All the book-based movies and TV shows featuring Cyril Cusack, ranked

In 1932, Christy Brown is born into a family of 15. Christy’s father, who never believed Christy would amount to anything, starts to become proud after witnessing him use his left foot, the only body part he can fully control, to write the word mother on the floor with a piece of chalk.

On 22 August 1962, an assassination attempt is made on French President Charles de Gaulle by the militant underground organisation OAS in anger over the French government granting independence to Algeria. The remaining OAS leaders, now hiding in Austria, decide to make another attempt and hire a professional British assassin, who chooses the code name Jackal.

The West Berlin office of MI6, under station chief Alec Leamas, has suffered from reduced effectiveness. Leamas is approached by a series of operatives, each one passing him up the chain of the East German intelligence service, and he expresses a willingness to sell British secrets for money.

In 1943, Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Ewen Montagu devises a scheme to deceive the Nazis about the impending invasion of Southern Europe. The strong currents would almost certainly carry it ashore near where a known German secret agent operates. The non-existent Royal Marine, Major William Martin, would appear to be a plane-crash victim carrying falsified letters about a forthcoming Allied invasion of German-occupied Greece.

Since her birth in 1805, twenty-one years prior, Amy Dorrit has lived in the Marshalsea Prison for Debt, caring for her father, William, who now enjoys a position of privileged seniority as the Father of the Marshalsea. To help her family, Amy works as a seamstress for Mrs. Clennam, a cranky, cold and forbidding semi-invalid living in a crumbling home with servants, the sinister Jeremiah Flintwinch and his bumbling wife, Affery.

Based on one of Ray Bradbury’s most famous novels, Fahrenheit 451 came out in 1966, one year after a dystopian film named Alphaville was released. In the future, the government maintains control of public opinion by outlawing literature and maintaining a group of enforcers, to perform the necessary book burnings.

In a dystopian 1984, Winston Smith endures a squalid existence in the totalitarian superstate of Oceania under the constant surveillance of the Thought Police. Julia procures contraband food and clothing on the black market, and for a brief few months they secretly meet and enjoy an idyllic life of relative freedom and contentment together.

In 1955, William Smith, a widower, lives with his nine-year-old son, Danny, in a vardo behind the filling station and garage where he works in the English countryside. Only their gas station happens to sit on a piece of land that a local developer wants to buy, and when he won’t take no for an answer, and sets government inspectors and social works onto Danny and his father.

Charles Dickens’s story of a young man’s journey to maturity. Then virtually abandoned on the streets of Victorian London, David Copperfield is flung into manhood and contends bravely with the perils of big-city corruption and vice; hardships which ultimately fuel his triumph as a talented and successful writer.