Documentary
The Secret Life of Books
Classic books are considered with a fresh eye. Returning to the authors' original manuscripts and letters, expert writers and performers bring their personal insights to these great works.
Series 1: 1. Great Expectations (29 mins)
- The Secret Life of Children's Books: 2. The Water-BabiesThe revolutionary science behind The Water-Babies and its influence on social reform.29 mins
- The Secret Life of Children's Books: 1. Five Children and ItHow Edith Nesbit created a new kind of children's fiction, a blend of magic and realism.29 mins
- Series 2: 6. Swallows and AmazonsHow Arthur Ransome perfected a new, more authentic kind of children's literature.29 mins
- Series 2: 5. Cider with RosieHow Laurie Lee blended fact and fiction in his elegy to a disappeared rural world.29 mins
- Series 2: 4. Confessions of an English Opium EaterJohn Cooper Clarke explores Thomas de Quincey's addiction memoir.29 mins
- Series 2: 3. The Mill on the FlossFiona Shaw explores the genesis of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.29 mins
- Series 2: 2. Edward Lear's Nonsense SongsNicholas Parsons explores the fine line between joy and melancholy in Lear's writing.29 mins
- Series 2: 1. The Faerie QueeneDr Janina Ramirez unravels Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene.29 mins
- Series 1: 6. FrankensteinAlice Roberts finds evidence of Mary Shelley's husband Percy's help with Frankenstein.29 mins
- Series 1: 5. Jane EyreBidisha revisits Charlotte Bronte's classic novel after first reading it as a teenager.29 mins
- Series 1: 4. The MabinogionCerys Matthews tells the story of one of the literary treasures of the medieval world.29 mins
- Series 1: 3. Mrs DallowayHow Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway re-imagined what a novel might be.29 mins
- Series 1: 2. Shakespeare's First FolioSimon Russell Beale looks at what we can learn from Shakespeare's First Folio.29 mins
- Series 1: 1. Great ExpectationsTony Jordan brings his writer's insight to Charles Dickens's Great Expectations.29 mins
