With Great Pleasure - With Great Pleasure at Christmas

Political journalist and Today programme presenter James Naughtie shares some of the pieces of prose and verse which have entertained and inspired him over the years. The readers are Alison Steadman, Bill Paterson and David Haig. Extracts read in this programme: from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Simon Armitage (poem) Published by Faber & Faber from Pig Ho-oo-oey (prose) From: Blandings Castle, by PG Wodehouse opening line from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene Published by Vintage opening line from Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier Published by Penguin opening line from Scaramouche, by Giuseppe Sabbatini Published by Hutchinson Library Services from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville Published by Penguin Classics from Venice, by Jan Morris Published by Faber & Faber from Greenmantle, by John Buchan Published by Wordsworth Classics from Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh Published by Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics from Abducting a General From: Words of Mercury, by Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed. Artemis Cooper Published by John Murray from Highways and Byways in the Western Highlands, by Seton Gordon Published by Macmillan The Little White Rose, by Hugh MacDiarmid (poem) From: Hugh MacDiarmid, Selected Poetry Published by Carcanet Midnight, Lochinver, by Norman MacCaig (poem) from: Norman MacCaig, Collected Poems Published by Chatto Poetry from The Testament of Cresseid, by Robert Henryson, trans. Seamus Heaney Published by Faber & Faber Letter from John Kipling to his family 1915 From: O Beloved Kids: Rudyard Kipling's letters to his children, ed. Eliot L. Gilbert Published by Little Books Last Post, by Carol Ann Duffy (poem) Commissioned by the Today programme from Point of Departure, by James Cameron Published by Arthur Barker from Echoes of the Jazz Age (prose) From: The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories, by F Scott Fitzgerald Published by Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics from Bleak House, by Charles Dickens Published by Oxford World's Classics Sonnet 30, by William Shakespeare (poem) From: Shakespeare's Sonnets Published by Gerald Duckworth from Paradise Lost, by John Milton (poem) From: John Milton, Complete English Poems Published by Everyman from Right Ho, Jeeves, by PG Wodehouse Published by Penguin.