Book In
Episodes
Christmas Poems
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Charlie and Rupert look at three great poems associated with Christmas - In the Bleak Midwinter by Christina Rossetti, a section from In Memoriam by A...
Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol
11 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 w...
Poets: Philip Larkin
28 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Poets: Sylvia Plath
21 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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. H...
The BIG Scale
13 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Book In introduces the Books in Greatness Scale - or BIGS. Charlie has developed a method of ranking books according to their greatness, with each bei...
Booker Prize Winners: Lincoln In The Bardo
10 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
The Traitors Special: Literature's Greatest Traitors!
03 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 lite...
Booker Prize Winners: Milkman - Anna Burns
31 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 larg...
Booker Prize Winners: Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel - Part 2
21 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Booker Prize Winners: Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel - Part 1
17 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Wolf Hall is Hilary Mantel's radical and profoundly original reimagining of the story of Thomas Cromwell. Born the son of a blacksmith, Cromwell ...
Booker Prize Winners: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida - Shehan Karunatilaka
14 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
6 Books We've Recently Read
03 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Rupert and Charlie each choose 3 books they've read recently and enjoyed. Charlie discusses whether Shakespeare really wrote the...
The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
18 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Middlemarch - George Eliot - Part 2
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 group...
Middlemarch - George Eliot - Part 1
05 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 cha...
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
08 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 mu...
Update on the Podcast - How it's Going, and What's Coming Up
05 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A short episode to update everyone - we started Book In a couple of months ago, with a plan to do 8 episodes and see how we got on. The response has b...
MacBeth - William Shakespeare
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 1606, James 1st had been King of England for three years. Most of his Stewart ancestors had met bloody and violent deaths, so for Shakespeare to wr...
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hamlet is one of the most famous, most performed and most analysed pieces of literature ever written. Every generation sees something of themselves in...
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
25 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the first poem in Lyrical Ballads, the groundbreaking volume of poetry published by Coleridge and Wordsworth in 17...
The Wasteland
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Published in 1922, T.S.Eliot's poem The Wasteland is a definitive text of modernism, and one of the towering cultural achievements of the twentie...
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Emily Bronte was one of six children brought up on the bleak Yorkshire moors, and was described by her sister Charlotte as “not a person of demonstr...
Emma - Jane Austen
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Nineteen Eighty-Four
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Rupert and Charlie look at George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Austere, prescient, terrifying and ultimately profoundly moving, the no...
The Great Gatsby
25 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For the first episode of Book In, Rupert and Charlie discuss The Great Gatsby, Scott FitzGerald’s wonderful novel of love, loss and broken dreams. P...
Book In - Trailer
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Book In is a podcast in which brothers Rupert and Charlie Fordham discuss all things English Literature. From Chaucer to the present day, covering dra...