Late Returns
BBC Radio 4

The writer Nicholas Royle began his exploration of the world of the unreturned library book (9 February) at Manchester Central Library. Keeping his voice down, in what, he explained had been his teenage stamping ground, he confessed himself a serial offender.

A copy of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes abstracted from a Parisian library in 1984; 15 numbers of a French-Algerian literary magazine purloined from the University of London; a François Mauriac novel that belonged to Manchester Grammar School … nearly three decades later, Royle’s conscience had begun to prick him. It was time to make amends.