London Revisited: Mosaics, Archers and a Wall...

Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present ...  Show more

Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. 'Venus and Adonis' appeared in quarto that year and become by far the most popular work Shakespeare published in his lifetime, running to ten editions befor ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss James Joyce's novel Ulysses. First published ninety years ago in Paris, Joyce's masterpiece is a sprawling and startlingly original work charting a single day in the life of the Dubliner Leopold Bloom. Some early readers were outraged by its se ...  Show more

Peter Capaldi talks about his latest album – Sweet Illusions – a nod to the thriving 80s music scene in Glasgow where Peter made his musical debut fronting The Dreamboys. Through the Shortbread Tin is a new National Theatre of Scotland production about the supposed third century ...  Show more

It is a truth universally acknowledged that tragedy is one of the world's highest art forms, and that Shakespeare was one of the form's greatest practitioners. But how did he do it? What models did he have to draw upon, and where did he innovate? In this episode, Jacke talks to S ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy. Sterne's comic masterpiece is an extravagantly inventive work which was hugely popular when first published in 1759. Its often bawdy humour, and numerous digressions, are combined with bold literary expe ...  Show more