pages of (mainly) English literature. Recalling the style of the England teams of his youth, Charlie opts for a 4-4-2 formation, and selects players from clubs as diverse as Chaucer, Tolkein and Dickens. Rupert goes for the more sophisticated, continental 4-3-3, and relies fairly heavily on Milton, while also making use of C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald Fraser. Both, obviously, can’t ignore Shakespeare and Dickens. So which of the teams would give the French and Argentinians a run for their money, and is either good enough to go all the way and lift the Jules Rimet trophy? Join Book In to get in the mood for this quadrennial footballfest, and decide for yourself.
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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 and the Odyssey. The Odyssey tells of the adventures of one of the Greek heroes, Odysseus, as he returned to his home in Ithaca from the Trojan War. His journey took 10 years, and included adventures which are famous to this day, including his encounter with the one-eyed Cyclops, and negotiating the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis. When he finally reaches Ithaca, he has to deal with the suitors who are occupying his palace and trying to persuade his wife Penelope that he is dead and that she should marry one of them. Attributed to a man called Homer, the true authorship of the work is unknown. But it asks questions which resonate with us now. What is home? What is a hero, and how should men behave? Why is the journey itself so important? What makes a great leader? How does a son find his own identity when he has a powerful father? Is adultery justifiable? How should you behave towards strangers? Told in beautiful poetry, the descriptions of Odysseus and his men sailing across the wine dark sea haunt our imaginations today as they would have done for the Greeks who heard these stories so many centuries ago. Join Rupert and Charlie as they look at this extraordinary and magnificent work of literature, which has influenced almost every great writer since, and which is the first expression of the western consciousness that we have.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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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 first wife and her third husband. But in 1986, he published what his son Martin regarded as his masterpiece, The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize. Set in the south Wales in which he had spent the first 15 years of his professional life, it follows the lives of several couples who have known each other since childhood and are now in their 60s. Their world is thrown into turmoil by the return from London of Alan Weaver and his beautiful wife Rhiannon. Alan is a minor TV celebrity who has built a career on being a professional Welshman; on his return, old relationships are rekindled and long dormant affairs restarted. In a haze of alcohol and cigarettes, Amis portrays the reality of physical decline, the pathos of remembering past and lost love, and the sense of imminent death with humour and sensitivity. His satire of Welsh nationalism and the excesses of Welsh cultural figures like Dylan Thomas is merciless, and yet there is a warmth and tenderness in his descriptions of characters with whom he shared so many physical and emotional qualities. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss this fine novel, which was the start of a late renaissance for Amis’ career.
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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 real India, and takes them on an expedition to the strange caves which are a short trainride from the city of Chandrapore. He goes into one of the caves with Adela Quested, a young woman recently arrived from England. But Adela suddenly flees from the cave and accuses Aziz of attempting to rape her. The incident creates a crisis between the communities, and forces the central characters to confront existential issues about themselves and their lives. Forster explores the relationship between the career soldiers and administrators who nominally run India, and the various classes of Indians, and through this prism asks some fundamental questions: what is the nature of friendship? Can it transcend racial divides? What is the real India? And how do characters like Mrs Moore cope when everything they have believed in sems suddenly worthless? Forster never wrote another novel after this one, although he lived for nearly 50 more years. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss this most subtle and sensitive of writers.
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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 militarily but is taking an interest. The novel tells the story of an American agent called Pyle who is supplying advice and explosives to a shadowy group who he believes can provide a “Third Way” for the country. Pyle meets a British journalist, Fowler, and it is through Fowler’s eyes that the story unfolds. His voice is to a large extent Greene’s voice – jaded, cynical and weary, but he retains the capacity for love and hope. He has a beautiful Vietnamese girlfriend called Phoung, who the idealistic Pyle falls in love with. How does this triangle play out? Who is Pyle really and what is he trying to achieve? Why doesn’t Fowler want to go home? And how does Greene’s Catholicism play out in the entangled lives of these three characters? Join Charlie and Rupert as they discuss this most subtle and nuanced of novels by one of the masters of 20th century British fiction.
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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 at how Charles Ryder interacts with them, and we also talk about the extraordinary creation of Anthony Blanche who is so important both as a friend of Sebastian and as a commentator on the Flyte family. And we look at the humour in the book - as always, Waugh is a brilliantly writer and the scenes with Charles and his father are amongst the funniest he wrote. Why do the Flytes all fall in love with the slightly dull and passive figure of Charles? Why does Julia fall in love with the brash, heartless Rex Mottram? Why does Lord Marchmain come back to Brideshead to die? And does the 1981 TV series of the book stand up today? Join Rupert and Charlie on Book In to find out.
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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 contrast to the drab reality of life in the army. He later said that he regretted the richness of the language he had used, and declared that the novel was about the “operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”. The Catholicism is of course central to the novel, as it was to Waugh’s own life, but despite his somewhat disingenuous revisions, the power of the book continues to come from the vividly described memory of happy times that had passed, and love that had died. In the first episode of a two part podcast, Rupert and Charlie look at Waugh's own life and conversion to Catholicism, and discuss how the Catholic faith affects the Marchmain family. Why can’t Julia be with Charles? Do we blame Lord Marchmain for leaving his wife? And why is Waugh so rude about Hooper? Join us on Book In to find out.
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Another from the archives while Rupert is away scaling mountains. We'll be back soon!
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 that is so special about them? Rupert and Charlie look at arguably the greatest of them all, the story of Emma Woodhouse. Set in the modest provincial town of Highbury, and charting the day to day lives and concerns of ordinary people, she explores the very depths of human nature, and how we relate to each other. But is Emma a sympathetic heroine or a manipulative schemer? Why can’t she see that the man for her isn’t the smooth chancer who dazzles her for a while, but the solid and kind friend who has always had her interests at heart? And why is she so rude to poor old ladies on picnics? Charlie will explain it all.
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Our first ever episode re-released: Rupert and Charlie discuss The Great Gatsby, Scott FitzGerald’s wonderful novel of love, loss and broken dreams. Published 100 years ago, the book is extraordinarily modern and speaks to a contemporary audience as powerfully as it did to the jazz generation of the 1920s. Charlie talks about the multi-layered nature of the book with its time shifts and multiple viewpoints. Was Gatsby really a good guy who lost his way? Is Daisy a murderess? Did FitzGerald himself really believe in the American dream? Are the film versions accurate? And is The Great Gatsby the elusive Great American Novel? Join Charlie and Rupert to find out.
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Two brothers live in a squalid bedsit in west London. The room is crammed with junk. They befriend Davies, who is homeless and a tramp. He moves in with them, and they offer him a job as a caretaker for the property. But the job falls through, because Davies can’t get his papers, which are in Sidcup. Harold Pinter’s brilliant play tells the story of these three lost men, and how power shifts between them over time. They are hopeless and damaged, but they variously have dreams of getting a job, refurbishing and letting out the property and engaging with life in a normal manner. Pinter explores issues of homelessness, mental health, dealing with trauma and male relationships in a way which was groundbreaking for its time and resonates strongly today. He was a remarkable man - he came from a humble Jewish background to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his marriage to Lady Antonia Fraser propelled him into the highest echelons of British society. He loved cricket and parties, and mixed freely with the establishment of the time, but nonetheless remained resolutely attached to left wing causes and campaigned against what he saw as American imperialism throughout his life.
Join Charlie and Rupert as they discuss this fascinating man and his early masterpiece, The Caretaker.
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Tom Stoppard was glamorous, charismatic and brilliant, and his plays are among the finest written in English since the Second World War. Perhaps his most accomplished work is Arcadia, first performed in 1993, with a stellar cast including Rufus Sewell, Penelope Keith, Harriet Walter and Bill Nighy. The play contains two separate groups of people, one from the early 1800s, and the other from the present day, but performing in the same room in a country house in England. Stoppard explores a multitude of themes including mathematics and chaos theory, landscape gardening, entropy, the nature of knowledge, and literary criticism. It is dazzling, funny, witty and deeply moving, and the connections between the two groups are revealed as the play unfolds. But is it too clever by half? Can Stoppard's unashamedly intellectual exploration of ideas come across as all artifice and no heart? What role does Byron play in all this? And has there ever been a better name for a tortoise than Plautus? Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss Stoppard's great play and celebrate his long and distinguished life.
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Tune in for Book In’s review of Emerald Fennell’s film Wuthering Heights. The advance publicity promised a modern and original take on Emily Bronte’s classic novel - does the film deliver this? Fennell is well known for her fondness for portraying themes of repressed sexuality and sado-masochism - does this work in Wuthering Heights? Do Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi capture the extraordinary combination of innocence and passion that Cathy and Heathcliff have in the novel? Is Elordi a convincing villain? And could this be the start of a major career revival for Martin Clunes? Join Rupert and Charlie to get their take on Fennell’s blockbuster movie.
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The Great Tradition - which are the greatest novels we have done in the podcast?
What are the greatest novels in the English language? On Book In, we’ve covered quite a few over the last few months, and now we take a step back, and try to assess their quality. The critic F R Leavis, who we have referenced frequently in the podcasts, had his views, trenchantly expressed in his famous work The Great Tradition. We look at his criteria and discuss whether or not they are relevant or useful today. And we come up with our own rankings and ratings for the major novels we have done. Is Heart of Darkness a better book than Jane Eyre? Is it possible to say? Does it matter? Join Rupert and Charlie to find out, and see if you agree.
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Charlie and Rupert continue their discussion of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. What effect had the First World War had on the rarefied circles in which Clarissa Dalloway moved, and were those experiences different to the rest of society? The novel ostensibly takes place within the confines of a single day in June 1923, but within this framework, Woolf tells the stories of her characters over many decades. How does she do it, and how does it reflect the way in which we all experience time and memory in our everyday lives? What is the influence of the modernist giants James Joyce and T.S.Eliot, whose seminal works Ulysses and The Wasteland had been published only two years before? And what is the best film made of this book, which on the face of it would appear to be unfilmable? Join Book In to find out.
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At the age of 40 Virginia Woolf was a prominent figure in post first world war London. She had published several novels, and was a well known commentator and critic. She came from literary aristocracy - her father was Leslie Stephen, who had married William Thackeray’s daughter, and with her husband Leonard Woolf, she was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, which included her sister Vanessa Bell, Vanessa’s artist husband Clive, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Duncan Grant. But then in 1925 everything changed; she published Mrs Dalloway, in which she told the story of the experience of one woman’s life for one day in June 1923 in London. The New Yorker described it as “one of the few great innovations in the history of the novel”. The text uses modernist techniques of multiple viewpoints and cinematic sweeps and takes us in and out of the minds and feelings of a group of individuals whose lives intersect during the day. Beautiful, haunting and superbly executed, it explores issues of memory, regret, the appalling mental suffering experienced by WW1 survivors and the brittle nature of British society in the 1920s. In another two part episode, Rupert and Charlie look at this seminal work of twentieth century English fiction.
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In the second part of Book In’s episode on Thomas Hardy’s great novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, Rupert and Charlie look at the character of Michael Henchard - the qualities which enabled him to rise, and the faults that led to his fall. But is he the victim of his own downfall, or is it the case that in Hardy’s world the universe is random and cruel, and tragedy and misery are the inevitable conditions to which human beings are bound? Why dies the young Scotsman Donald Farfrae succeed where Henchard does not? What was going on in agriculture in England in the early 1840s, before the Corn Laws were repealed? Why are clothes so important to Hardy? What happens when Henchard starts drinking again? And why did friend of the show Henry James describe Hardy as “second rate”? Join Rupert and Charlie to find out.
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Thomas Hardy lived an extraordinary life. He was born into poverty and obscurity in rural Dorset in 1840, yet when he died in 1928, he was rich and world famous. His funeral at Westminster Abbey was a quasi-state occasion, with all the leading politicians and writers of the day attending, and thousands of people lining the streets of London in tribute. As a child, he remembered his grandmother recalling the French Revolution, yet he lived through the first world war into a world of motor cars, radio and television, and mass democracy. He was unhappily married to his first wife, Emma, yet when she died, he was consumed with grief and remorse, and the poetry he produced in the two years after her death is some of the finest love poetry ever written. In a two part episode of Book In, Charlie and Rupert look at one of his greatest novels, The Mayor of Casterbridge, the tragic story of Michael Henchard, who rose from rural obscurity to being the richest and most powerful man in the area. But his past catches up with him; the terrible thing he did when he was young comes back to haunt him, and his fall is public and complete. As in so many of his books, Hardy takes us back to the rural world of his youth, and shows us the lives that the people he knew as a young man were living. But even when he was writing the novel, it was a world that had passed; we see the emergence of new men, new ideas and new technologies, and the destructive effect these have on the old way of life. What is the role of the town of Casterbridge in the story? How is Henchard like Hardy? To what extent is Henchard brought down by his own actions, and to what extent is he a victim of the remorseless fate in which Hardy believed? And what on earth is a skimmity ride? Join Rupert and Charlie to find out.
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Rupert and Charlie continue their discussion of Great Expectations. They take a look at what was always one of Dickens' great preoccupations, the operation of the law in the book, and the brilliant character of Jaggers the lawyer and his sidekick, Wemmick. The prison hulks on the Thames from which Magwitch escapes were well known to Dickens as a child, and the descriptions of the court, where 32 people are sentenced to death, are unforgettable. As so often in Dickens, the cast of minor characters are rich and varied, and we look at many of them including Trabb's Boy who torments Pip once he has become a gentleman; Wopsle, the fruity and absurd actor; Pumblechook, who insists on giving Pip rolling mental arithmetic tests to humiliate him, and Bentley Drummle, the lugubrious rich man's son who manages to marry Estella. But is the melodrama overdone? Are the plot twists and coincidences too convoluted to be credible? And is this Charles Dickens' finest novel? Join Rupert and Charlie to find out.
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Published at the height of his powers in 1860, Great Expectations is Charles Dickens’ penultimate novel, and one of his very greatest. Its characters are unforgettable - Miss Havisham, self-imprisoned in her wedding dress and with her wedding feast laid on the table in the forbidding Satis House; her ward Estella, haughty, ice-cold and unreachable, the agent of Miss Havisham’s intended revenge on men and on the world; Magwitch, the desperate and terrifying convict who confronts the young boy Pip in a graveyard on the Kent marshes; and the intimidating, brilliant and untouchable lawyer Jaggers, who seems to act as a puppet master to many of the characters throughout the story. In the first of two episodes, Rupert and Charlie explore Dickens’ childhood, and how the experience of being forced to work in a factory at the age of 12, and seeing his father being imprisoned for debt, affected him for the rest of his life. Charlie talks about the brilliance of so many of the openings of Dickens novels, especially this one, and looks at Dickens' rich and vivid portrayal of London and the Kent marshes. But what are the great expectations that Pip has, and who else has them too? When they aren’t realised, what hard truths does Pip learn? And why did Dickens write several different endings to the novel? Join Rupert and Charlie to find out.
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In the second of the episodes on Jane Eyre, Rupert and Charlie take a look at some of the main characters in the book. The behaviour of Mr Rochester is basically weird - he locks up his wife in the attic, dresses up as a female gypsy fortune teller, and flirts with Blanche Ingram when he's really in love with Jane. Why does he do this? Why did he marry Bertha in the first place? And why does he risk his life to save her? When Jane leaves Rochester, she finds shelter with a family who turn out to be her cousins. One of them is the terrifying St John Rivers, an evangelical soldier of Christ who wants Jane to join him in his journey. Why does she refuse? What is Charlotte Bronte's attitude to religion in this book? How does Jane suddenly find herself rich, and what does she do with the money? And is Jane Eyre as good as Wuthering Heights? Join Book In as we conclude our discussion of this wonderful and hugely influential novel.
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