Showing results by publisher "BBC Audio" in Classics

Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon is best-known for A Scots Quair, a trilogy of novels comprising Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite that are considered to be among the most important works of the 20th century Scottish Renaissance. Featured here are the BBC Radio dramatisations of the first two novels, as well as a special documentary feature exploring the landscape and legacy of Sunset Song.

Poet and playwright Federico García Lorca is one of the most famous figures in 20th-century Spanish literature. A member of the 'Generation of '27' avant-garde movement that included Dalí and Buñuel, he became well known for his lyrical, symbolic works mixing modernism and the folkloric traditions of his native Andalusia. He was executed by Nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War, aged only 38. More than 80 years later, his poetry is revered worldwide and the plays in his 'Rural Trilogy' are widely regarded as masterpieces.

David McAlister reads six supernatural stories from the author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Best known for his science fiction, H G Wells was also a master of the ghost story, producing numerous tales of the Gothic, the eldritch and the uncanny. These six stories, ranging from the humorous to the horrifying, epitomise the very best of Wells’ occult fiction.

In this BBC radio full-cast dramatisation of one of Jane Austen's most beloved works, Catherine Morland's overactive imagination makes her life more complicated than she would have wished.... Catherine is obsessed with Gothic novels, often getting swept up by her taste for the dramatic and tragic. Did Mrs Tilney really die nine years previously, or has she been murdered or imprisoned in her chambers this whole time? Meanwhile, she is torn between two suitors, the handsome and clever Henry Tilney and the arrogant John Thorpe....

Thornton Wilder is one of America's most important literary figures. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times - for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth - and is the only person to be awarded the Pulitzer for both fiction and drama. Included here are four of his key works, set in different times and places, but sharing the same fundamental motifs - the universality of human experience and our search for life's meaning.

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Virgil's sweeping epic, starring Ralph Fiennes as Aeneas and Derek Jacobi as the Narrator. One of the classics of all time, The Aeneid was Virgil's last and greatest work. In it, he recounts in vivid imagery the legendary origin of the Roman Empire. The story begins after the Greeks have destroyed the city of Troy. The Trojan Prince Aeneas, defeated and depressed, leads his remaining citizens to a new land and a new destiny foretold by the Gods.

Nina Stibbe came to fame with Love, Nina, a memoir of her time working as a nanny in 1980s literary London. It won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2014 National Book Awards, and was adapted into a hit BBC TV series. She has since written six more books, four of them novels, and a sparkling selection of her work is included here, alongside two fascinating interviews with Nina herself.

Originally published in 1943, The Glass Bead Game was Herman Hesse’s last novel. It was hailed as his magnum opus, and was instrumental in securing him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946. Set in a utopian future society, it explores themes of knowledge, individualism, creativity and spirituality, and has inspired contemporary thinkers from authors to game designers. Narrated by Derek Jacobi, this two-part radio drama tells the story of Joseph Knecht (Tom Ferguson), plucked from obscurity as a young orphan, admitted to the finest elite school and groomed for greatness.

Kipling, our narrator, tells this strange story: he was running a newspaper in a big Indian city. In the hot stillness of one night when he was putting the paper to bed, two men came into his office. They were red-bearded giant Daniel Dravot and his friend Peachy Carnehan. These two 'gentlemen at large', as they called themselves, lately of the British army, had put together an insane and dangerous plan: they wanted to be Kings of Kafiristan, a mountainous region of Afghanistan.

A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime recording of Samuel West reading from the novella The Aspern Papers by Henry James, set against the decaying grandeur of Venice. Originally broadcast 26 April - 4 May 2010. Henry James took as inspiration for this tale the story of a mistress of Byron's who outlived the poet into lonely old age. He transposed the setting to Venice and cast the city he loved as a character in a taut narrative of literary theft and deception.

The young poet Stephen has been recalled from Paris to Dublin to be at his mother’s deathbed. But he refuses her dying wishes: to kneel and pray for her. Now, holed up in his Martello tower outside the city walls, he has to suffer the taunts of Buck Mulligan by day and, by night, the vision of ‘her eyes, shaking out of death to shake and bend my soul.’ Timelessly evocative, Ulysses is far more than the story of Stephen Dedalus’ journey through Dublin.

Chloe Pirrie and Ben Batt star in this stunning dramatisation of Emily Brontë's classic, adapted by best-selling author Rachel Joyce. When homeless orphan Heathcliff is brought to the isolated, storm-swept farmhouse of Wuthering Heights, he sparks very different emotions in the children of the house, Hindley and Cathy. While Hindley instantly hates him and makes his life miserable, Heathcliff finds a soul mate in Cathy, and the two spend days playing together on the wild Yorkshire moors. Inseparable as children, passionately in love as adolescents, they are everything to each other....

Three BBC radio adaptations of famous novels by the prolific 19th-century author Mrs Oliphant - plus an episode of Reading Aloud, with extracts from her autobiography. Sometimes called ‘the feminist Trollope’, Margaret Oliphant wrote more than 100 works of fiction in a wide variety of genres, ranging from novels of small-town life to historical tales and supernatural stories. Included here are three of her best-loved works, brimming with dry wit, perceptive irony and flawed but fascinating heroines.

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Dickens' heart-stopping historical adventure set in the French Revolution and featuring the gentle Charles Darnay and the dissolute Sydney Carton. The action switches between London and Paris during the nightmare of The Terror - and in the shadow of Madame Guillotine - in this Sony award-winning drama that captures the joy and anguish of those corrupt and turbulent times.

Tom shares the cramped and claustrophobic tenement home with his overbearing mother, Amanda, and painfully shy sister, Laura. He works in a warehouse but dreams of becoming a poet, escaping his mundane life. Laura hides at home, lacking the confidence to engage meaningfully with the outside world, preferring instead to lose herself in her collection of fragile glass animals. Amanda sells magazine subscriptions over the phone and commits herself to finding a match for her daughter. One day, Tom succumbs to his mother's pressure and brings home a gentleman caller....

Jane Austen's acclaimed comedy of manners contains a truly memorable cast of characters, including the snobbish Mrs Ferrers, impetuous Marianne, selfish John Dashwood, and his awful, grasping wife. Annette Crosbie captures all the wit and charm of the romance in this BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour reading.

Spring 1905, England. When Helen Schlegel goes to stay at Howards End - the country home of the Wilcox family, her own life, along with that of her sister Margaret, is changed forever. This is the tale of three families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes, the gentle, idealistic Schlegels and the lower-middle class Basts. Frequently cited as E. M. Forster's finest work, Howards End brilliantly explores class warfare, conflict and the English character. This BBC dramatisation skilfully brings the classic novel to life.

Novelist and poet George Meredith is widely regarded as the last great Victorian author. He influenced writers including Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize seven times. This BBC collection features dramatisations of his most famous novel, The Egoist, and his witty bildungsroman The Adventures of Harry Richmond.

This is a BBC Radio full-cast dramatisation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, starring Bryan Dick as Nick and Andrew Scott as Jay Gatsby. The greatest book on the fallibility of the American dream, The Great Gatsby, a portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, is by far the most popular classic in modern American fiction. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's - and his country's - greatest obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and new beginnings.

Locked up in jail, Miguel de Cervantes is attempting to start a novel when he is visited by a priest, who tells him about an old man driven insane by chivalric romances and a vision of glory. Inspired, Cervantes takes up his pen and begins to write. His story begins in La Mancha, where an elderly country gentleman decides to emulate his knightly heroes, Sir Lancelot and El Cid, and embark on a quest to prove his valour. Renaming himself Don Quixote, he puts on his rusty armour and rides out with his loyal squire Sancho Panza.