In Northern Ireland, from the late 70s to the early 90s, the IRA killed over 40 alleged informers.

But the man who often found, tortured and sometimes killed these people on behalf of the IRA

was himself an informer, a secret British army agent with the codename Stakeknife.

Who gets to play God? And why me? Why my family?

When lies are still being told to this day, who do you believe?

I wouldn't even know where to start, and I'm with the IRA.

Steakknife.

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Hello, the Japanese philosopher Soetso Yanagi once stated that the future is new and the past is new.

The world we were so accustomed to has become an unfamiliar, strange place.

All before us, all we see has become a subject of re-evaluation.

Well, today we're re-evaluating a literary legacy,

warping the present with the uncanny contemporary short stories of John Lancaster,

and looking to the future with new black British writing.

Past, present and future refreshed.

We start today then with a fresh look at Charles Dickens,

an author whose prolific output has spawned an equally large amount of critical writing and biography.

And yet, as Professor John Mullen points out in his new book, The Artful Dickens,

he's often seen only as an entertainer, the creator of larger-than-life characters and dramatic plots with a complicated personal life.

Now, Mullen puts aside biography and popular perceptions and instead focuses on the literary techniques Charles Dickens used to create the worlds and characters which are so distinctively and recognisably his own. Like Pip,

narrator of great expectations. My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than 20 years older than I,

...