Here are the greatest and best-loved stories from the Old Testament of the Bible, stories which can be read as much for their human, literary and historical appeal as for their religious meaning. The selection ranges from childhood favourites like David and Goliath, to key moments in Jewish history such as the Exodus, and also includes some of the finest poetry in the Old Testament the Song of Solomon, for example. Until the invention of the printing press and the coming of the Reformation...

Over the last forty years, the mythology of Princess Diana has turned the woman who was born Diana Spencer into a symbol for almost anything. From a harbinger of Brexit populism, an all-American consumer capitalist, and the savior of the British aristocracy, to a catalyst for #MeToo, Diana connects with a wider array of people than any member of the royal family ever has. We feel so familiar with Diana that it seems crushingly formal to use anything but her first name.In Dianaw...

A selection of the renowned French philosophers Sartre’s plays.This collection features several dramatisations of Jean-Paul Sartre's works, including The Roads to Freedom, No Way Out (or "Huis Clos"), Assassins and Nekrassov. These productions showcase Sartre's exploration of existentialism, freedom, and political themes. Notable cast members include David Haig, James Fle...

In this BBC full-cast production of Twelfth Night, Malvolio is looking for trouble - and revenge...Michael Maloney, Josette Simon and Anne-Marie Duff star in this fast and funny production of Shakespeare's most sparkling and optimistic comedy, when all the world is turned on its head and authority is usurped, when by civil misrule girls become boys and women lust after women.BBC radio has a unique heritage when it ...

Death, innocence, sacrifice and corruption The Old Curiosity Shop is vintage Dickens. Provoking an unprecedented outpouring of public grief when it was first published, it follows the story of Little Nell and her feckless grandfather. Forced to leave their magical shop of curiosities in London, they are pursued across the English countryside by the grotesquely evil dwarf Quilp. They escape but at what cost? Part tragedy, part allegory, this is Dickens at his most intense; drawing on his ow...

The novel that launched Dickens as an international celebrity, The Pickwick Papers is a loose collection of Samuel Pickwick’s adventures with his friends, and became a serialisation phenomenon upon its release.The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club or more commonly known as The Pickwick Papers is the first novel by Charles Dickens.Written for publication as a serial, The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely-related adventures.Mr Samuel Pickwick Esquire is the ...

Hard Times Audiobook is the most “Victorian” novel among the others by great Charles Dickens. It is the novel where under an external sentimentality there is rough furiousness of the realist writer, to whom imperfection of a human nature and darkness of a human soul are not the news, but still provoke rejection. Friendship and betrayal, love and hate, opposition of the children of the fortune and forgotten men are just some plot lines of the novel. Hard Times is a truly all embracing epoch...

One of Charles Dickens's most personally resonant novels, Little Dorrit speaks across the centuries to the modern audience. Its depiction of shady financiers and banking collapses seems uncannily topical, as does Dickens's compassionate admiration for Amy Dorrit, the "child of the Marshalsea," as she struggles to hold her family together in the face of neglect, irresponsibility, and ruin. Intricate in its plotting, the novel also satirizes the cumbersome machinery of government. F...

Dombey and Son is vintage Dickens and explores the classic themes of betrayal, cruelty and deceit. Dombey’s dysfunctional relationships are painted against a backdrop of social unrest in industrialised London, which is populated by a host of fascinating and memorable secondary characters. The complete and unabridged 1867 text is brought spectacularly to life by veteran reader David Timson.

While visiting his parents gravesite in the marshy mists of a village graveyard, Pip, a young orphan living with his older sister, encounters a shivering, limping convict on the run.

This much-loved novel was, by Dickens’s own admission, his ‘favourite child’. It is easy to see why, with its colourful characters ranging from the repulsive Uriah Heep to the endlessly improvident Micawbers, and dominated throughout by the moving story of David’s search for a family and a home…

This novel provides a highly charged examination of human suffering and human sacrifice, private experience and public history, during the French Revolution.A Tale of Two Cities is one of Charles Dickens's most exciting novels. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, it tells the story of a family threatened by the terrible events of the past. Doctor Manette was wrongly imprisoned in the Bastille for eighteen years without trial by the aristocratic authorities. ...