Curated category
British novels adapted for radio
- James BondJames Bond was born from a very deliberate act of boredom management. On the 17th of February 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at his Goldeneye estate in…
- The Pickwick PapersThe first issue of The Pickwick Papers appeared in March 1836. It contained two chapters and cost one shilling. Each subsequent number followed a strict…
- The Lord of the RingsThe Lord of the Rings began with a birthday party. Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit celebrating his eleventy-first year, slips on a magic ring and vanishes from his…
- FrankensteinFrankenstein begins not with a monster but with a question whispered around a log fire. In the rainy summer of 1816, Mary Shelley sat at Lord Byron's Villa…
- The War of the WorldsThe War of the Worlds, published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann, opens with a sentence that has unsettled readers for over a century: "Yet across…
- The HobbitThe Hobbit, or There and Back Again begins with a sentence Tolkien wrote on a blank exam paper one day in the early 1930s: "In a hole in the ground there…
- Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryCharlie and the Chocolate Factory, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1964, began not in a writer's imagination but in a schoolboy's hands.
- To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse arrives with a question rather than a story: can a child's disappointment about a cancelled boat trip hold the whole weight of human…
- Gulliver's TravelsGulliver's Travels arrived in London bookshops on the 28th of October 1726, priced at 8 shillings and 6 pence, and within days it had become the talk of the…
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeStrange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde begins not with a monster, but with a lawyer on a Sunday walk. Gabriel John Utterson, a reserved London solicitor…
- The Lost World (Doyle novel)Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stood before the Royal Geographical Society on the 13th of February 1911. He listened intently as his friend Percy Harrison Fawcett…