Claim OwnershipThe Curiously Specific Book Club
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Forget Downton Abbey or The Crown, we use classic novels to guide you through the Britain of today and yesterday.
Every podcast, Lloyd & Tim – two funny book-loving blokes – take you on a walk or a road trip, using a well-known novel as the only guide.
Great literature, amazing landscapes and general laughter guaranteed with every episode.
Your presenters are:
Tim Wright (r): digital writer/consultant for web, mobile, radio, TV, theatre. Half of xpt.com. Former Head of Immersive at NFTS. Web here, Twitter here.
Lloyd Shepherd (l): author of 4 novels: The English Monster. The Poisoned Island. Savage Magic. The Detective and the Devil. Also does digital product development. Web here, Twitter here.
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78 Episodes
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In Part Two of our Buchan-based adventure we switch from Scotland to the Kent coast. We’re in search of the eponymous 39 steps. But first we need to locate Trafalgar House where German secret agents are hiding out. We end up at North Foreland, between the homes of a German-hating lord and a German-loving marquess. And, yes, we did find some steps! Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
It’s an iconic moment in British literature – John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay running across a moor with police, secret agents and an airplane all trying to hunt him down. But is it based on any kind of reality? We head for the Scottish Lowlands to find out, taking in abandoned train lines, the site of a car crash and a very remote farmhouse. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We return to Ramsgate in Kent with Margot Bennett’s brilliant thriller THE WIDOW OF BATH as our only guide. The book was published in 1952, the same year as rock and roll had its birthday. We’re looking for a hat shop and a suspicous employment agency and we’re pretty confident we’ve found both.We date the book’s action to 1951 with some of our usual close reading, before visiting our final location. The house of the deceased, Judge Bath, is described by Bennett as being five miles from the location of the book, on a clifftop looking over a bay. If you go five miles north from Ramsgate, you find yourself at North Foreland. And here there is something else extraordinary: another house, in which a writer completed his own chase thriller 40 years before Bennett’s. And in front of that house is a set of steps that go down to the sea.But that’s another story. For now, we leave you with one plea: read Margot Bennett. She deserves to be far better known than she is. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A young man with a questionable background is sitting in a small hotel by an unnamed harbour in England. He is ostensibly writing a review. Behind him he hears a party of unseen people come into the hotel restaurant. He knows their voices. They are people from his past. One of them, he had a love affair with. She is now married to a judge. The judge’s name is Bath.So begins Margot Bennett’s perfectly calibrated 1952 thriller THE WIDOW OF BATH. But where is this strange hotel? All Bennett tells us directly is that this is ‘not Bournemouth.’ Thankfully, there are other clues – more than enough for us to get our teeth into.And so we take you to Ramsgate on the Kent coast, our candidate for the book’s location. We discover a past filled with suspicious waiters, terrible food, and eternal controversies about immigration. When it comes to immigration, we find nothing much has changed. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In Part Two we get out of town and attempt to bury ourselves in the Dorset countryside. We start at Dorchester, track down the narrator’s fake hideaway in the Sydling valley and then search for the famous ‘holloway’ where our hero tries to evade his pursuers. Is it a real place? Listen now to find out. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We take the classic 1939 thriller out for ride, starting precisely where the book’s hard-boiled narrator makes land in London at Hurlingham. We track down his hotel off the Cromwell Road and then re-enact a tense chase around Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Holborn, ending in a (fictional) death at a defunct London Underground station. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
It’s the second part of our adventure with AA Milne’s astonishingly popular book of verse for children, WHEN WE WERE VERY YOUNG. And, like Milne himself often was, we’re back on a golf course – or at least, we’re in where an Addington golf course used to be, and we’re wondering if Milne played there. We also visit somewhere rather special – Decoy Cottage in Sussex, where Christopher Robin spent his first handful of summers, and where there was a swan on the pond called Pooh. All of which is guiding us towards the inevitable – the birthplace of Winnie the Pooh, Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, where we inevitably leave our car in the Pooh Car Park, throw sticks off the Pooh sticks bridge, and mourn the unlikely death of a global rock superstar in the same garden where Christopher Robin played. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
AA Milne’s book of poetry for children, WHEN WE VERY YOUNG, was stupefyingly successful – it may be the most successful volume of poetry ever published. In the first part of our adventure, we discover bears everywhere: waiting for us to step on cracks in the pavement outside the Chelsea home where AA Milne lived with his wife Daphne and, of course, his son Christopher Robin; bearskins on guards outside Buckingham Palace; and Winnie the bear herself, a Canadian visitor to London Zoo, whose name inspired a smaller, more fictional bear. We end the episode by asking, quite seriously: when Mother went down to the end of the town, where on earth did she go? Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In Part Two of our adventures along the River Dart, we wonder whether the poet Alice Oswald genuinely walked the whole of the river from source to sea, thus producing her magnificent 2002 work ‘Dart’. We definitely believe she sat by the Totnes weir and probably saw seals on the Mew Stone. But did she really note down the names of all those boats in the many mooring sites along the way? Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Alice Oswald’s long poem ‘Dart’ provides a journey in verse from the source of the River Dart all the way to the sea. We take the same journey using the poem as our guide. We hope to unlock our inner poets and verify all the locations mentioned in ‘Dart’. We certainly had a lovely day out - on the moor and on a steam train! Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We’re back with the second part of our journey with Edward Thomas’s IN PURSUIT OF SPRING, the book which turned this frustrated critic and essayist into a major poet, with the advice and assistance of his great friend Robert Frost. In this episode we continue our journey into Somerset, following the exact route that Thomas took. On the way we visit Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s house in Nether Stowey, look out over the Bristol Channel at Kilve, and take in the immensity of the views from Cothelstone Hill, where Thomas himself finished his journey. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In 1913, Edward Thomas had not yet written a line of poetry, but on Good Friday he set off on a bicycle journey from his parents’ home in south London to the Quantock Hills of Somerset. He intended to write a book, the kind of ‘country notes’ affair he had turned his hand to before, but what resulted was something extraordinary – a book-length piece of prose which, at times, reads like verse. We follow the route he took, beginning in Clapham and discovering how much some of the places he rode through have changed, and how little others. On the way, we read Thomas’s most famous poem, ‘Adlestrop’, on a railway station, hear our first chiffchaff, and find the special place which Thomas described with such power that his friend Robert Frost told him he was, in fact, already a poet. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We’re using Nell Dunn’s ‘Up The Junction’ to guide us through the notorious York & Winstanley estate in Battersea. We’re hoping to locate an old sweet factory and Nell Dunn’s house – and then make it safely out to the train station. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In 1959, Nell Dunn gave up her privileged lifestyle to live in smelly, poverty-stricken North Battersea. We use her book ‘Up The Junction’ to navigate our way into her world and through the Battersea of today. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For part two of our adventure with Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 masterpiece THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA we leave South London behind us and head for more exotic climes – viz, West Kensington and Hammersmith in the west of the city. We find the flat where Karim, his father the Buddha, and Eva move into a flat above Thin Lizzy’s tour manager, just round the corner from where Karim sees a certain punk band with a red-haired singer in 1976. Following Karim’s career in experimental theatre we take ourself to Riverside Studios, haunt of Daleks and challenging dramatists. We find the autobiographical isn’t far from Kureishi’s novel, and we discuss 1990, the year of the book’s publication and the fall of Thatcher. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For the second of our trilogy of episodes featuring books that came up from the depths of South London, we’re taking a walk with Hanif Kureishi’s 1990 masterpiece THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA. We begin in Bromley, birthplace and home of the book’s hero Karim (aka Creamy) and his father, the eponymous Buddha – and also the childhood home of none other than David Bowie, whose life weaves in and out of the plot as we head north to Beckenham, where Karim has his first sexual encounter and Bowie played his first festival. Then it’s north again, to Penge, where Karim’s ‘uncle’ keeps a store next to a library. Along the way we discuss Karim, Kureishi and Bowie’s school, how Bowie discovered music opposite where Karim discovered tea, and the South Asian experience of living in South London in the 1970s. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In Part Two, we continue to map out the South London world of ‘Wise Children’’s fictional characters. We find a haberdashers on Clapham High Street, above which Dora and Nora might have learned to dance. We stop in at the Coach and Horses pub on Acre Lane - Dora’s local. And we visit Angela Carter’s house in Clapham where this magnificent tale of 20th century show business folk was dreamed up. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This magical novel about two ageing ‘hoofers’ of London SW2 is a great excuse to get out into Lambeth, South London and hunt down the location of amazing old theatres like the massive Kennington Theatre and the Brixton Empress.We start at one of the great homes of Shakespeare performance in South London – The Old Vic. And end up in a terraced street off Brixton Hill, where dozens of actors, entertainers, comedians and acrobats would have lived back in the day. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In part two, we persist in our search for Midhurst locations that match the events in Ruth Rendell’s first novel, FROM DOON WITH DEATH. We become increasingly bogged down, unable to make the book match the real world. So we try another approach. Could Kingsmarkham actually be somewhere else? Is Rendell playing games with us? Could she actually be thinking about somewhere a lot closer to home?But having almost given up hope of finding any authentic locations, we go hunting for the wood in which the body of Mrs Parsons is dumped. Here, things are much more promising – and what is more, we manage to find a Royal connection. A cheeky one, no doubt, but a connection is a connection. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We’re off on our next adventure, and this time our guide is Ruth Rendell, the grandest of literary detective dames and inventor of the town of Kingsmarkham, and its watchful Chief Inspector Wexford. We start where Rendell started – with her very first book, FROM DOON WITH DEATH, published in 1964. We’re introduced to Wexford and a cast of local characters in the Sussex town of Kingsmarkham. And we take Rendell’s word on trust because she herself tells us, in the afterword to the book, that Kingsmarkham is ‘based on’ Midhurst. But when we get to Midhurst, we are troubled by the lack of similarities with this pleasant little town nestled in the South Downs National Park, and Rendell’s creation. Could she be having us on? To what extent could Midhurst possibly be Kingsmarkham? For instance - where is the train station? We begin to worry….. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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