Book In
Episodes
Great Sporting Books
19 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Sports Books: Open - Andre Agassi, Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby, Great Cricket MatchesBook In take a look at three books on sport. Open is the autobiog...
World Cup Special
12 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The Odyssey - Homer
05 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 b...
The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis
29 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 Ho...
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
22 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 In...
The Quiet American - Graham Greene
15 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Send us Fan MailGraham Greene’s novel The Quiet American is set in Vietnam in the 1950s – the French are trying to hold on to colonial power and a...
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - Part 2
08 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Send us Fan MailAt Book In, we continue our discussion of Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful novel Brideshead Revisited. We look at the characters of the Marc...
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Brideshead Revisited is Evelyn Waugh’s most famous novel. Magnificent but flawed, he wrote it while recovering from an injury during the Second Worl...
Re-Release - Emma - Jane Austen
24 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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, a...
Re-Release - The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
17 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Our first ever episode re-released: Rupert and Charlie discuss The Great Gatsby, Scott FitzGerald’s wonderful novel of love, loss and broken dreams....
The Caretaker - Harold Pinter
10 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 wi...
Arcadia - Tom Stoppard
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Tom Stoppard was glamorous, charismatic and brilliant, and his plays are among the finest written in English since the Second World War. Perhaps his m...
Wuthering Heights - Film Review
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 Bront...
The Great Tradition - F. R. Leavis
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf - Part 2
13 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 whi...
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf - Part 1
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 commenta...
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy - Part 2
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 Micha...
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy - Part 1
20 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 wo...
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Part 2
13 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Rupert and Charlie continue their discussion of Great Expectations. They take a look at what was always one of Dickens' great preoccupations, the...
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Part 1
06 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Published at the height of his powers in 1860, Great Expectations is Charles Dickens’ penultimate novel, and one of his very greatest. Its character...
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë - Part 2
30 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 i...
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë - Part 1
23 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte's most famous book and one of the most celebrated, controversial and loved novels ever written. Millions who have n...
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
13 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1816, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was saying on the shores of Lake Geneva with his young wife Mary, and his friends Lord Byron and John Polidori....
Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan
05 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
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...