Writer Penelope Lively’s enduring themes are the connections and interplay between memory, history and time. Nowhere is this more compelling than in Moon Tiger, published in 1987 and widely regarded as one of her best novels. It won the Booker Prize that same year and went on to gain The Golden Booker in 2018 as the stand-out winner of the 1980s. The novel’s protagonist Claudia Hampton is an historian and war correspondent, ambitious and independent and a 20th Century woman who has defied the co...
May 31, 2026•14 min
John Yorke explores why Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes has had such a profound influence on storytelling in the 400 years since it was published in 1605. ‘Like Shakespeare, Cervantes is inescapable for all writers who have come after him,’ according to literary critic Harold Bloom. He creates a blueprint for the modern novel by shifting from static, infallible archetypes to dynamic, evolving characters who are fundamentally changed by their relationship with each other. Cervantes’ work is fu...
May 10, 2026•14 min
John Yorke explores why Don Quixote has had such a profound influence on storytelling in the four hundred years since it was published. The first European novel, it’s an epic work of comic - and tragic - genius. Quixote embodies an ideal of heroic resilience in the face of a broken reality. And it’s a novel that’s in our bones: familiar even if we haven’t read any of its nearly a thousand pages. The programme includes an interview with film director, cartoonist and Monty Python member Terry Gill...
May 03, 2026•15 min
John Yorke takes a look at Transcription by Kate Atkinson. First published in 2018, Transcription tells the story of three different time periods in the life of our protagonist, Juliet Armstrong. The interweaving timelines take us from 1940 to 1981, telling of her experiences working in wartime for MI5, working in peacetime for BBC Radio, up to the end of her life in the moments between life and death. Transcription is a spy novel but it’s the work’s thematic depth that raises it above standard ...
Apr 16, 2026•14 min
Tom Stoppard was of course best known for his work writing for stage and screen - but the dramas he created for radio were also an extremely important part of his career and his development as a writer. Across five decades he continued to return to a medium that suited him so well; without the constraints of visuals, his deft structural turns, linguistic pyrotechnics and imaginative leaps could flourish. In this special episode of Opening Lines for Radio 4’s Celebrating Stoppard season, John Yor...
Apr 04, 2026•15 min
Flight by Walter White, published in 1926, asks questions about race and identity when its central character chooses to ‘pass’ as a white woman. In this second episode about the book, John Yorke asks if this is why the book has largely been forgotten even though it was written by one of the most influential figures in 20th century America. John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories ...
Apr 02, 2026•14 min
Flight was the second novel by one of twentieth century’s America’s most influential figures, Walter White. Published in 1926, it asks questions about race and identity when its central character chooses to ‘pass’ as a white woman. A prime mover in the Harlem Renaissance, White was a celebrated writer and activist but his book has largely been forgotten. John Yorke looks at the man and his work. John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpac...
Mar 22, 2026•14 min
John Yorke explores themes of loss, longing and the founding of America, in Willa Cather’s innovative novel, My Ántonia. A milestone in American literature, the novel’s heroine is - unusually for the time - a Czech immigrant, Ántonia Shimerda, seen through the eyes of her childhood friend, lawyer Jim Burden. Ántonia survives poverty, tragedy and betrayal through her hard work, energy and optimism. The novel shows ‘the other side of the rug, the pattern that is not supposed to count in a story. T...
Mar 15, 2026•14 min
Owen Wister’s 1902 novel The Virginian did more than any other single piece of art in establishing the parameters of the Western as a genre. Telling the tale of a charismatic tight-lipped cowboy whose actions always speak louder than his words, it was wildly popular with readers and viewers of its many screen adaptations. The book is a celebration of rugged individualism and frontier spirit that spoke profoundly to its audience at the beginning of the twentieth-century - but does it offer any in...
Mar 01, 2026•15 min
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke concludes his exploration of Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind. In the 90 years since it was published it has sold more than 30 million copies – it was the bestselling American novel of the 20th century - but the book has become increasingly problematic for modern readers. In this third and final episode, John considers the themes of nostalgia and survival that made Gone with th...
Feb 25, 2026•14 min
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke continues his exploration of Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind. In the 90 years since it was published it has sold more than 30 million copies – it was the bestselling American novel of the 20th century - but the book has become increasingly problematic for modern readers. In this second episode, John considers how the history of the American Civil War and its aftermath inform t...
Feb 15, 2026•14 min
In the series that takes a look at books, plays and stories and how they work, John Yorke explores Margaret Mitchell’s epic Civil War romance, Gone with the Wind. It was the bestselling American novel of the 20th century, it has sold 30 million copies and counting, it won the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1939 film of the book remains among the highest grossing of all time. Gone with the Wind is a coming-of-age story, a love triangle, and an epic wartime romance. And it is a rollicking read, a hugely ...
Feb 08, 2026•14 min
During the mid-19th century America was undergoing unprecedented change. New railroads and canals allowed people and goods to criss-cross the country, as the old agrarian economy was replaced by a fast-paced industrialised one. This rapid market expansion was driven by profit and underpinned by slavery. As the lives of Americans began to speed up, Henry David Thoreau took time out to ask himself a question - is this the best way to live? In 1845, when he was 27 years old, he built a one-roomed c...
Feb 01, 2026•14 min
The headless horseman who haunts Sleepy Hollow in Washington Irving’s ghost story has become an iconic figure in American popular culture, thanks to many film and TV adaptations, ranging from a 1922 silent movie to an episode of Scooby Doo. John Yorke looks at how this deceptively simple tale made Irving an overnight literary superstar when it was published in an 1820 collection of short stories that also included Rip van Winkle, and why it was so influential on the work of the next generation o...
Jan 25, 2026•14 min
In this second episode, John Yorke assesses the criticism levelled against James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans - primarily that it is responsible for the widely held, inaccurate, view that indigenous Americans were inevitably disappearing during the period the novel is set, and that that false narrative was used to justify colonisation. Also, John delves deeper into the author’s background to understand his influences, and asks what we should make of The Last of the Mohic...
Jan 04, 2026•14 min
Published in 1826, the American writer James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans is set during the French and Indian War, in 1750s North America. The story follows a group of British colonists trying to cross frontier land – and examines the complexity of the relationship that existed between the colonialists and the land they were - in essence stealing – the native American’s. The book, which has been adapted widely for film and TV, mixes fiction with real historical events and has...
Dec 28, 2025•14 min
Ian Sansom, sitting in for John Yorke, takes a look at Joy In the Morning, the 44th Jeeves and Wooster novel by PG Wodehouse. Published in 1946, it revolves around Bertie Wooster’s attempts to avoid a series of social and romantic calamities. The omniscient Jeeves, of course, remains the great calm at the centre of the novel’s storm, devising ingenious solutions just when disaster seems inevitable. Readings from the book are by Stephen Fry, who also describes why he’s such an enthusiast for Wode...
Dec 23, 2025•15 min
John Yorke explores the revolutionary techniques developed by Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility and uncovers why her work is so endlessly adaptable to modern tastes. Austen innovated ‘free indirect style’, which blends third person narration with a character’s internal thoughts and feelings. Novelists have been using her creation ever since. She also had a gift for dialogue which allows her to reveal character through idiosyncratic speech habits. The novel is shot through with darkness, but i...
Dec 20, 2025•14 min
John Yorke explores the romantic framework of Jane Austen’s first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, as well as the reasons for its enduring appeal. It’s a novel that explores the cost of love, and in it, Austen develops writing techniques that revolutionised this new form, which are still in use some two hundred years later. With contributions from Professor John Mullan, and poet and dramatist Claudine Toutoungi. John Yorke has worked in television and radio for thirty years and shares his...
Dec 20, 2025•14 min
The opening lines of Pride and Prejudice are not only among the most famous in all of literature, they also place marriage front and centre as the key theme within the novel. “It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Austen writes, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” So many of the characters and their actions are driven by the search for a good marriage - but their motivations and aspirations are both richly varied and illuminating of Regency society ...
Dec 14, 2025•14 min
Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has not only captured the hearts of generations of readers, it also helped change the way that novels are written. This most beloved tale of Regency romance, featuring the brilliantly quick-witted Elizabeth Bennett and the haughty figure of Fitzwilliam Darcy, allows us into its characters’ heads and hearts in newly sophisticated ways that set the template for so much of the fiction that followed. In this, the first of two parts focusing on Austen’s most popular ...
Dec 13, 2025•14 min
According to its introduction, The Princess Bride is a long, sprawling book by the great Florinese writer S. Morgenstern that renowned screenwriter and novelist William Goldman has been obliged to abridge so that his son doesn’t have to struggle through all the boring bits. But as John Yorke reveals, all is not as it seems in this metafictional novel from 1973 that Goldman himself went on to adapt into a screenplay for a much-loved film. The Princess Bride may ostensibly be a fairy story, but th...
Nov 30, 2025•14 min
John Yorke takes a look at an enduring classic of children’s literature, The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Published in 1908, The Wind In The Willows is about nature – both human and animal. It is, on the face of it, a children’s book packed with beloved characters. But hidden beneath the bucolic adventures and Grahame’s beautiful evocation of the landscape, there is a desperate longing to escape the stresses of wide world into the peace and freedom of the natural world - a longing tha...
Nov 16, 2025•14 min
Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey, was the first full book she wrote. She was in her early 20s at the time and it was accepted by a publisher but the novel wasn’t published in her lifetime. In this second episode John Yorke looks at the story behind the genesis of Northanger Abbey - how a young woman with only three years of formal education came to write such an accomplished work, what prompted her to write a satire of Gothic fiction, and why the book is also a hymn of praise to the novel f...
Nov 02, 2025•14 min
Northanger Abbey was Jane Austen’s first book, although it wasn’t published until after her death. It tells the story of Catherine Morland, an impressionable young woman who is introduced to fashionable society when she’s taken by a wealthy neighbour to Bath. There, Catherine’s imagination catches fire when she’s initiated into the thrills of Gothic fiction by new friend, Isabella Thorpe – a pretty, charming but devious gold digger. Another great reader of Gothic novels is ‘not quite handsome bu...
Nov 02, 2025•14 min
When Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto in 1764, novels as a form were still in their infancy. Many tended to be long-winded works, instructing readers on how to live a moral life. With this short and fast-paced rollercoaster of a book, Walpole blew that idea out of the water, introducing his audience to a completely new kind of fiction, featuring supernatural happenings, suspense, and a young woman fleeing an evil villain down a dark corridor with a candle that blows out at the vita...
Oct 26, 2025•15 min
In the winter of 1847, the Star of the Sea sets sail from Ireland for New York. Among the refugees are a maidservant, a bankrupt aristocrat, an aspiring novelist and a maker of revolutionary ballads. It reads like a Victorian gothic novel, with murder and intrigue at its heart. Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor was published in 2002 and attracted multiple plaudits as well as literary awards. O’Connor talks about the shocked response from his publishers when he proposed writing a novel about the...
Oct 05, 2025•14 min
John Yorke looks at the background to A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and assesses the appeal of this worldwide best seller by Marina Lewycka. Two feuding sisters unite to thwart their newly widowed father’s impending marriage to Valentina - a voluptuous gold-digger from Ukraine who loves green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine and who’ll stop at nothing in her single-minded pursuit of the luxurious Western lifestyle she dreams of. John Yorke has worked in television and radio...
Sep 28, 2025•15 min
John Yorke looks at The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final play and a landmark in 20th century theatre. It’s 1903 and Liubov Andryeevna Ranyevskaya has returned to the family estate in southern Russia. As the head of this aristocratic household she faces a dilemma. The family is in serious financial difficulty and they have the choice of either selling the entire estate, or accepting the proposal of local businessman, Lopakhin, to cut down their beloved cherry orchard to make way for holiday ...
Sep 14, 2025•14 min
John Yorke looks at The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov’s final play and a landmark in 20th century theatre. It’s 1903 and Liubov Andryeevna Ranyevskaya is returning to the family estate in southern Russia. As the head of this aristocratic household, she faces a crisis. The family is in serious financial difficulty and it seems inevitable that the estate will have to be sold to pay their debts. A local businessman, Lopakhin, offers a solution, but it would mean the loss of their beloved cherry orc...
Sep 14, 2025•15 min
