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Curated playlist

British novels adapted for radio

  • James BondJames Bond got his name from a field guide to Caribbean birds. Ian Fleming wanted the dullest name he could find.
  • The Pickwick PapersCharles Dickens, then 24, was hired to write captions for comic sporting drawings. He knew nothing of sport.
  • The Lord of the RingsA Collins contact told Tolkien that The Lord of the Rings "urgently wanted cutting."
  • FrankensteinBoris Karloff's lightning-jolted monster is not what Mary Shelley wrote. That image came largely from a 1931 film.
  • The War of the WorldsIn The War of the Worlds, the Martians are beaten by germs. Earthly bacteria kill them, since they had no immunity.
  • The HobbitA publisher let his 10-year-old son decide whether to print The Hobbit.
  • Charlie and the Chocolate FactoryDahl's early drafts of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had nine golden tickets, not five.
  • To the LighthouseTo the Lighthouse builds a whole novel on a boy's cancelled boat trip. Virginia Woolf's 1927 book has almost no action.
  • Gulliver's TravelsGulliver's Travels gave computer science the terms big-endian and little-endian.
  • Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr HydeA dream gave Stevenson the idea for Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His wife woke him mid-transformation.
  • The Lost World (Doyle novel)The Lost World, a 1912 adventure novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, began with a startlingly bold ambition. While writing it, Doyle told his editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith: "My ambition is to do for the boys' book what Sherlock Holmes did…

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