Alan Bennett at the BBC

'I tend to think of myself as a man of few words, but looking at this collection it seems to have been gab gab gab for the last thirty years.'

Admittedly not all the words are his own - but even the work of other writers can be transformed by Alan Bennett

A+ Audio Guide: Frankenstein,

A+ Audio is the innovative audio study guide series that will help you better understand, appreciate, and enjoy great works of literature. With a dramatic presentation that gives voice to the printed word, you'll experience these classic works as never before.

Classic Drama: Mansfield Park

Hannah Gordon is the narrator with Amanda Root as Fanny Price, Jane Lapotaire as Mrs Norris and Michael Williams as Sir Thomas Bertram in this full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Jane Austen's perceptive study of middle class morals and mores in the nineteenth century.

History of Opera, The

Opera, said Moliere, is the most expensive noise known to man. From its beginnings in the 16th century, through to today when there are as many musical styles as there are composers, opera has fascinated, infuriated, delighted, been censored, been banned, excited riots, even won a nation its freedom. Here is the colourful story of sometimes temperamental composers and even more temperamental singers working in an art form which has produced some of man's noblest artistic creations.

Canterbury Tales - Volume III, The

Seven more Tales presented here in unabridged modern verse - an ideal way to appreciate the genuinely funny and droll talent of England's early master storyteller. The group continues its pilgrimage to Canterbury, talking with each other, their interaction mediated (sometimes) by the affable Host - Chaucer himself. Eight leading British actors bring the medieval world into the 21st century, and at least in terms of character, not much seems to have changed

Hamlet

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies, the others being Othello (1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). In writing this extraordinary play Shakespeare effectively re-invented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years - we have to go back to the Greek dramatists of 5th century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity.