The Secret Life of Books
In this six-part series, expert writers and performers will revisit the authors' original manuscripts and letters to reveal new insights into some of the greatest works of literature.
In this six-part series, expert writers and performers will revisit the authors' original manuscripts and letters to reveal new insights into some of the greatest works of literature.

Tony Jordan brings his writer's insight to a popular classic - Charles Dickens' Great Expectations.

Actor Simon Russell Beale looks at what we can learn from Shakespeare's First Folio.

Author Alexandra Harris shows how Virginia Woolf's classic work, Mrs. Dalloway, completely reimagined what a novel might...

Welsh singer and songwriter Cerys Matthews tells the story of one of the literary treasures of the medieval world - the...

Novelist Bidisha Mamata revisits Charlotte Bronte's classic novel after first reading it as a teenager.

Professor Alice Roberts finds evidence of Mary Shelley's husband Percy's help with her famous novel.

Performance poet John Cooper Clarke explores Thomas de Quincey's autobiographical classic.

Actor and director Fiona Shaw explores the genesis of her all-time favourite book, The Mill on the Floss.

Nicholas Parsons explores the fine line between joy and melancholy in Edward Lear's writing.

Joanna Trollope looks at how Laurie Lee blended fact and fiction in his elegy to a disappeared rural world.

Dr. Janina Ramirez unravels Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan epic - The Faerie Queene.

John Sergeant looks at how Arthur Ransome perfected a new, more authentic kind of children's literature.