The Secret life of books:
The Faerie Queene
Clip | The Secret Life of Books (2015) | BBC
In series 2 of The Secret Life of Books, Dr Janina Ramirez unravels Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan epic The Faerie Queene to reveal how this fantasy world of elves, nymphs and questing knights was written in the midst of the brutal Tudor occupation of Ireland, and how the writer's growing disillusionment with the conflict was coded into the poem's restless verse.