Robert Douglas Fairhurst - Becoming Dickens

2012 is the bicentenary of Dickens' birth and we get our celebration of his life and work under way with this thought-provoking interview with a Dickens biographer who has chosen to follow his subject's life for only his first three decades. This approach, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst argues, allows us to see how precarious Dickens' early life was and to contemplate the roads not taken which Dickens himself almost went down. By showing that success was not a foregone conclusion, that success - when it comes - is all the more remarkable.

DOWNLOAD PODCAST | Buy the book

(To download a file for transferral to an audio device such as an MP3 player, right-click the download link and select 'Save Target As')
Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

Stuart Kelly - The Book of Lost Books

Stuart Kelly is a freelance critic and writer and the Literary Editor of Scotland on Sunday. In his new paperback, The Book of Lost Books - An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You'll Never Read, Kelly provides an witty and enjoyable account of history's books that never quite saw the light of day. From authors of varying degrees of fame and popularity, Kelly unearths the books that were destroyed, misplaced, never finished, or never even begun - from ancient Greek and Arabic masters through Shakespeare, Dante and Hemingway right up to the present day.

DOWNLOAD SEGMENT | Buy the book

(To download a file for transferral to an audio device such as an MP3 player, right-click the download link and select 'Save Target As')
Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

James Shapiro - Contested Will

James Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. A Shakespeare scholar, his latest book is Contested Will; a fascinating search for the controversial reasons why many people, including such respected figures including Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain and Orson Welles, question whether the Bard really wrote his celebrated plays. In the book, Shapiro retraces a path strewn with fabricated documents, calls for trials, false claimants, concealed identity and bald-faced deception to irrevocably change the nature of the debate.

DOWNLOAD SEGMENT | Buy the book

(To download a file for transferral to an audio device such as an MP3 player, right-click the download link and select 'Save Target As')
Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

Alberto Manguel - A Reader on Reading

Alberto Manguel is a Argentine-born Canadian writer, translator, and editor. In his second appearance on our show, Manguel discusses his new book A Reader on Reading, in which he argues that the activity of reading, defines our species. Manguel explores the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies.

DOWNLOAD SEGMENT | Buy the book

(To download a file for transferral to an audio device such as an MP3 player, right-click the download link and select 'Save Target As')
Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

John Sutherland - Curiosities of Literature

Listen to John Sutherland, as he discusses Curiosities of Literature. In the book, Sutherland presents a series of essays in which he looks to answer a range of literary curiosities including: 'When did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature?', 'Who wrote the first Western?', 'Is there any link between asthma and literary genius?' and more.

DOWNLOAD SEGMENT | Buy the book

(To download a file for transferral to an audio device such as an MP3 player, right-click the download link and select 'Save Target As')
Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com

Alberto Manguel - The Library at Night

Alberto Manguel, acclaimed writer on books and reading and author of The Library at Night, presents a history of libraries past and present. From the ancient world to modern online resources, as well as the personal libraries of figures such as Charles Dickens and Jorge Luis Borges.

DOWNLOAD SEGMENT | Buy the book

(To download a file for transferral to an audio device such as an MP3 player, right-click the download link and select 'Save Target As')
Audio recordings produced by George Miller of podularity.com