HisDarkMaterials.org

A quite long, but very good review that shows not only the obvious but many other aspects of the stories. Based on many interviews, quotes and opinions, this is not only a review of the trilogy, nor an analysis, but an allround conclusion of the books and the author's agenda.

I had to wait three years for Philip Pullman

This is an interview with Philip Pullman from when he visited the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. Quite an interesting read!

Question: How long did it take you to write the His Dark Materials trilogy, with all the philosophical and religious problems that Lyra and her friends run in to?
Morgan Lee Elwell, 14, Richmond, Virginia

Philip Pullman: Seven years from beginning to end. But I didn't plan it all out in advance - otherwise I would have spent seven years following a plan and would have gone mad. You have to have the freedom to let the story go off in unexpected directions. But I did a lot of re-writing to sort it out afterwards. That's the way I work.

Q: What age group did you write them for? I read them when I was seven or eight, and I loved them! But my friend, who read The Golden Compass a few weeks before her tenth birthday, didn't understand it. I couldn't understand how she could read the ending, and not have to read the second and third books!
Margaret Lindeman (Your Number 1 Fan), 10, Kingston, New York

PP: I wrote them for the age I was at the time I started the story - which was a rather tired 43-year-old!

Q: Did you expect the books to be such a success? I have heard that many people write their books, expecting only a few to be sold, and they turn out to be a huge thing.
Joss Love, 12, Cheltenham

PP: No, I only thought about 80 people would read them at most. I never dreamed they would become as popular as they have.

Q: Were Lyra or Will based on someone from your own life?
Chloe Simmonds, 11, Greet

PP: Not on particular individuals, but when I was a teacher I taught a lot of young people of Will and Lyra's age. I wanted to show that ordinary children, without magical gifts, are capable of achieving extraordinary things.

Q: Why did you choose Oxford as the setting?
Peter Lane, 15, Lechlade

PP: Because I'm lazy! I have lived in Oxford and know it well so it saves on research. And Oxford is also a fascinating place in lots of different ways, with its academic life, the business world and its artistic traditions.

Q: Where did you get your inspiration for the His Dark Materials series from?
Carrieanne French, 12, West Lothian

PP: From everything I've ever read! I have always loved stories and I enjoy poetry too.

Q: Which of your minor characters deserves his or her own novel?
Tom Croft, 13, Reading

PP: Oh, that's a very good question. There are quite a few but the explorer Lee Scoresby and the bear Iorek Byrnison are old companions by the time we meet them. It would be interesting to know more about what happened to them earlier in their lives.

Q: Do you believe people (from our world) can learn to see their inner d

Ara was so kind to send us the images from the new Lyra

This is a really good articler from today

Youthful energy: Anna Maxwell Martin plays Lyra, with Dominic Cooper as Will

As millions of readers over the past three years have discovered, His Dark Materials is a 1,300-page epic in which the central characters, Lyra and Will, move between parallel universes, journey to the Land of the Dead, take part in a new war in heaven, and witness the death of God. This huge adventure introduces a dazzling array of creatures from daemons to cliffghasts, armoured bears, spectres, gyptians, harpies and pocket-sized Gallivespians. The audiotape of the entire trilogy runs for 35 hours. Had the National set itself an impossible task? "I don't think anything is impossible in the theatre," Pullman says. "But it was going to be terribly difficult. It's much easier probably to make a novel into a film. "The cinema can easily show a polar bear wearing armour, who can stand up and talk and manipulate machinery. And they can show witches flying through the air and balloons sailing through the Arctic skies. Very, very easily. To do those things in the theatre, it has to become metaphorical, not literal."

Next month, the stage version of His Dark Materials, directed by Nicholas Hytner, will open at the National. Each of the two plays runs for three hours, including an interval. So far, a cast that includes Timothy Dalton as Lord Asriel, Patricia Hodge as Mrs Coulter and Niamh Cusack as Serafina Pekkala has rehearsed Play One for three weeks and Play Two for three weeks, and the cast is now back on Play One.

If you walked into the rehearsal room, you would see a row of bears' heads hanging from a clothes rack, a pair of cliffghasts towering in a corner, daemons crouching on tables, and a snow leopard, dogs and wolves crowded into a corner. All these animals are puppets. The all-important props from the story - the alethiometer that can answer questions, the subtle knife that can cut between worlds, and the amber spyglass that can follow the movement of dust particles - lie on the stage manager's table.

Just beyond the rehearsal room, scene-painters are working on the exterior walls of Jordan College, loosely based on Exeter College, Oxford, where Pullman was an undergraduate. In the prop-making department next door, Terri Anderson is building the horrific machine that separates children from their daemons, painting the handle of the controls a melodramatic bright red.

On the first day of rehearsal, Hytner told the company that he had never before directed two plays at the same time. "It's going to have to be run like a military campaign." The rehearsal schedule, posted by the entrance, announces calls for "daemon work", "witches' torture" and "bear fight". Elsewhere, actors are having wig and costume fittings and sessions with the voice coach. The stage manager, Courtney Bryant, says: "It's the biggest show the National has done in two decades."

When he was appointed director of the National, Hytner knew he wanted to do an epic play that would appeal to young people. He didn't want to stage another piece of Edwardian nostalgia. After all, as he says about his production of The Wind in the Willows, "I'd already done that."

He feels that movies are far more sophisticated in the way they appeal to younger audiences. In the theatre, younger audiences are often presented with plays that appeal just as much to their grandparents or great-grandparents.

Hytner wanted to do something that was new and big and would draw on the full resources of the National. His literary manager, Jack Bradley, recommended His Dark Materials. Hytner was halfway through the second volume when he asked Bradley to get the stage rights. "If you hesitate," Hytner said, "you don't do it. It felt crazy, it felt unstageable, but it felt we have to, we have to try."

He knew Nicholas Wright, who wrote the award-winning Vincent in Brixton, was a fan of the books, and he asked him to adapt them. Together they spent 18 months rethinking the trilogy as a piece of theatre. Wright began as faithfully as possible, transcribing scenes from the books into scenes for a play.

Gradually, through a series of workshops in which a group of actors rehearsed the scenes that had been written, the plays developed their own identities. Storylines were nudged around, new scenes created, and new emphasis given to some elements. In one example, the pivotal role that a main character takes in the trilogy has been deftly reassigned to another character.

There have been rewrites all through the first six weeks of rehearsals. The one thing Wright could not change was the order of the scenes. They had to be fixed before rehearsals so that designer Giles Cadle could get the sets made.

Designing the transitions between the scenes has been as big a job for Cadle as designing the scenes themselves. Traditionally, on the first day of rehearsals, the director shows the cast the model of the set and explains what happens in each scene. Hytner could only show a few of the 100 scenes. "It's going to take longer for me to show this to you," he told the whole company, "than it would for you to watch it." Rehearsals have been full of discussions to ensure that the several quests remain at the forefront of the audience's mind. It's a process that Timothy Dalton enjoys. "I've always thought the only point of being an actor is to tell stories."

This is Dalton's first time at the National and the former James Bond's first stage appearance for 14 years. "Spending the past 20 years in movies, people are always writing and rewriting as you go along. It's something that I'm terribly used to."

Patricia Hodge plays Mrs Coulter, a glamorous and dangerous figure, who is capable of terrible deeds. "We can't achieve precisely what is in people's heads when they read the book. We can't achieve technically what they can achieve on film. What we can do is make these characters come to life." With a vast narrative and dozens of characters, Hodge compares the experience to appearing in a musical. "You have to be a miniaturist. You have to bring a portrait to life in a small amount of time." Another challenge is that actors in their twenties will be playing characters who are aged 12. Dominic Cooper, who plays Will, says: "We're not being made to play an age. Doing child acting is completely the wrong way to go."

It's the things that the characters do that reveal their age. "We would never in a million years do what they do. They jump through a window they've just made in the air, through to another universe. They're fearless."

For Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays Lyra, her aim is to be as faithful as possible to the books. She had read the books three years ago and loved them.

"We're not 12. We're not kids. All we can get is the energy of a child. Thinking in the way a child thinks rather than the way an adult thinks. Being immediate. Instinctive. Just saying what you feel." The biggest challenge of all appears in the opening sentence: "Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall" In the parallel universe in which the first volume, Northern Lights, begins, every person has a visible daemon, an animal that embodies the soul, subconscious or inner feelings of the character. That opening sentence would make most directors look for other material.

It was the first question that anyone asked Hytner: how are you going to do the daemons? Once Hytner had decided to use puppets, he made extensive investigations, and discovered that for serious puppetry "all roads led to Michael Curry". It was Curry who did the puppets for The Lion King. He runs a large workshop in Portland, Oregon. Most of the daemons had arrived from America in time for the first day. There was nothing literal about them.

They were of particular interest to Samuel Barnett, who plays Pantalaimon, Lyra's daemon. He will be working with a range of puppets - from pine marten to mouse to wildcat - as his character keeps changing shape. "I've never done anything like this before," says Barnett, "I've never seen anything like this done before."

Pullman says: "I am fundamentally a storyteller. I'm more interested in the events that I'm talking about than in the fine prose in which I recount them." He loves the idea that people can take a story he has written and tell it in a completely different way.

"It struck me right at the beginning of rehearsals," says Dalton, "that here you are looking at a bit of bent wire and a bit of curtain material, and you invest it with personality, you feel for it, because it has a story."

'His Dark Materials' is at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), from Dec 4 to March 20. 'The Art of Darkness: Staging the Philip Pullman Trilogy' by Robert Butler (NT Publications/Oberon Books) is published in January.

[The Telegraph, 04/11/03]

The Sunday Telegraph had this great article about Philip Pullman. Enjoy!

In a new short story Philip Pullman has returned to the fantastical world of the award-winning His Dark Materials. He talks to Amanda Mitchison about God, the universe, and what has happened to his famous shed Philip Pullman used to write his fantastical children's books in a grubby shed at the bottom of his garden in north Oxford. The shed was Pullman's nest. Over the years he had accumulated interesting detritus, and, fearing that he might disrupt the flow of his writing, he had grown a little superstitious about clearing it out. Journalists enjoyed describing the fly-blown awfulness of it - the cobwebs, the dusty bric-

Shedless: Success has brought Philip Pullman indoors

But now Pullman, 57, and his wife Jude have moved to a village in the Cotswolds. And it is here that we meet. Pullman is not the shambling, professorial type that the grotty shed might suggest. Instead the door is opened by an alert man with intense blue eyes that disappear when he laughs. From below comes a faint scuffling sound of restricted breathing and, down at Pullman's feet, float two little beady-eyed gargoyles. The couple keep pugs: Hogarth and Nellie.

We enter a long, low-ceilinged living-room. In the kitchen, Pullman's latest creation, a spiced, lemony chicken soup, quietly brews. Pullman is welcoming, the soup is delicious and for pudding there are mulberries picked from his front garden. Afterwards, with a slight flourish, he opens a door and announces in his clear, precise voice, 'I'm afraid the shed is no more.'

Beyond is his new study, furnished with bookshelves, tables, a plan chest and a fancy iMac. There is plenty of other stuff here too: pictures and ornaments, and an electric saw, a plane, and many, many blocks of wood - Pullman is clever with his hands, and is constructing a rocking horse for his 16-month-old grandson.

It was Pullman's fame, and maybe his new-found wealth, that spurred him to move house. For years he was a respected children's writer with an eager following. Then, in 1995, with Northern Lights, the first volume of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman became a bestseller. Adults as well as children loved his universe of strange, parallel worlds and his extraordinary inventions - the armoured bears, the tiny, fierce Gallivespians who rode on dragonflies, the mulefa with their elephant trunks and diamond-shaped spines and the magical knife that could cut windows between worlds. Most ingenious and beguiling are the daemons. These daemons, which take the form of animals, are outward manifestations of his characters' souls - inseparable, intimate companions. In 2002 The Amber Spyglass, the third volume of Pullman's epic adventure, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

Total British sales for the trilogy are 2.7 million copies. 'I'm not interested in numbers, but I think it has been translated into 36 languages,' he says. Next month a two-part adaptation of His Dark Materials opens at the National Theatre. And a film of Northern Lights, with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, is in the pipeline. But there is a downside to fame - Pullman started feeling pestered: 'People didn't break into the shed, but the doorbell was always ringing, and I would open the door and find somebody standing there with a big pile of books and a big smile.' Now, says Pullman, he has to be careful to limit his engagements. And, just to remind him, he has placed on a shelf a small skeleton with a sign attached saying i said yes and i should have said no.

Looking round his new study, there is no sign of the multitude of things shored up over time. Instead, if his latest work is anything to go by, the stuff has moved from his workplace into his books. Lyra's Oxford, a short story about Lyra, the feisty, almost feral young heroine of the trilogy, includes an assortment of 'things'. Bound into the neat little red volume is a map of Oxford with handwritten inscriptions in brown ink, a postcard written by one of the central characters of His Dark Materials, a brochure for a cruise of the Levant, a publisher's catalogue including advertisements for draughtsman's materials, arctic travel goods, abstruse travelogues and so on.

The references are antiquated and otherworldly, an intermingling of the real and imaginary. The map of Oxford does not represent the town as we know it, but the town of Oxford in a parallel world inhabited by Lyra. It includes: a zeppelin, a steam train, Lyra's school and a dozen imaginary university colleges. The story in Lyra's Oxford is set in the same series of fictional worlds as the trilogy, but Lyra is back living in Jordan College and something occurs to show that the forces of evil are still very much abroad.

This short story is a sort of taster, or appetite-whetter. Another, much more substantial volume, provisionally entitled The Book of Dust, is to follow. Lyra will be about 16 years old - in the original trilogy she was still a child on the cusp of adolescence. Pullman says he always knew that, after the trilogy, he would want to return to the same world. 'I had a sense from quite early on in the writing that I wanted to go back. There were episodes and questions I wanted to explore.'

However, in his introduction to Lyra's Oxford, Pullman concentrates not on the story but on all the 'things' that accompany his book. These things might, he suggests 'have come from other worlds. That scribbled map, that publisher's catalogue - they might have been put down absent-mindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window.'

He likens these fragments, somewhat bafflingly, to 'an ionising particle in a bubble chamber: they draw the line of a path taken by something too mysterious to see. That path of the particle is a story.' Then he adds: 'Perhaps some particles move backwards in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are.'

Pullman is at home with scientific conceits. Towards the end of Northern Lights there is an exquisite, intellectually slippery scientific justification for the presence of parallel worlds. There, the explanation comes within the context of a work of fiction. But here, in Lyra's Oxford, his assertions seem more a statement of belief than a mere metaphysical tease.

Does he really believe in other worlds? Pullman looks mildly across the room. 'Yes, yes,' he says. 'Part of me does believe.' He jabs a finger at his head. 'The part that creates the stories does. The other worlds business appears to be supported by modern science. A notable example is the double-slit experiment where, if you are firing photons one at a time through parallel slits in a piece of cardboard, they nevertheless seem to interfere with each other as if there were lots of them going through at once. So, either the photons know what the other ones have done or, in another universe, there are other ones going through the other slits and interfering with them. That is one of the oddnesses in the little corners of quantum physics...'

Then Pullman stops. 'I've forgotten how I began the sentence.' You were saying, in short, that you do believe in other worlds. He smiles a cryptic smile.

Does he believe in other worlds? Pullman doesn't believe in God, or so he has said countless times. He is also vehemently opposed to organised religion - in His Dark Materials, the church and clergy are malevolent, child-destroying forces of repression. The trilogy is in part a reworking of Milton's Paradise Lost with two children, Lyra and Will, taking on the quest to save the world and fighting the war in heaven. Only this time, the fates are reversed. Lyra and Will overturn the established order. Their worlds are redeemed, and God, who turns out to be only a wizened old man encased in a life-support machine, crumbles to dust.

Pullman's stance has produced a furore: the Catholic Herald has condemned the trilogy as 'worthy of the bonfire' and Peter Hitchens, in the Mail on Sunday, spent a column raging against Pullman's godlessness. Yet His Dark Materials remains the most moral and theological of children's stories. As Pullman says, 'I have always been interested in questions that fall under the general heading of what we call religion, questions of reality and meaning and purpose and what are we here for and where do we come from and all that stuff.'

And his imagery and writing remains grounded in the canon of English literature, which has, at core, the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Pullman grew up with religion all around him. His grandfather Sidney was a clergyman and the young Philip and his little brother Francis spent much of their early childhood living in his book-filled house in Norfolk. Pullman's father Alfred, an RAF pilot, was killed in a flying accident in Kenya when the boy was seven. His mother, Audrey, spent her weekdays working in an administrative job at the BBC in London.

Pullman opens a bottom drawer of the chest. Here lies a scattering of family photographs and documents - fragments that trace his upbringing and have their own conundrums and unexpected trajectories. Pullman picks up a photograph of his parents on a night out - his father looking Bertie Woosterish with a goofy smile and a handlebar moustache. Hanging round his arm is Pullman's mother, a pretty, dark-haired woman in a slinky evening dress.

Pullman picks up another, more prosaic photograph, taken some time later. This shows his mother standing in a street, still looking pretty, but now painfully thin. After his mother's death 14 years ago, Pullman was going through her papers when he found deeds of separation - the couple had been on the point of splitting up when Alfred Pullman was killed. 'I knew nothing at the time. It was never mentioned. Quite extraordinary!' Later Pullman's mother remarried - another RAF pilot - and the family travelled across the world on a cruise liner and spent 18 months in Australia before returning to live in the countryside in north Wales.

Pullman loved reading as a boy, and by his teens he was writing poetry. Today, he says, he doesn't know how children find the time to read: they are so busy with their homework, judo, orchestra, mobile phones and emails. He remembers, 'When I was a boy in Wales, my closest friend lived a couple of miles away. But we used to play together all the time and I would think nothing of walking through the woods a mile or two. Children don't have to go and entertain themselves any more as we did, and I am sure that we benefited from it. They seem to have less chance to experience the things like being bored, or darkness, real darkness and silence. I am sure that my imagination was strengthened and fed by the things I had to do in order to play.'

From his comprehensive school Pullman won a scholarship to read English at Oxford. But he was undisciplined and felt that literary criticism was pointless. However, he had the confidence to fail spectacularly and came out with a third-class degree. He then went to London, where he met his wife, Jude. The couple have two sons: Jamie, 31, a viola player, and Tom, 20, who is studying linguistics at Cambridge.

In his early twenties Pullman published his first novel. The Haunted Storm was well received and won a prize, but Pullman is dismissive of it. He calls it 'adult literary fiction' and winces, as if the term were a dirty word. He wrote 'out of a sense of duty, rather than conviction' and says he felt 'glum and resentful' about his work. Certainly writing was not providing a living. Pullman had a job at Moss Bros in Covent Garden. 'Every lunchtime I would go to the churchyard of St Paul's opposite and write a rondo or villanelle or sonnet,' he says.

After 18 months he moved to a more sedate posting as a librarian at Charing Cross library. Then he trained as a teacher. For the next 12 years he worked in two middle schools in Oxford, teaching English to children between nine and 13. Pullman describes his teaching as 'variable' but, according to former pupils, he was exceptional and exciting. Greta Stoddart, the poet, was taught by him at Bishop Kirk Middle School: 'He had an extraordinary energy. And he didn't need books. He would come in and just launch into some story. He had this great mane of long, wavy hair that he would scrape back with his long fingernails - he kept them long to play the guitar. And he had that very direct stare that stays just a little longer than you'd expect. All of us girls were a bit in love with him.'

Pullman wrote plays for his pupils: 'The first one I did was called Spring-Heeled Jack and it was a sort of melodrama, with an outrageous villain and larger-than-life heroes and comic policeman and that sort of thing. And I thought, 'I am really enjoying this! I like this way of telling a story. It's grotesque, absurd and not realistic, but it is really good fun!' Pullman had found his m

The Guardian is giving five copies of Lyra

Philip Pullman's introduction to Lyra's Oxford

This book contains a story and several other things. The other things might be connected with the story, or they might not; they might be connected to stories that haven't appeared yet. It's not easy to tell.

It's easy to imagine how they might have turned up, though. The world is full of things like that: old postcards, theatre programmes, leaflets about bomb-proofing your cellar, greetings cards, photograph albums, holiday brochures, instruction booklets for machine tools, maps, catalogues, railway timetables, menu cards from long-gone cruise liners - all kinds of things that once served a real and useful purpose, but have now become cut adrift from the things and the people they relate to.

They might have come from anywhere. They might have come from other worlds. That scribbled-on map, that publisher's catalogue - they might have been put down absent-mindedly in another universe, and been blown by a chance wind through an open window, to find themselves after many adventures on a market-stall in our world.

All these tattered old bits and pieces have a history and a meaning. A group of them together can seem like the traces left by an ionising particle in a bubble chamber: they draw the line of a path taken by something too mysterious to see. That path is a story, of course. What scientists do when they look at the line of bubbles on the screen is work out the story of the particle that made them: what sort of particle it must have been, and what caused it to move in that way, and how long it was likely to continue.

Dr Mary Malone would have been familiar with that sort of story in the course of her search for dark matter. But it might not have occurred to her, for example, when she sent a postcard to an old friend shortly after arriving in Oxford for the first time, that that card itself would trace part of a story that hadn't yet happened when she wrote it. Perhaps some particles move backwards in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read.

The story in this book is partly about that very process.

[Guardian]

This article is about how staff of Oxfam shops (an english charity) receive valuable books in their donations. It also mentions:

"(...) staff at the store in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, recently discovered a first edition hardback of Northern Lights by Philip Pullman worth

One kindly soul in Oxford handed in a first edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy worth nearly

This is the full article of which we gave an excerpt a few days ago. The article is about how:

Church leaders have called on schools to steer clear of the National Theatre's forthcoming adaptation of Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, criticising it as blasphemous and in poor taste.

The Association of Christian Teachers has condemned the decision to stage the production, which depicts the death of a weak and elderly God, to coincide with the Christmas holidays.

Rupert Kaye, the association's chief executive, said: "Philip Pullman actually sets out to undermine and attack the Christian faith. His blasphemy is shameless. This production is in poor taste, given the timing and the content. Teachers should steer clear."

The Church of England has also questioned the timing of the play. A spokesman said: "Given that Christmas is a major Christian festival, His Dark Materials wouldn't seem an obvious choice.

"The possibility that it may cause offence is something we are sure responsible teachers will bear in mind."

Peter Jennings, spokesman for the Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham, said:

"We wouldn't want to be associated with it at all."

Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, dismissed the criticism:

"Sure, it's anti-clerical," he said. "But it's full of spiritual yearnings.

It's a hugely ambitious attempt to create a new mythology for a generation not served by organised religion."

Philip Pullman said: "My readers are more intelligent than that. The books aren't about the death of God, but about the coming of love. They're about leaving childhood behind and embracing adulthood."

Other members of the church have reacted more favourably to the production.

Pete Broadbent, Bishop of Willesden, welcomed the opportunity for religious debate. He said: "Pullman is a thoroughly good author. The books put questions about life, death and morality on the agenda. It's much better to be talking about religious questions than ignoring them."

His Dark Materials is the National Theatre's most ambitious production to date, costing an anticipated

Author Andrew O'Hagan has attacked the BBC show The Big Read, accusing it of being "anti-literary".

O'Hagan, who was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize with his novel Our Fathers, expressed anger that the show is based upon public opinion.

"Somebody said that The Big Read was not just un-literary but anti-literary and I think that's right," he said.

"It is based on the assumption that the opinion of the public is always beyond reproach."

O'Hagan added that he "hated the opinion of the population".

"Their choice in books is bound to be emetic, and so it has proved to be."

Author, critic and broadcaster Adam Mars-Jones further fuelled the debate by calling the show "obscene".

Public

However, show producer Hannah Beckerman has hit back at the criticisms.

"It's a public participation event," she said. "What I think is unique about the project is you're actually saying to the people who pay the licence fee, 'you tell us the books that you love most and we'll make a whole series about it'."

The programme sees viewers voting for their favourite books from a shortlist of 21, narrowed down from 100 by a public vote.

Over the next six weeks, various celebrities will put the case forward for their favourite book in the Top 21, before the winner is revealed on December 13.

According to figures, 2.3m people tuned in on Saturday 18 October, to see presenter Clive Anderson reveal the top 21, while 1.6m watched this Saturday's show in which Meera Syal, William Hague and Benedict Allen stated the case for their chosen books.

The list includes two books by the Bronte sisters, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice and Tolstoy's War And Peace.

JRR Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings is currently 8/11 favourite to top the list, followed by Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, and Pride And Prejudice at 5/1.

[BBC, 31/10/03]