The Modern World: Ten Great Writers

From the series "The Modern World: Ten Great Writers", this playful documentary introduces James Joyce's most famous work "Ulysses". It includes fantastic adaptations to film from...

When an anarchist attempted to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, an idea exploded in the mind of Joseph Conrad. This program re-creates the world of The Secret Agent, the first gr...

Withdrawing from the glittering high society he had so avidly courted, Marcel Proust spent the last decade of his life in virtual isolation, writing and revising Remembrance of Thi...

A novel of ideas at once serious and comic, The Magic Mountain offers a bird’s-eye view of the political, philosophical, and social landscapes of pre-World War I Europe. This progr...

This program, narrated by Ibsen biographer Michael Meyer, charts the development of Henrik Ibsen’s style over four periods: his early years of failure; his epic dramas; his sociolo...

Virginia Woolf pushed the boundaries of the novel as a tool for psychological inquiry through her experimentation with subjective and relativistic perceptions of time and events. T...

In 1925 Luigi Pirandello brought his troupe to England as part of a worldwide tour. This program re-creates one day in London as “The Einstein of the Theater” watches his plays and...

Read by noted actors Michael Gough, Edward Fox, and Eileen Atkins, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land powerfully expresses the disillusionment and disgust of the post–World War I era in...

A suppressor of his own writings, Franz Kafka even requested that upon his death all his extant works be destroyed—yet those very works accurately prefigured the anxieties and alie...

In this lively round-table discussion, moderator Melvyn Bragg; the late writer and critic Anthony Burgess; Professor George Steiner, author of Language and Silence; literary critic...