Showing titles in Literary History & Criticism

Conversations with the biggest names in horror fiction. A podcast for horror readers who want to know where their favourite stories came from . . . and what frightens the people who wrote them.

How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? What is Italian Feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? What does 'soulful' mean? Is Date Movie the worst film ever made? A collection of essays that brims over with personality and warmth, Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive.

The Daily Stoic - 365 Day Devotional by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman - Read by Peter Saddington

A best-selling novelist since 1921, Georgette Heyer is known across the world for her historical romances set in Regency England. This is the ultimate, definitive guide to Georgette Heyer's novels, her heroines, her villains and dashing heroes, the shops, clubs and towns they frequented, the parties and seasons they celebrated, how they ate, drank and dressed, socialised, shopped and drove. An utterly delightful and fun read, compelling in its historical detail, this is a must-hear for any Georgette Heyer fan.

Four hundred years after Shakespeare's death, Keenan's smart and passionate memoir brings new life to his work. With 14 of his plays as a springboard, she explores the many facets of love and sexuality - from desire and communication to fetish and fantasy. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Keenan unmasks Helena as a sexual masochist - like Jillian herself. In Macbeth, she examines criminalized sexual identities and the dark side of "privacy".

The Ministry of Truth by Dorian Lynskey is the first audiobook that fully examines the epochal and cultural event that is 1984 in all its aspects: its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in wartime Britain that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his dying days; and the political and cultural phenomena that the novel ignited at once upon publication and that, far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. It explains how fiction history informs fiction and how fiction explains history.

Whilst in Ireland for an International Song Competition, Tony Hawks was amazed to see a hitch-hiker, trying to thumb a lift, but with a fridge. This seemed amazingly optimistic - his Irish friends, however thought nothing of it at all. 'I had clearly arrived in a country', writes Tony, 'where the qualifications for 'eccentric' involved a great deal more than that to which I had become used'. Two years pass but the fridge incident haunts our author.

Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times best-selling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana, where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher spiraled into depression and a stress-related autoimmune disease.

During the 1930s at Oxford, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams - remarkable friends, writers, and scholars - met regularly to discuss philosophy and literature and to read aloud from their own works in progress. Calling themselves the Inklings, their circle grew. It was in this company that such classics as The Lord of the Rings, The Screwtape Letters, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first found an audience.

Two people do the same job and are both firefighters. When one is asked what they do for a living, their response is met with: 'That's amazing, you are so brave!', while the other is asked: 'Isn't that dangerous? Aren't you scared? What about your kids?' Can you guess the difference between the two? These comments are the reality for Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton and many other women at work and in life. Gender biases stop women from succeeding - but why are certain qualities associated with success viewed less favourably for women?

Filled with the twists, pathos and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist's extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer's death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, A.N. Wilson seeks to understand Dickens' creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens's fiction drew from his own experiences. Dickens knew first-hand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage.

Some of the most rewarding pages in Henry Miller's books concern his self-education as a writer. He tells, as few great writers ever have, how he set his goals, how he discovered the excitement of using words, how the books he read influenced him, and how he learned to draw on his own experience.

Slide "Further Under the Duvet", get yourself comfortable, and let Marian take you places you've never been before. Places like the Irish air-guitar championships, a shopping trip to Bloomingdales with a difference, and Cannes with a chronic case of Villa-itis. Along the way you'll encounter knicker-politics, fake tans, sticky-out ears and passionate love affairs both with make-up and Toblerones.

For decades, feminist artists have confronted the problem of how to tell the truth about their experiences as bodies. Queer bodies, sick bodies, racialised bodies, female bodies, what is their language, what are the materials we need to transcribe it? Exploring the ways in which feminist artists have taken up this challenge, Art Monsters is a landmark intervention in how we think about art and the body, calling attention to a radical heritage of feminist work that not only reacts against patriarchy but redefines its own aesthetic aims.

Welcome to The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes Podcast - a show devoted to revisiting and honoring the world's greatest portrayal of the world's greatest detective. From 1984 to 1994, Granada Television produced what is arguably the best (and most complete) depiction of the legendary detective’s Adventures, Memoirs, Case-Books and many Returns. Spanning 36 episodes and 5 movies, producer Michael Cox created a Sherlockian experience like no other. This podcast will examine that timeless series with a specific eye on Jeremy Brett in the role he was destined to immortalize.

Grigori Aleksandrovich Pechorin is an enigma: arrogant, cocky, melancholic, brave, cynic, romantic, loner, socialite, soldier, free soul, and yet, victim of the world, he eludes definition and remains a mystery to those who know him. Just who is he? And what does he hope to achieve? Evolving from first person to third person, and then into a diary, A Hero of Our Time takes on a variety of forms to interrogate Pechorin's cryptic character and his unusual philosophy, providing breathtaking descriptions of the Caucasus along the way.

Written by Daniel Nettle - author of the popular book Happiness - this brief volume takes the listener on an exhilarating tour of what modern science can tell us about human personality. Revealing that our personalities stem from our biological makeup, Nettle looks at the latest findings from genetics and brain science, and considers the evolutionary origins and consequences of different personalities. The heart of the book sheds light on the "big five": Extraversion, Neuroticism, Conscientious, Agreeableness, and Openness.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)

In these 10 entertaining documentaries, he explores why some books, games and binge-watched box sets are, as they say, 'literally unputdownable'; peers into Plotto, an ingenious manual of story devices, to discover whether it really can make writing easy; takes a sideways look at some familiar characters from literature, including James Bond, Dracula, Fu Manchu and Carruthers; delves into the intricacies of the locked-room murder; and revisits his old prep school to find out whether a book of stirring 19th-century verse can work its magic on today’s young people.

Agatha Christie revelled in the use of poison to kill off unfortunate victims in her books; indeed, she employed it more than any other murder method, with the poison itself often being a central part of the novel. Her choice of deadly substances was far from random—the characteristics of each often provide vital clues to the discovery of the murderer. Christie's extensive chemical knowledge provides the backdrop for A Is for Arsenic, in which Kathryn Harkup investigates the poisons used by the murderer in fourteen classic Agatha Christie mysteries.