Writer and cyclist Peter Whitfield discusses some of the gems of world literature. Do you want to know about Dante’s Divine Comedy or the novels of Jane Austen or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick?
Listen to these accessible and entertaining introductions. We will be regularly adding new subjects. They may help you decide which classic to listen to next – and even if you know the work, you may find these short but illuminating essays worth hearing.
Some of the introductions included are:
The Poems of Emily Dickinson (7 mins, MP3, 2.6 MB)
Homer’s Odyssey (9 mins, MP3, 3 MB)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (8 mins, MP3, 2.9 MB)
Ivanhoe (9 mins, MP3, 3 MB)
The Lives of the Painters (10 mins, MP3, 3.4 MB)
The Life of Samuel Johnson (9 mins, MP3, 3.3 MB)
Thoreau’s Walden (8 mins, MP3, 2.6 MB)
The Life of the Buddha (13 mins, MP3, 4.5 MB)
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (8 mins, MP3, 2.8 MB)
The Brothers Grimm (10 mins, MP3, 3.4 MB)
The Life of Beethoven (11 mins, MP3, 3.9 MB)
Shakespeare’s First Folio (10 mins, MP3, 3.4 MB)
The Bible – Genesis and Apocalypse (15 mins, MP3, 5.2 MB)
Pepys’s Diary (11 mins, MP3, 3.7 MB)
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (11 mins, MP3, 3.7 MB)
Jane Austen – from Northanger Abbey to Persuasion, (9 mins, MP3, 3.3 MB)
Melville’s Moby Dick, (9 mins, MP3, 3.0 MB)
Dante’s Divine Comedy, (10 mins, MP3, 3.5 MB)