Alan Bennett's selection of English verse by his favourite poets: Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Philip Larkin is accompanied by his own enlivening commentary and was recorded before a live audience. In this personal anthology, Alan Bennett has chosen more than seventy poems by six well-loved poets, discussing the writers and their verse in his customary conversational style through anecdote, shrewd appraisal and spare but telling biographical detail.

A meeting at Oxford University during World War II signalled the beginning of a lifelong friendship between two outstanding contributors to 20th century English literature: Philip Larkin, poet, and Kingsley Amis, the prolific novelist. Selected from correspondence written between 1943 and 1985, these letters offer an entertaining and illuminating insight into the prejudices, exasperations and in-jokes of two literary greats. A linking commentary complements the writers' own words.

All of the Shakespeare plays within the Argo Classics catalogue are performed by the Marlowe Dramatic Society and Professional Players. The Marlowe was founded in 1907 with a mission to focus on effective delivery of verse, respect the integrity of texts and rescue neglected plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries and the less performed plays of Shakespeare himself. The Marlowe has performed annually at Cambridge Arts Theatre since its opening in 1936 and continues to produce some of the finest actors of their generations.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a misogynist and a narcissist. Now Larkin scholar James Booth, for seventeen years a colleague of the poet's at the University of Hull, offers a very different portrait. Drawn from years of research and a wide variety of Larkin's friends and correspondents, this is the most comprehensive portrait of the poet yet published.

These are masterly readings, by renowned thespian Paul Schofield, of two substantial works of poetry by T.S. Eliot.

From his remarkable debut The Hawk in the Rain (1957) to his death in 1998, Ted Hughes was a colossal presence in the English literary landscape. He was also admired as a performer of his own work. Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes' masterful versions of stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, includes those of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas and Pyramus and Thisbe as well as many others.

Drawing upon all of his award-winning poetry collections, including Kid, Book of Matches, The Universal Home Doctor, Seeing Stars and The Unaccompanied, as well as his medieval translations and verse dramas, Paper Aeroplane represents a generous and thrilling gathering of work from one of contemporary poetry's most essential voices. 

From his remarkable debut The Hawk in the Rain (1957) to his death in 1998, Ted Hughes was a colossal presence in the English literary landscape. He was also admired as a performer of his own work. Crow is one of his most significant collections, focusing on the central figure of the crow - predatory, mocking and indestructible. Crow is read here by the author in its entirety and with narrative links not included in the published text.

The landmark selection of poems from the greatest poet of our age, read on audio by Seamus Heaney himself. 'His is "close-up" poetry - close up to thought, to the world, to the emotions. Few writers at work today, in verse or fiction, can give the sense of rich, fecund, lived life that Heaney does.(John Banville )More than any other poet since Wordsworth he can make us understand that the outside world is not outside, but what we are made of. (John Carey)

BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please is the longest-running broadcast of verse anywhere in the world. First aired in 1979, the programme, a request show which broadcasts to two million listeners a week, has become a unique record of the country's best-loved poems over the decades since its inception. The BBC has looked back through its rich archive of recordings to produce a poll of the most asked-for and most broadcast pieces ever: 50 of those poems are read here by Adjoa Andoh and Anton Lesser.

Volume two of the definitive collection of Seamus Heaney reading his own work, recorded in 2009 by RTE. Volume two contains four collections published between 1979 and 1991: Field Work, Station Island, The Haw Lantern and Seeing Things.

From his remarkable debut The Hawk in the Rain (1957) to his death in 1998, Ted Hughes was a colossal presence in the English literary landscape. He was also admired as a performer of his own work. In this 1994 recording, The Thought-Fox and Other Poems, he reads a selection of poems from The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Wodwo, Crow, Moortown, Cave Birds, Season Songs, Earth-Numb and New Selected Poems.

In 2010, the BBC and the British Museum embarked on an ambitious project: to tell the story of 2,000,000 years of human history using 100 objects selected from the museum's vast and renowned collection. Presented by the British Museum's then director Neil MacGregor, each episode focuses on a single object - from a Stone Age tool to a solar-powered lamp - and explains its significance in human history. 

His most intimate and epic work to date, Inside Story is the portrait of Martin Amis' extraordinary life, as a man and a writer. This novel had its birth in a death - that of the author's closest friend, Christopher Hitchens. We also encounter the vibrant characters who have helped define Martin Amis, from his father Kingsley, to his hero Saul Bellow, from Philip Larkin to Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and to the person who captivated his 20s, the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps. 

A masterly new recording by Ralph Fiennes. Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T. S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in 20th-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author.