The Best of Radio Litopia Peter Cox

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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