Beatrix Potter with Patricia Routledge

L'acte de la beauté

Louisa May Alcott, author of "Little Women," leads a literary double life, writing under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard, an identity that remains until the 1940s.

A feature-length documentary on the life of one of the last surviving actresses from the golden age of Hollywood – Joan Collins. This epic film is told from the ringside as Joan narrates her rollercoaster life story with her inimitable wit and verve. A worldwide television phenomenon with her decade-defining role in Dynasty, Collins shares her extraordinary archive and never before seen home movie footage, giving an intimate glimpse into one of the world’s most iconic figures. Against a backdrop of Collins’s own narration, her story showcases the extraordinary life of a woman who has lived through the glitz, the glamour and the enduring moments of Hollywood history, and survived it all with panache.

A poetic look at the life and legacy of legendary author Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), who wrote over over a hundred short stories and 44 novels of mind-bending sci-fi, exploring themes of authority, drugs, theology, mental illness and much more.

Rumer Godden the 88 year old author is taken back to India, where she lived from 1908-1945 to revisit her unconventional life there and to share with her daughter the experiences which inform all her writing.

Ralph Ellison was an African-American writer and essayist, who's only novel Invisible Man (1953) gained a wide critical success. Ellison's ambitious journey from a childhood of hardship and poverty to celebrated African American writer is chronicled in this inspiring program through exclusive interviews and personal recollection.

Documentary about Kathy Acker where she talks about her writing and her life in New York.

Xaviera Hollander, 'The Happy Hooker': Portrait of a Sexual Revolutionary is a documentary about one of the world's most important sexual icons. Interviews with Larry King and commentary from America's foremost sexologists explore Xaviera's rise and fall, her deportation from the United States and Canada, and her political significance to the feminist movement.

It is late 2004, and 34-year-old Englishman Alistair Appleton is about to fly from London to the Brazilian coast, where he will drink ayahuasca for the first time. With wit, insight, and sensitivity, Alistair shares this experience with us, and chats with some fellow participants before and after the ayahuasca ceremonies. For the past few years, Alistair had been working as a television presenter. In 2000, he started making trips to the Centre for World Peace and Health in Scotland to learn how to meditate. When clinical psychologist Silvia Polivoy opened an ayahuasca healing center in Bahia in 2004, Alistair faced his fears and seized the opportunity to attend.

Jack Kerouac's life is examined through interviews with his contemporaries and friends including Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William S. Burroughs. The film also employs dramatic recreations of Kerouac's life beginning with his early childhood.

RICHARD WRIGHT was an African-American author of novels, short stories and non-fiction that dealt with powerful themes and controversial topics. Much of his works concerned racial themes that helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Born on a plantation in Mississippi, Wright was a descendent of the first slaves who arrived in Jamestown Massachusetts. This program follows his arduous path from sharecropper to literary giant. Through authors like H.L. Menken, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, he discovered that literature could be used as a catalyst for social change. In 1937 Wright moved to New York and his work began to garner national attention for it's political and social commentary. Much of Wright's writing focused on the African American community and experience; his novel Native Son won him a Guggenheim Fellowship and was adapted to the Broadway stage with Orson Welles directing in 1941.

On an overcast morning in 1999, William Gibson, father of cyberpunk and author of the cult-classic novel Neuromancer, stepped into a limousine and set off on a road trip around North America. The limo was rigged with digital cameras, a computer, a television, a stereo, and a cell phone. Generated entirely by this four-wheeled media machine, No Maps for These Territories is both an account of Gibson’s life and work and a commentary on the world outside the car windows. Here, the man who coined the word "cyberspace" offers a unique perspective on Western culture at the edge of the new millennium, and in the throes of convulsive, tech-driven change.

A moving portrait of one of the most loved and read Danish poets, Halfdan Rasmussen. The film covers both the early years with poverty and wartime on to success and the humorous nonsense verses that has made Rasmussen one of the most read authors in Denmark.

Surpassed only by the Bible and Shakespeare, Agatha Christie is the most successful writer of all time. We all know her characters and incredible plot twists, but what do we know about Agatha herself? Combining rare access to Agatha's family, her personal archive and speaking to those who know her work best, discover what made the world's most successful crime writer tick.

A visually stunning film on acclaimed author David Adams Richards and his connection to one of Canada’s most overlooked yet breathtaking regions.

1990 TV adaptation of a 1979 biographical play by Ned Sherrin & Caryl Brahms, based on the life of conductor and impresario Sir Thomas Beecham. With Timothy West as Beecham.

Armando Iannucci presents a personal argument in praise of the genius of Charles Dickens. Through the prism of the author's most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield, Armando looks beyond Dickens - the national institution - and instead explores the qualities of Dickens's work that still make him one of the best British writers. While Dickens is often celebrated for his powerful depictions of Victorian England and his role as a social reformer, this programme foregrounds the elements of his writing which make him worth reading, as much for what he tells us about ourselves in the twenty-first century as our ancestors in the nineteenth. Armando argues that Dickens's remarkable use of language and his extraordinary gift for creating characters make him a startlingly experimental and psychologically penetrating writer who demands not just to be adapted for television but to be read and read again.

C.S. Lewis's biographer A.N. Wilson goes in search of the man behind Narnia, a highly secretive man whose personal life was marked by the loss of the three women he most loved.

Animals, Whores & Dialogue is more than just a sequel to Wayne Ewing's 2003 Breakfast with Hunter which Variety declared to be a movie "that captures the essence of his [Hunter Thompson's] jazzy pop journalism." This new feature length documentary goes even deeper into Gonzo journalism with intimate scenes of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson at work writing, editing, and recounting the creation of classics like Hells Angels and Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Animals, whores & dialogue were metaphors and an element Hunter almost always wove into his writing, and the words were emblazoned on his typewriter.

A documentary about the legendary series of nationally televised debates in 1968 between two great public intellectuals, the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley Jr. Intended as commentary on the issues of their day, these vitriolic and explosive encounters came to define the modern era of public discourse in the media, marking the big bang moment of our contemporary media landscape when spectacle trumped content and argument replaced substance. Best of Enemies delves into the entangled biographies of these two great thinkers, and luxuriates in the language and the theater of their debates, begging the question, "What has television done to the way we discuss politics in our democracy today?"