PICTURES FROM ITALY 📚: with Pete Orford Artwork

Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥

Actor Dominic Gerrard hosts an exciting new series that explores the Life and Times of Charles Dickens: his extraordinary novels, who he was as a person, his career as a performer, and his activism.
Guests include: Stephen Fry, Miriam Margolyes, Armando Iannucci, Alice Loxton, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Lucinda Hawksley, John Mullan, Pen Vogler, Andrew Davies, Rosie Holt, Bernard Cornwell .... and many more academics, writers, actors, directors and descendants of the great man himself!
Along side these interviews there are special Dickens readings from across his works ...
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Charles Dickens: A Brain on Fire! 🔥

PICTURES FROM ITALY 📚: with Pete Orford

August 16, 2025 • Dominic Gerrard

In the July of 1844 Dickens, his wife Catherine, their five children, his sister-in-law Georgina - plus three servants and their dog Timber - left London for Italy. What followed was an extraordinary adventure for them all.

Returning to the series to talk to Dominic about his new Oxford University Press edition of Pictures From Italy is the inimitable Dr. Pete Orford also returning to read excerpts from the book is the brilliant actor Tom Andrews ...

The recording Vivaldi's Four Seasons has been granted under license from Epidemic Sound

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Thank you so much!

Host: Dominic Gerrard
Series Artwork: Léna Gibert
Original Music: Dominic Gerrard

Thank you for listening!