BBC Radio

BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live, the network's flagship Saturday morning programme, has been on the air since 2006 and is hugely popular, with 1.8 million weekly listeners. Since 2013 it has featured a slot called 'Thank You', for which members of the public phone in to thank people for kind acts they have done for them in the past—sometimes decades and decades ago—and who they didn't get a chance to thank at the time. It's a lovely, heartwarming...

In Agatha Christie's classic, A Pocket Full of Rye, the bizarre death of a financial tycoon has Miss Marple investigating a very odd case of crime by rhyme.

Rex Fortescue, king of a financial empire, was sipping tea in his "counting house" when he suffered an agonizing and sudden death. On later inspection, the pockets of the deceased were found to contain traces of cereals.

Yet,

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A quiet English village is plagued by a fiendish serial killer in Queen of Mystery Agatha Christie's classic thriller, Murder is Easy. Luke Fitzwilliam does not believe Miss Pinkerton's wild allegation that a multiple murderer is at work in the quiet English village of Wychwood and that her local doctor is next in line. But within hours, Miss Pinkerton has been killed in a hit-and-run car accident. Mere coincidence? Luke is inclined to think so-until...

Focuses on a former military espionage department in London and its attempts to train an agent for a mission in East Germany.

In Sparkling Cyanide, Agatha Christie seats six—including a murderer—around a dining table set for seven, one year to the day that a beautiful heiress was poisoned in that very room.

Six people sit down to a sumptuous meal at a table laid for seven. In front of the empty place is a sprig of rosemary—"rosemary for remembrance." A strange sentiment considering no one is likely to forget the

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With neither friends nor family, Lucy Snowe sets sail from England to find employment in a girls' boarding school in the small town of Villette. There she struggles to retain her self-possession in the face of unruly pupils, an initially suspicious headmaster, and her own complex feelings, first for the school's English doctor and then for the dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel. Drawing on her own deeply unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels,...

The sensational bestselling story of Little Nell, the beautiful child thrown into a shadowy, terrifying world, seems to belong less to the history of the Victorian novel than to folklore, fairy tale, or myth. The sorrows of Nell and her grandfather are offset by Dickens's creation of a dazzling contemporary world inhabited by some of his most brilliantly drawn characters-the eloquent ne'er-do-well Dick Swiveller; the hungry maid known as the "Marchioness";...

In this work of historical reconstruction Neil MacGregor and his team at the British Museum, working together in a landmark collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the BBC, bring us twenty objects that capture the essence of Shakespeare's universe and the Tudor era of Elizabeth I.

In the first story, Agatha is alarmed when her new wizard of a hairdresser seems keen to take on more than just her split ends. She soon discovers that everyone in his salon has a secret, and that he practices a very dark magic indeed. However, James refuses to help. Has he really ceased to care for her? In the second story, after pursuing him for nearly four years, Agatha is finally about to marry James Lacey, the handsome Colonel next door. But...

The Terrible Tourist: Now that their marriage plans have collapsed, Agatha is furious to find that James is taking a holiday on the island where they were to have their honeymoon. But when she sets out in pursuit of him, she stumbles upon another murder. The Fairies of Fryfam: Having been hurt by James once too often, Agatha takes a trip to the Cornish village of Fryfam and is soon disturbed by some strange lights at the bottom of the garden.