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With Great Pleasure at Christmas

Political journalist and Today programme presenter James Naughtie shares some of the pieces of prose and verse which have entertained and inspired him over the years.

Political journalist and Today programme presenter James Naughtie shares some of the pieces of prose and verse which have entertained and inspired him over the years. The readers are Alison Steadman, Bill Paterson and David Haig.

Extracts read in this programme:

from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Simon Armitage (poem)
Published by Faber & Faber

from Pig Ho-oo-oey (prose)
From: Blandings Castle, by PG Wodehouse

opening line from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene
Published by Vintage

opening line from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Published by Penguin

opening line from Scaramouche, by Giuseppe Sabbatini
Published by Hutchinson Library Services

from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
Published by Penguin Classics

from Venice, by Jan Morris
Published by Faber & Faber

from Greenmantle, by John Buchan
Published by Wordsworth Classics

from Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh
Published by Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics

from Abducting a General
From: Words of Mercury, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed. Artemis Cooper
Published by John Murray

from Highways and Byways in the Western Highlands, by Seton Gordon
Published by Macmillan

The Little White Rose, by Hugh MacDiarmid (poem)
From: Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Poetry
Published by Carcanet

Midnight, Lochinver, by Norman MacCaig (poem)
from: Norman MacCaig, Collected Poems
Published by Chatto Poetry

from The Testament of Cresseid, by Robert Henryson, trans. Seamus Heaney
Published by Faber & Faber

Letter from John Kipling to his family 1915
From: O Beloved Kids: Rudyard Kipling's letters to his children, ed. Eliot L. Gilbert
Published by Little Books

Last Post, by Carol Ann Duffy (poem)
Commissioned by the Today programme

from Point of Departure, by James Cameron
Published by Arthur Barker

from Echoes of the Jazz Age (prose)
From: The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories, by F Scott Fitzgerald
Published by Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics

from Bleak House, by Charles Dickens
Published by Oxford World's Classics

Sonnet 30, by William Shakespeare (poem)
From: Shakespeare's Sonnets
Published by Gerald Duckworth

from Paradise Lost, by John Milton (poem)
From: John Milton, Complete English Poems
Published by Everyman

from Right Ho, Jeeves, by PG Wodehouse
Published by Penguin.

1 hour

Last on

Christmas Day 2009 13:00

Broadcast

  • Christmas Day 2009 13:00

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