The Secret Life of Books (2014)

Great Expectations has often been considered one of Charles Dickens's greatest works. EastEnders screenwriter Tony Jordan explores Dickens's success as a serial writer and how Dickens could never keep his own personal problems out of his novels.

Actor Simon Russell Beale has dedicated most of his professional life to the work of one man: The Bard, William Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's time, original manuscripts were thrown away, so without The First Folio, many of Shakespeare's works would have been lost forever.

English writer Virginia Woolf is one of the most fascinating novelists of the twentieth century. Presenter Alexandra Harris explores Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway and how the writing reflected the unstable society following the World War One.

The Mabinogion is a collection of 11 ancient folk tales that is considered Wales' most important contribution to European literature. Cerys Matthews explores the fascinating history of the collection and how it influenced fantasy such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Novelist Bidisha Mamata first read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre when she was a teenager and was captivated by Jane's liberating journey into adulthood. But upon revisiting the book, Bidisha challenges the romanticism of Brontë's classic novel.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has become synonymous monsters and the dangers of science without morals. Author and scientist Professor Alice Roberts returns to the original text to explore the myths of the novel and what Shelley originally intended Frankenstein to be about.

Dr Janina Ramirez unravels Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene to reveal how this fantasy world of elves, nymphs and questing knights was written in the midst of the brutal Tudor occupation of Ireland, and how the writer's growing disillusionment with the conflict was coded into the poem's restless vers

Nicholas Parsons, a lifelong fan of Edward Lear, revisits the book that gave the world The Owl and the Pussycat to explore the fine line between joy and melancholy in Lear's writing and discover how the epileptic, bronchial, asthmatic depressive pioneered a new kind of poetry that married brilliant wordplay with astonishing artwork.

Multi-award-winning actor and director Fiona Shaw explores the genesis of her all-time favourite book, The Mill on the Floss, and discovers how the scandal that caused George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans) to take a male pen name was also played out in the plot of her classic novel about a woman's thwarted intellectual ambitions and conflicting sexual desires.

Performance poet and former heroin addict John Cooper Clarke explores Thomas de Quincey's autobiographical classic Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and discovers how his fellow Mancunian's addiction memoir avoids the cliches of modern 'misery-lit' in favour of something much more unsentimental and psychologically complex.

Best-selling chronicler of modern country life, Joanna Trollope traces the roots of her favourite book Cider with Rosie to uncover how Laurie Lee blended fact and fiction in his wistful elegy to a disappeared rural world - and reflect on why a book with such dark, hard-edged undercurrents continues to have such a popular appeal.

Former journalist and keen amateur sailor John Sergeant takes to the water in the wake of the plucky young heroes of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, and learns how a globe-trotting foreign correspondent and acquaintance of Lenin and Trotsky came to perfect a new, more authentic kind of children's literature that featured real children doing real things in real places.