The novelist Benjamin Markovits, the literary historian Lara Feigel and the broadcaster and essayist Kevin Jackson join Matthew Sweet and an audience at Southbank Centre, London to explore some of the key books published in 1946 – a year in which Penguin Classics launched in the UK with a version of the Odyssey, Herman Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature, popular fiction included crime stories by Agatha Christie, Edmund Crispin and John Dickson Carr and children were reading Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, the first of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and the second Thomas the Tank Engine book.

Their particular choices include Back, a novel by Henry Green, All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, Jill by Philip Larkin and The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Recorded in front of an audience at Southbank as part of Sound Frontiers: Celebrating seven decades of pioneering music and culture from Radio 3 and the Third Programme.

Producer: Zahid Warley.