In Our Time

After listening to the very interesting discussion of Lord Byron on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, I went looking for other episodes that might be of interest to students of IGCSE English Lit and found several. Here they are.

"Charles Dickens" from 2001.


"The Sonnet" from 2001.


"Shakespeare's Life" from 2001.


"Gothic" from 2001.


"The Romantics" from 2000.


"Shakespeare's Work" from 2000.


"Shakespeare and Literary Criticism" from 1999.


"The Later Romantics" from 2004.


"The Charge of the Light Brigade" from 2008.

Story Recordings

Here are some online recorded versions of the stories you have read.


"The Signalman" by Charles Dickens




"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman




"How It Happened" by Arthur Conan Doyle




"Meteor" by John Wyndham (This one is a Canadian radio dramatization that strays a bit from the original story, so be careful to note the differences.)




"There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury



Here is another interesting video adaptation of this story.

Since the Russian animated adaptation of this story posted earlier has been taken down from its old youtube address, here it is again too.




"The Third and Final Continent" by Jhumpa Lahiri is available as an MP3 download for purchase on amazon.com . (If you have never bought an audio book through amazon, you can arrange to get it for free, but be careful to follow the rules or you may end up spending more than you intend!)


Unfortunately, an audio version of The Turning, the volume of Tim Winton's stories including "On Her Knees" is not available for download, but it does exist in CD format here.

Byron Stuff

I have just been listening to an interesting podcast about Lord Byron, author of "So, we'll go no more a roving" that may interest you.

Please note that though this discussion is about Byron, it is about a very long poem by him titled Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It is not about "So, we'll go no more a roving". In other words, while this podcast includes a lot of interesting biographical information about the poet, do not expect it to provide "answers" concerning "So, we'll go no more a roving". In particular, please note that unlike Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, "So, we'll go no more a roving" is not written in Spencerian stanzas.

(Now that you know what this is not, here it is.)




On the subject of Byron, you may also be interested to listen to some recordings that are of "So, we'll go no more a roving". You'll notice that all these recordings are in song form and use the words of Byron's poem, but that they are also quite different from each other.


This one is by Gervase Elwes from 1911. That's right, about one hundred years ago, but also about one hundred years after Byron. The video is obviously by someone whose hobby is old recordings.



This is Joan Baez from 1964.



This is Leonard Cohen from 2004.

Which of these recordings do you think is the most effective adaptation of Byron's poem? Why?