The Best of Radio Litopia Peter Cox
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- Arts
The Best of Radio Litopia as curated by Peter Cox
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The Adversary – Emmanuel Carrère
In the quiet Jura region of France, a physician goes completely haywire in a series of crimes that are hard for his friends and acquaintances to grasp. But then their grasp loosens further. And disappears altogether. Because the man at the centre, the man they thought they knew, turns out to be a dangerous and violent stranger. And now I know what it feels like to write a Dateline teaser. Non-fiction.
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Latecomers – Anita Brookner
Hartmann and Fibitch arrived in England as refugees on the Kindertransport and then they had had wives and children and those children had families and – what was the point of this story again? Served (saved?) with a side of Sebald (how can you not) plus the flavour of Rushforth, which is the name of an author.
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The Scapegoat – Sophia Nikolaidou
The real life murder mystery of a CBS reporter is foreground and backdrop for a modern day high school student trying to figure out why the wrong man was put down. Also a love story. Salonic.
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Peter Englund: The Beauty and the Sorrow
His origins were humble; a working-class boy from a small military town in northern Sweden, not far from the Arctic Circle. Today, he is one of the most influential figures in the world of literature, because Peter Englund is Permanent Secretary to the Swedish Academy, the body that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature.
For someone who has within his power the making or breaking of international writing careers, Peter, as you'll hear, is remarkably unassuming. Perhaps one reason for this is that he's still a writer himself; he understands the writing process profoundly, and his own books have been both bestsellers and widely acclaimed. His most recent, just launched in London, is a stunning new approach to the history of the First World War. Subtitled "an intimate history", The Beauty and the Sorrow explores the personal aspects of war: not the grand strategies concocted in the cabinets of Europe, but the experiences of "ordinary" people from around the world, all now unknown - were it not for Peter's deeply moving book. -
The Man Behind Sherlock Holmes
What with Benedict Cumberbatch’s radical new television interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, and the recent big-screen Guy Ritchie / Robert Downey / Jude Law action movies, the Baker Street seven per-center is enjoying a major revival of interest.
How appropriate, then, that the master scriptwriter of the entire Holmes canon should join us for tonight's Litopia After Dark. Bert Coules is nearly as legendary as his protagonist in Holmesian circles. He’s a man who’s had more experience of Sherlock Holmes than almost anyone else, apart from Conan Doyle. Not only was he head writer on the BBC’s project to dramatise the entire Holmes canon, but he then went on to write The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – original plots based on passing references from Conan Doyle’s oeuvre.
Bert has also adapted several Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael novels, starring Philip Madoc as Cadfael, and has dramatised works by Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Isaac Asimov and other best-selling genre authors.
Whether you're a Holmes fan, an aspiring scriptwriter, or simply interested in great drama, you'll love this show - pass it on to your friends! -
John Simopoulos: A Tiger Burning Bright
When we asked John Simopoulos, Founding Fellow and Dean of Degrees at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, to read Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner last year, we had an overwhelming response from listeners wanting to hear more from him.
We're thrilled to welcome John back to present this special new year's "mixed bag of prose, poetry and century" that is certain to delight and inspire you... happy new year!
John reads and discusses:
Meditation 17 by John Donne
"The Little Black Boy" by William Blake
"The Tiger" by William Blake
Samuel Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield
"Those Winter Sundays" By Robert Hayden
"Heraclitus" by William Johnson Cory
"On The Coast Of Coromandel" by Osbert Sitwell
"The Owl And The Pussy Cat" by Edward Lear
Music in the programme is available for purchase from magnatune.com