Middlemarch

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the great writers on Central Europe after the first world war and on the dying of the old orders with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a German speaking Jew from Brody in the north-eastern edge of that Empire, which was then i ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), the graphic artist and printmaker best known for his impossible buildings, paradoxical perspectives, and repeating geometric patterns. Born in Leeuwarden and trained as a printmaker, Escher visited t ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss what Virginia Woolf called 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people'. It was written by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans (1819-80), published in 8 parts in 1871-72, and was originally two separate stories which became ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Jane Austen’s last complete novel, which was published just before Christmas in 1817, five months after her death. It is the story of Anne Elliot, now 27 and (so we are told), losing her bloom, and of her feelings for Captain Wentworth who she was ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South, published in 1855 after serialisation in Dickens' Household Words magazine. It is the story of Margaret Hale, who was raised in the South in the New Forest and London's Harley Street, and then moves North ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Anne Bronte's second novel, published in 1848, which is now celebrated alongside those of her sisters but which Charlotte Bronte tried to suppress as a 'mistake'. It examines the life of Helen, who has escaped her abusive husband Arthur Huntingdon ...  Show more