Exclusive: The Pickwick Papers read by Anton Lesser (Part 3)

To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth, we're serialising The Pickwick Papers... Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we'reclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser. Chapters 5 and 6 can be heard below. You can catch up on previous chapters ... Read More...

The Music of James Joyce

Today, Mahlerman examines the legacy of James Joyce: the language in the music, and the music in the language... The great modernist writer James Joyce was so saturated in music that, for a while as a young man, he considered devoting his life to it, but although music's loss became literature's ... Read More...

Sporting heroes

On the eve of the 2012 Six Nations tournament, Gaw brings together his two loves: rugby and poetry... We cannot look, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens, which ... Read More...

The “Blenkinsop!” Speech

Read the following quotation, then declaim it aloud, then answer the questions: “Blenkinsop! Blenkinsop! Fain wert thou embrinaged there at the harbourside! No turncoat cutpurse at the ducking stool sought to jar thy chaps. Was it but a toughening that smudged such gobby vexations, or was a man o’ poultry glutted ... Read More...

Heroes of Slang: Charles Dickens

This week our roving wordsmith Jonathon Green rummages around in the output of our most famous Victorian writer, Charles Dickens, to see whether his urban characters spoke much in the way of realistic contemporary argot... Dickens is 200 this year and who am I to eschew the bandwagon. Write, they say, ... Read More...

Television’s false past

Nige explains why period television always gets it wrong… Television, that futuristic medium, is deeply in love with the past. It likes nothing more than sending people back in time to experience 'living in the past' for our delectation in 'historical reality shows' - Turn Back Time (shopkeepers sampling retail life ... Read More...