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The Secret Life of BooksSeries 2Episodes Available now
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Swallows and Amazons
6/6How Arthur Ransome perfected a new, more authentic kind of children's literature.

Cider with Rosie
5/6How Laurie Lee blended fact and fiction in his elegy to a disappeared rural world.

Confessions of an English Opium Eater
4/6John Cooper Clarke explores Thomas de Quincey's addiction memoir.

The Mill on the Floss
3/6Fiona Shaw explores the genesis of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss.

Edward Lear's Nonsense Songs
2/6Nicholas Parsons explores the fine line between joy and melancholy in Lear's writing.

The Faerie Queene
1/6Dr Janina Ramirez unravels Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene.