Hercule Poirot, a Tunisian dagger and an evening of Mah Jong: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The three best-selling authors of all time are, in order, God, Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. Exact figures are hard to know, but the gulf between Christie and the second division is big enough to g...
22 Apr 20251h 17min
Who watches the Watchmen?: Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, wrote the Roman poet Juvenal two thousand years ago. And just in case your Latin isn’t up to scratch, we’ll translate it for you: Who watches the watchmen? That line pro...
15 Apr 20251h 4min
SLoB's Secret Life of Pets
From Macavity to Samuel Johnson’s Hodge, Buck to Rochester’s Pilot, what is classic literature without its pets? One of the most affecting scenes in The Odyssey, that foundation stone of western liter...
7 Apr 202558min
George Orwell 6: What's in Room 101? 1984 Part 2
As Shakespeare almost wrote: Orwell That Ends Well. While our six-part series on George Orwell comes to a triumphant end, Orwell’s life - alas - did not. He died too young and deeply pessimistic about...
4 Apr 202555min
George Orwell 5: Sex crime, anyone? 1984 pt1
Newspeak, Big Brother, the Thought Police, Room 101, doublethink, sex crime, the Ministry of Truth. Few books have generated quite as many outlandish yet unforgettable concepts as George Orwell’s Nine...
1 Apr 202557min
George Orwell 4: Come on, Eileen! Anna Funder, Mrs Orwell and Wifedom
George Orwell is one of the most famous names in classic literature, thanks to his novels Animal Farm and 1984, both dystopian fables of worlds gone mad, ruled over by autocratic pigs and authoritaria...
28 Mars 20251h
George Orwell 3: Murder in the Barnyard: Animal Farm
Animal Farm is George Orwell’s micro masterpiece, an animal fable that offers a devastating critique of Stalinist Russia and the rise of totalitarianism. Orwell described it to a friend as a “little s...
25 Mars 20251h 20min
World Poetry Day Double-Bill: Can poetry change the world? The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon
Together, Siegfried Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman (1917) and Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918) are among the greatest examples of protest art in British history. Sassoon was a decorated war hero, who...
21 Mars 202554min
