Show Notes
Sports Books: Open - Andre Agassi, Fever Pitch – Nick Hornby, Great Cricket Matches Book 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 whee...
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When Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale, he was an older, though not old, man. It was one of what are often called his late plays, and along with The Tempest one of the two great plays he wrote at the end of his career. In these plays, he experimented with new forms of expression and genre. They seem to stretch traditional genres of tragedy or comedy, and develop a more transcendent sense of magic and mystery. At the end of The Winter’s Tale, the female courtier Paulina perhaps speaks for Sh...
As the exceptional summer of 2026 fades into memory, we look at three autumn poems. John Keats’ To Autumn is the finest of his Odes and one of the greatest poems written in English. At the moment of fruition, decay begins; from the high point of life, comes death; and in that moment of equipoise there is an ecstasy as well as a melancholy at the passing of life and of beauty, beautifully captured in Pip Torrens’ wonderful, understated reading. Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal is a sprawling, j...
As Georgia Oakley's film of Sense and Sensibility is released, Book In looks at Jane Austen's novel. It was the first that she published, but already her genius for satire, social comedy and the extraordinarily subtle expression of human relationships is evident from the first page. Marianne has sensibility, and throws herself at life; unimpressed with the worthy but pedestrian Colonel Brandon, she is thrilled by the arrival of Willoughby, who leaves her house during a rainstorm "to make hims...
Iain Dale is one of the country's leading broadcasters. His evening radio show on LBC attracts millions of listeners, and for 30 years he has been at the centre of British politics as a publisher, radio host, author, podcaster, bookshop owner, political candidate and TV pundit. He has interviewed everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Andy Burnham, and in his brilliant and highly entertaining autobiography "Have I Said Too Much?" (to which the answer is clearly "no"), he tells the story of his li...
We're swotting up for our next series this week, so sadly haven't had time to record a new episode. Instead, we're re-releasing one of our classics from the archive. Philip Larkin wrote some of the greatest poetry in English in the second half of the twentieth century. Brilliant, famous and successful, he chose to live as a librarian in Hull, largely avoiding the public gaze, and watching the world from the edge of England. His simple language and easily accessible work have made him hu...