Finnegans Wake is a complex novel that blends the reality of life with a dream world.

Excerpts from journals, letters, poetry and prose enrich this narrative biography of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte. The program introduces the sisters' major works and illuminates their basic, recurrent themes. Samples of their own art-work, on-location photography of northern England, as well as prints, paintings and sketches portray the land and the period.

"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...

"Inspired by the twenty-three "tales," Matthew Dennison takes a selection of quotations from Potter's stories and uses them to explore her multifaceted life and character: repressed Victorian daughter; thwarted lover; artistic genius; formidable country woman. This dramatic narrative charts her transformation from a young girl with a love of animals and fairy tales into a bestselling author and canny businesswoman--so deeply unusual for the Victorian...

"'The Memory Chalet' is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation 'was a revolutionary...

As a young man working in East Africa for the Shell Company, Roald Dahl recounts his adventures living in the jungle and later flying a fighter plane in World War II.

Explores the reasons why women do not have the same influence, power, and wealth as men do. Meditates on the writer-temperament and explores the need for a woman to have a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year being symbols of the power to think for oneself and contemplate.

The Importance of Music to Girls is the story of the adventures that music leads us into-how it forms and transforms us. As a soundtrack, it's there in the background while we go about the thrilling and mortifying business of growing up: raging, falling in love, wanting to change the world. Lavinia Greenlaw turns the volume up loud, and in prose of pure fury and beauty makes us remember how the music came first. For Greenlaw, music-from bubblegum...

"Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died--an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit...