Podcast
Book In
Hosted by Rupert Fordham and Charlie Fordham · EN
Book In is a podcast in which brothers Rupert and Charlie Fordham discuss all things English Literature. From Chaucer to the present day, covering drama, novels and poetry, they cover all the classics and much more, from the UK, Ireland, the US, Europe and the rest of the world. Informative but lighthearted, Book In is suitable for all readers, and will be helpful for students doing GCSE, A-Level and university English degrees as well.
Both Rupert and Charlie have been keen readers all their lives and both studied English at university. For many years Charlie taught English at GCSE and A-level.
18episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
W. B. Yeats Poems - Innisfree to Easter 1916
4d ago00:45:54Tap to summarizeIn the early 20th century, as the nation of Ireland emerged from the turmoil of centuries of struggle, oppression, poverty and famine, one figure above all others was both prophet and judge of the tumultuous process. In his early years, William Butler Yeats created a mythology of Ireland, and later, with poems like Easter 1916 and The Second Coming, he wrote of the ambiguity, the "terrible beauty", that was explicit in the uprisings and civil wars which preceded the creation of the Irish Free State. But he was not just a poet; with Maud Gonne, the actress and revolutionary with whom he fell hopelessly in love and who he compared to Helen of Troy, he became involved in the creation of an Irish Theatre, and in direct political action with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the forerunner of the IRA. On its creation, he became a public figure as a Senator in the Dail, and with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 became world famous. But he was a man of contradictions, a Republican who detested violence, a Protestant who supported Irish freedom, an intellectual who believed in magic. Join Rupert and Charlie as they look at W B Yeats in a 2 part series.
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W.H. Auden Poems
2w ago01:03:18Tap to summarizeW H Auden wrote some of the most beautiful and complex poetry of the 20th century. Best known to modern audiences as the author of “Stop all the Clocks”, read by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral, he grew up in Yorkshire and the Midlands, and his parents were a psychiatrist and a nurse; this provincial, professional background pervades his poetry with its images of industry and science. Like many of his generation, he was on the left and went to Spain to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. But when World War Two started, he left for America, from where he observed the carnage with a combination of detachment and guilt. Like his contemporaries Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and T.S Eliot, he converted to Christianity as an adult, and his later work is an extraordinary fusion of private love, public engagement and religious exploration. There are many recordings of him on TV chat shows in his later years, and his extraordinary,Rembrandtesque appearance and gravelly voice convey a public intellectual of a kind which no longer exists in the modern world. Join Charlie and Rupert as they explore the poetry of this brilliant and underestimated poet.
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T. S. Eliot - The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Marina
3w ago00:53:05Tap to summarizeIn the second episode on T.S.Eliot, Book In looks at the poems he wrote after The Wasteland, as he moved towards a conversion to Christianity. In the Hollow Men, he returns again to the desolation and spiritual emptiness of the West after the First World War, weaving together Dante, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Gunpowder Plot amongst other themes. By the time he wrote Ash Wednesday three years later he had fully embraced the High Anglican church, and the poem tells of his need to renounce the pride and arrogance which he felt had characterised his behaviour in the past. The language in these poems is incantatory, chanting, rooted in the bible and the prayerbook. Marina is a beautiful meditation on sin, death and redemption, immersed in images of the sea and the coastal New England landscape of his youth. Join Charlie and Rupert as they explore this critical phase of Eliot’s life, and the exquisite religious verse he produced, perhaps the finest in the English language sine the metaphysical poets of the 17th century.
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T. S. Eliot – Prufrock, Preludes and La Figlia Che Piange
4w ago01:04:46Tap to summarizeThe first poem that T.S.Eliot published, in 1915, was The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and two years later, it was included as the title poem in a collection called Prufrock and Other Observations. It was a sensation; breaking dramatically with the gentle and conventional lyrics of the late Victorian and Edwardian poets of the time, many critics found it pretentious at best and incomprehensible at worst. One speculated that Eliot had thought "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." But Prufrock and the other poems in the collection marked a revolutionary break in literature, and heralded the arrival of modernism, with its representation of the fracturing of western society and the western mind in the wake of the First World War and the work of Freud and Jung as they explained the workings of human consciousness. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss these brilliant and groundbreaking poems, and how they are both an extraordinary break with the past, but also deeply rooted in western culture from Greek and Roman times onwards.
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Thomas Hardy Poems
Jun 2601:06:11Tap to summarizeAt the age of 55, and at the height of his fame, Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels and decided to devote the rest of his life to poetry. He was disillusioned with the commercial requirements of novel writing, and had been upset by the adverse reaction of some critics to Jude the Obscure. Many people believe that his poems are his greatest achievement, and he is in exalted company in being in the first rank of both poetry and novels or plays, along with Samuel Beckett, DH Lawrence and Shakespeare. Much of his poetry was inspired by his first wife Emma; the beautiful lyric When I Set Out for Lyonnesse was written after he first met her. Their marriage was unhappy, but when she died, Hardy was consumed with grief, and remorse at how badly he had treated her. The poems he wrote at this time are among the most beautiful in the English language. Join Rupert and Charlie as they take a look at some of Hardy’s poems.
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Great Sporting Books
Jun 1901:02:32Tap to summarizeSports Books: Open - Andre Agassi, Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby, Great Cricket MatchesBook In take a look at three books on sport. Open is the autobiography of Andre Agassi: one of the greatest players of all time, Agassi was driven by his domineering father to hit 2,500 balls a day from the age of 5, and at 13 was sent to the Nick Bolliteri Tennis Academy in Florida, essentially a boot camp for teenage tennis prodigies. By 18, he was in the world’s top 10 and won three Grand Slams but the wheels came off in his mid 20s as his partying life caught up with him and he descended to 141 in the world. His subsequent comeback and further success is one of the great redemption stories in sport, and he tells the story in his compelling and brilliant book, Open. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch was the book which charted, and perhaps partly caused, the transformation of football from the muddy pitches and hooligan supporters of the 1970s and 1980s to the cool, fashionable, sophisticated product it is today. Through accounts of specific matches involving his beloved Arsenal FC, Hornby charts his own childhood and adolescence and sets them in the context of the social and economic changes occurring in Britain at the time. Funny, wide ranging and a little bit nerdy, it is a brilliant account of growing up in the UK in the transformative years of the late 20th century. Cricket has produced some great literature over the years; Great Cricket Matches is a collection of accounts written by various writers and was given to Rupert as a child. He selects three pieces from it which he has always loved and shares them with Charlie and the Book In audience.
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World Cup Special
Jun 1200:50:32Tap to summarizeIt’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 or Gordon, and how to fit in Jude Bellingham, Rupert and Charlie choose their own teams from the pages of (mainly) English literature. Recalling the style of the England teams of his youth, Charlie opts for a 4-4-2 formation, and selects players from clubs as diverse as Chaucer, Tolkein and Dickens. Rupert goes for the more sophisticated, continental 4-3-3, and relies fairly heavily on Milton, while also making use of C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald Fraser. Both, obviously, can’t ignore Shakespeare and Dickens. So which of the teams would give the French and Argentinians a run for their money, and is either good enough to go all the way and lift the Jules Rimet trophy? Join Book In to get in the mood for this quadrennial footballfest, and decide for yourself.
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The Odyssey - Homer
Jun 501:11:04Tap to summarizeAround 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 bards had passed from generation to generation, and the greatest of these poems were the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Odyssey tells of the adventures of one of the Greek heroes, Odysseus, as he returned to his home in Ithaca from the Trojan War. His journey took 10 years, and included adventures which are famous to this day, including his encounter with the one-eyed Cyclops, and negotiating the twin dangers of Scylla and Charybdis. When he finally reaches Ithaca, he has to deal with the suitors who are occupying his palace and trying to persuade his wife Penelope that he is dead and that she should marry one of them. Attributed to a man called Homer, the true authorship of the work is unknown. But it asks questions which resonate with us now. What is home? What is a hero, and how should men behave? Why is the journey itself so important? What makes a great leader? How does a son find his own identity when he has a powerful father? Is adultery justifiable? How should you behave towards strangers? Told in beautiful poetry, the descriptions of Odysseus and his men sailing across the wine dark sea haunt our imaginations today as they would have done for the Greeks who heard these stories so many centuries ago. Join Rupert and Charlie as they look at this extraordinary and magnificent work of literature, which has influenced almost every great writer since, and which is the first expression of the western consciousness that we have.
Transcribe →The Old Devils - Kingsley Amis
May 2901:02:30Tap to summarizeBy the mid 1980s, Kingsley Amis was generally considered to be finished as a novelist. Devastated by the collapse of his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard, he was hugely overweight, drinking far too much and renting a basement flat from his first wife and her third husband. But in 1986, he published what his son Martin regarded as his masterpiece, The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize. Set in the south Wales in which he had spent the first 15 years of his professional life, it follows the lives of several couples who have known each other since childhood and are now in their 60s. Their world is thrown into turmoil by the return from London of Alan Weaver and his beautiful wife Rhiannon. Alan is a minor TV celebrity who has built a career on being a professional Welshman; on his return, old relationships are rekindled and long dormant affairs restarted. In a haze of alcohol and cigarettes, Amis portrays the reality of physical decline, the pathos of remembering past and lost love, and the sense of imminent death with humour and sensitivity. His satire of Welsh nationalism and the excesses of Welsh cultural figures like Dylan Thomas is merciless, and yet there is a warmth and tenderness in his descriptions of characters with whom he shared so many physical and emotional qualities. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss this fine novel, which was the start of a late renaissance for Amis’ career.
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A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
May 2201:02:10Tap to summarizeWhat 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 India in the early 20th century. An Indian doctor, Aziz, wants to show some English visitors the real India, and takes them on an expedition to the strange caves which are a short trainride from the city of Chandrapore. He goes into one of the caves with Adela Quested, a young woman recently arrived from England. But Adela suddenly flees from the cave and accuses Aziz of attempting to rape her. The incident creates a crisis between the communities, and forces the central characters to confront existential issues about themselves and their lives. Forster explores the relationship between the career soldiers and administrators who nominally run India, and the various classes of Indians, and through this prism asks some fundamental questions: what is the nature of friendship? Can it transcend racial divides? What is the real India? And how do characters like Mrs Moore cope when everything they have believed in sems suddenly worthless? Forster never wrote another novel after this one, although he lived for nearly 50 more years. Join Rupert and Charlie as they discuss this most subtle and sensitive of writers.
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