Opening Lines

John Yorke looks at the second half of Jonathan’s Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, taking in Gulliver’s voyages to the floating island of Laputa and to the land of the Houyhnhnms.
Laputa and its neighbouring territories are populated by absurdly misguided academics and scientists, while the Houyhnhnms are ultra-rational talking horses who share their kingdom with bestial humans, or Yahoos. This part of the book is far darker than the first half, in which Gulliver spends time with tiny people and then with giants, which explains why it hasn’t featured in many children’s adaptations.
John shows how Swift aims his satire at the dangers of valuing abstract scientific speculation over common sense and of allowing delusions of human rationality to justify atrocities. Targets that sadly have lost none of their relevance 300 years on from the book’s publication.

John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters - now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for R4.
Contributors:
Valerie Rumbold is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is one of the editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and is currently working on the forthcoming Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope.
David Quantick is a novelist and satirist. His many TV and radio writing credits include Veep, The Thick of It, Blue Jam and Harry Hill’s TV Burp. His most recent novel is The Hyena.
Reader: Ewan Bailey
Music: Torquil MacLeod
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Coordinator: Dawn Williams
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

John Yorke looks at the first two parts of Jonathan’s Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels.
Gulliver’s voyages to Lilliput and to Brobdingnag are the ones that will be familiar to many through countless adaptations for children and pop culture references. The first island is populated by tiny people who tether Gulliver to the ground when they first discover him, while the second is a land of giants. John explores how Swift’s satire, targeted at the political and religious hypocrisies that he observed in 18th century Britain, still have the power to sting today, and makes the case for this being one of the pre-eminent literary works of all time.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters - now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for R4.
Contributors:
Valerie Rumbold is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is one of the editors of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and is currently working on the forthcoming Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope.
David Quantick is a novelist and satirist. His many TV and radio writing credits include Veep, The Thick of It, Blue Jam and Harry Hill’s TV Burp. His most recent novel is The Hyena.
Reader: Ewan Bailey
Music: Torquil MacLeod
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Coordinator: Dawn Williams
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

A dying man’s final, puzzling question - “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” – provides the title for Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel. What singles this book out is that the investigation is not undertaken by Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, but by Bobby Jones and Lady Frances Derwent – childhood friends whose suspicions compel them to try their hand at some amateur sleuthing.
All the twists and turns of plot that Christie does so well are here, along with a charming and humorous evocation of the between-the-wars generation of Bright Young Things that has echoes of PG Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters - now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for R4.
Nicola Upson is a crime novelist known for her series of novels that feature a fictional version of the writer Josephine Tey as the heroine and detective. Nicola is also member of The Detection Club.
Hugh Laurie archive clip taken from Front Row, BBC Radio 4 – 3 April 2023
Agatha Christie archive clip taken from Agatha Christie: Speaking Her Own Words, Ep 4 Keeping Notes – BBC Radio 4 Extra – 30 December 2015
Reading from Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie (copyright 1934, Agatha Christie Limited – a Chorion company)
Reader: Emily Pithon
Music: Torquil MacLeod
Production Hub Coordinator: Dawn Williams
Sound: Sean Kerwin
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

John Yorke explores The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, novelist and veteran of the Vietnam War. Published in 1990 it’s a collection of interlinked stories about a platoon of American soldiers fighting an invisible enemy in the booby-trapped jungles of Vietnam.
But Tim O’Brien is not telling a straightforward factual war story, he’s also reflecting on the nature of experience and memory, and the power of storytelling. The title story describes not just the physical objects the soldiers carried but the profound emotional burden of guilt, trauma and grief.
The narrator of the stories is called Tim O’Brien, just like the author, but he is a fictional character. One of the book’s main themes is the relationship between truth and fiction, and O'Brien frequently blurs the distinction between the two, suggesting that a fictional story may have more emotional truth than a strictly factual one.
The Things They Carried is both a vividly portrayed collection of stories about the often surreal nature of the Vietnam war, and a meditation on the memories of those who fought in it. It reveals that the heaviest burdens soldiers carry are often the invisible ones, and that stories can be a way of coming to terms with those burdens after the fighting has ended.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain - from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters - now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for R4.
The Things They Carried is published by 4th Estate.
Recording of Tim O’Brien from an interview for The National Endowment for the Arts on 9 November, 2011.
Contributor:
Dr Alex Vernon, ME and Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College, Arkansas. Author of Peace Is A Shy Thing, a literary biography of Tim O’Brien.
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Production Coordinator: Dawn Williams
Sound: Iain Hunter
Producer: Kate McAll
Executive Producer: Caroline Raphael
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4

Midnight Cowboy, a 1965 novel by the American writer James Leo Herlihy, is best known to most for its film adaptation, starring Jon Voight as Joe Buck – a naïve dreamer from Texas - and Dustin Hoffman as Enrico "Ratso" Rizzo, a New York street pickpocket.
The novel tells the story of Joe Buck’s childhood in Texas, provides context for his naivety and emotional illiteracy, and explains what drives him to move to New York in his 20s, to seek his fortune providing sexual services to rich frustrated women.
Directed by John Schlesinger, the 1969 movie version focuses less on Joe’s early life – and more on the relationship between Joe and Ratso in New York. The film won best picture at the Oscars the following year. The novel, which didn’t achieve mainstream success, fell out of print in the shadow of the film.
But, as John Yorke explains, the story of Midnight Cowboy, however simple, was groundbreaking in the mid 1960s: bringing characters at the margins of society to the centre, and dealing with themes of sexuality and sexual frankness in a powerful new way.
John also explores how Herlihy connects the story with the political uncertainty of 1960s America, and looks at what drove him to write the book.
John Yorke has worked in television and radio for over 30 years and shares his experience as he unpacks the themes and impact of the books, plays and stories dramatised in BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Drama series. As former Head of Channel Four Drama and Controller of BBC Drama Production he has worked on some of the most popular shows in Britain; from EastEnders to The Archers, Life on Mars to Shameless. He created the BBC Writers Academy and trained a generation of screenwriters, now with thousands of hours of television to their names. His acclaimed books Into the Woods and Trip to the Moon explore the structure and power of narrative, and he writes, teaches and consults on all forms of storytelling, including many podcasts for Radio 4.
Contributors:
James Leo Herlihy, from Studs Terkel WFMT radio archive, broadcast 1969.
Howard Schuman, from Open Book, BBC Radio 4, 10 August 2003.
Readings by William Hootkins for Open Book, BBC Radio 4, 10 August 2003.
Excerpts from Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy, Simon & Schuster, Inc, 1965.
Excerpts from John Schlesinger's 1969 film adaption of Midnight Cowboy.
Researcher: Henry Tydeman
Sound: Iain Hunter
Producer: Jack Soper
Executive Producer: Sara Davies
Production Hub Coordinator: Dawn Williams
A Pier production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds