Brian Abbott

The lives of Bodie and Doyle, top agents for Britain's CI5 (Criminal Intelligence 5), and their controller, George Cowley. The mandate of CI5 was to fight terrorism and similar high-profile crimes. Cowley, a hard ex-MI5 operative, hand-picked each of his men. Bodie is a cynical ex-SAS paratrooper and mercenary whose nature ran to controlled violence, while his partner, Doyle, comes to CI5 from the regular police force, and is more of an open minded liberal. Their relationship is often contentious, but they are the top men in their field, and the ones to whom Cowley always assigned to the toughest cases.

A young man journeys from a difficult childhood to maturity, exploring social injustice, personal development, and the complexities of human relationships.

After eight years in prison for a crime he didn't commit – the murder of his wife – John Madson has been released and seeks revenge on the policeman that framed him, DI Rourke. He meets Magda, a feisty barrister, willing to help him legally and also gets him a job as an outside clerk in her chambers. As the wheels of justice grind slowly forward, Madson begins to rebuild his life and feels the need to help Magda's other clients, who the law appears to be treating unfairly.

This Lost World is a splendid BBC TV dramatisation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous adventure story. Bob Hoskins makes an unusually genial Professor Challenger, far less of a bully than Doyle's character, but his slightly stereotyped companions are nicely filled out by a solid cast. James Fox is Challenger's more timid but still covertly adventurous rival, Tom Ward is the moustachioed big game hunter who faces an Allosaurus with an elephant gun, and Matthew Rhys plays the tagalong reporter hoping to impress his faithless fiancée.

A surreal and nightmarish selection of short stories derived from the cult collection Dirty Faxes, refracted through the neurosis of a middle-aged writer.