Michael Bird is a writer, art historian and radio broadcaster. He has published many books, essays and articles on modern and contemporary art. His books include Artists' Letters (2019) and 100 Ideas That Changed Art (2012).

Orlando Bird is a journalist who writes on art and culture, and is a regular contributor to The Telegraph and The Financial Times. He lives in London.

01. 'Got My Steam Up': Work in Progress
Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, Doris Lessing, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, Sylvia Plath

02. 'In This Strange Country': Places and People
Elizabeth Bishop, Charlotte Bronte, Colette, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Nabokov

03. 'My Glory Days': Writer to Writer
Samuel Beckett, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul, Leo Tolstoy, William Butler Yeats, Emile Zola

04. 'The Dreadful Steel': When Troubles Come
Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Frances Burney, Miguel de Cervantes, Franz Kafka, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde

05. 'I Love Your Verse': Friends and Lovers
Guillaume Apollinaire, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, Mary Godwin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Keats, Philip Larkin, Arthur Miller, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Virginia Woolf

06. 'Yes I Am Radical': This is History
George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Nadine Gordimer, Victor Hugo, Zora Neale Hurston, Samuel Johnson, Jack Kerouac, Siegfried Sassoon, Stendhal, Mark Twain

07. 'Too Darned Stupid': Patrons, Public, Publishers
Chinua Achebe, Honoré de Balzac, Bertolt Brecht, Angela Carter, Shelagh Delaney, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Ayn Rand, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift

08. 'That's All': Last Words
Lord Byron, Seamus Heaney, Katherine Mansfield, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mary Wollstonecraft, Stefan Zweig