Portrait of Lord Melvyn Bragg, host of In Our Time

English novels

The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland (or any part of Ireland before 1922).

5 episodes

Episodes in this category also belong to the following categories:

  1. Animal Farm

    4 Extra Debut. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss George Orwell's Animal Farm, which he struggled to publish in WW2 as the USSR was an ally. From 2016.

    29 September 2016

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    Featuring: Steven Connor, Mary Vincent, Robert Colls

     
  2. Fielding's Tom Jones

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Henry Fielding's influential comic novel in which the hero Jones has such a fundamentally good nature that even his critics forgive his faults.

    13 June 2024

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    Featuring: Judith Hawley, Henry Power, Charlotte Roberts

     
  3. Middlemarch

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss George Eliot's Study of Provincial Life, set before the Reform Act 1832 in a small, fictional town in the Midlands surrounded by farmland.

    18 April 2018

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    Featuring: Rosemary Ashton, Kathryn Hughes, John Bowen

     
  4. Nineteen Eighty-Four

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Orwell's dystopian novel where the state rewrites history, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength - and Big Brother is watching you

    15 September 2022

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    Featuring: David Dwan, Lisa Mullen, John Bowen

     
  5. North and South

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, who set her 1855 novel in a version of Manchester she called Milton in the county of Darkshire.

    9 March 2017

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    Featuring: Sally Shuttleworth, Dinah Birch, Jenny Uglow