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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.
30 Episodes
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Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte's most famous book and one of the most celebrated, controversial and loved novels ever written. Millions who have never read it know about the mysterious Mr Rochester, the mad wife he kept locked up in his attic, and the image of her throwing herself from the battlements of Thornfield as she burned it to the ground, Mr Rochester blinding and maiming himself as he tries to save her. The novel is the story of an orphaned and plain girl, Jane Eyre, who despite the d...
In 1816, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was staying on the shores of Lake Geneva with his young wife Mary, and his friends Lord Byron and John Polidori. It was the year without a summer, and, confined to the house by the terrible weather, they each agreed to write a ghost story. Over the next few weeks, the 19 year old Mary produced Frankenstein, one of the most consequential and influential books ever written. Fusing the Gothic and Romantic, it tells the story of the brilliant young scientist...
Small Things Like These is a short novel by the Irish writer Claire Keegan. It tells the story of Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small provincial town in the mid 1980s. As Christmas approaches, he delivers some coal to the local convent, and by chance discovers a girl there who is being kept in a coalshed. It is clear she is in distress and Bill is faced with a choice - should he do nothing, or act? Through Bill's story, we learn of the hold of the Catholic Church on the community, and th...
Charlie and Rupert look at three great poems associated with Christmas - In the Bleak Midwinter by Christina Rossetti, a section from In Memoriam by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and The Magi by W.B.Yeats. Rossetti's is a much loved and beautiful Christmas Carol, Tennyson's is a highly crafted meditation on some of the great themes of the mid C19th, and Yeats' a more primal reflection on faith and the connections between folklore and religion. But they all refer to Christmas either directly or indire...
The tale of the miserable Ebeneezer Scrooge, and how he came to find humanity, generosity and love, is probably the most famous Christmas story ever written outside the Bible. It is a ghost story and a classic morality tale; the book firmly established Christmas as a time for family, for joy, for generosity, presents and huge lunches, as well as a time of forgiveness and a chance to mend ones ways and set a path for a better life. But in the background are the familiar Dickensian themes of mi...
Philip Larkin wrote some of the greatest poetry in English in the second half of the twentieth century. Brilliant, famous and successful, he chose to live as a librarian in Hull, largely avoiding the public gaze, and watching the world from the edge of England. His simple language and easily accessible work have made him hugely popular, and his ability to use everyday scenes and events to convey profound ideas and feelings on life, love and death are deeply moving, and achieved in part throug...
Sylvia Plath was an American from a prosperous middle class background whose life was changed for ever when she met Ted Hughes at a party in London. He kissed her on the spot, and they were married four months later, on June 16th, deliberately selected as it was Bloomsday in Joyce's Ulysses. Their relationship was tumultous; Hughes had multiple affairs and Plath suffered from severe depression, but during this period she wrote some of the finest poetry of the twentieth century. Her greatest w...
Book In introduces the Books in Greatness Scale - or BIGS. Charlie has developed a method of ranking books according to their greatness, with each being awarded a score out of 10. He explains the system, and he and Rupert award marks out of 10 to all the books they've covered so far. Who is the more generous? Who took it upon themselves to declare that Hamlet may not be a 10? Is The Great Gatsby really a great book? And is this a useful exercise or just a couple of balding middle aged blokes ...
In 1862, with the Civil War nearly a year old, Abraham Lincoln's son Willie died of TB aged 11. He was buried in West Oak Cemetery in Washington DC, and a grieving and devastated Lincoln went at night to visit his son's coffin, and physically hold his dead body for one last time. Out of this single event, George Saunders creates a unique novel where Lincoln's visit is observed and commented on by the ghosts of the bodies buried in the cemetery. They each have their own story, and through them...
As Celebrity Traitors reaches its climax on BBC1 this week, Rupert and Charlie count down the Top 10 greatest traitors in literature. Who are the literary equivalents of the TV show's camp and hysterical Alan Carr, the all or nothing, over the top Jonathan Ross, and the ice cold killer Cat? Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens all feature, but who would have thought that Jane Austen would as well? And which revered Faithful does Rupert think should really be classified as a Traitor? Join this spec...
Milkman tells the story of an 18 year old girl living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The novel is set in the late 1970s, at a time when large parts of the Catholic community were in effect run by the IRA, and most families would have had young men involved in the struggle in one way or another, with many of them being captured, injured or killed. The story is told entirely in the first person, through the eyes of an 18 year old girl, who is being stalked by a mysterious older man ca...
In part 2 of Wolf Hall, Rupert and Charlie look at the way Hilary Mantel writes about the seismic changes occurring in England in the early 1530s. Her London is filled with Europeans - traders, artists and diplomats - and economic, financial and cultural connections with France, Germany, Holland and Italy are exploding, at the very point Thomas Cromwell is engineering a break with Rome and the turbo-charging of English sovereignty. Is this the first Brexit? Why were the monasteries dissolved?...
Wolf Hall is Hilary Mantel's radical and profoundly original reimagining of the story of Thomas Cromwell. Born the son of a blacksmith, Cromwell rose to become Henry VIII's chief lieutenant and enforcer, and was the man who engineered Britain's break with Rome and the Catholic Church, paving the way for Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn. History has always seen Cromwell as a ruthless, manipulative, scheming and deeply unpleasant man who would stop at nothing to achieve his aims. But in Mantel's...
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the Booker Prize in 2022, the first and only time it has been won by a Sri Lankan author. Set in the late 1980s, in the chaos and brutality of the Sri Lankan civil war, it tells the story of Maali Almeida, who announces himself thus: "If you had a business card, this is what it would say: Maali Almeida - photographer, gambler, slut." Maali has died, and on the first page says that he now knows the answer to the question "Is there life after death?" T...
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 books about the Civil War and its aftermath - "The Restless Republic - Britain without a Crown" by Anna Keay, and "An Instance of the Fingerpost" by Ian Pears. Rupert goes a little more middlebrow, with "The Spy and the Traitor" by Ben MacIntyre ,and "Prec...
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 Dove, one of the three novels that James wrote towards the end of his life which one critic called "the final splendid flowering of his genius." James was an American, and in this novel, as in many of his others, he looks at what happens when American you...
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 Middlemarch society. How does Eliot merge the civic with the individual? How does she create a web of connection, and why do so many things happen twice? Does it matter if you're just an ordinary person trying to do your best? What would Eliot's reputation ...
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 Brooke, the idealistic young doctor Tertius Lydgate and the evangelical and flawed banker Bulstrode are set against a backdrop of seismic change in society, politics, economics and science. But how does Eliot achieve such a panoramic sweep? How can ordi...
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 Congo nine years earlier, an experience which scarred him both mentally and physically for the rest of his life. Barely 100 pages long, the novel has cast a giant shadow over western literature ever since, and haunts our consciousness of colonial guilt and...
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 rendering of the changeability of human feelings and the delicacy of social situations is at its most acute. But who was proud, and who was prejudiced? How important are first impressions? How rich was Mr Darcy? Why can some people understand their short...
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