Others in the running for an guild award in March include BBC Radio 3's World and Music, a sequence of classical music interspersed with both popular and less familiar poems and proseread by leading actors.
These lines from Leviathan - Hobbes' best-known work and a masterpiece of English prose - have been read as meaning that humans are by nature violent animals.
"Bruges-La-Morte" ascends to the status of a masterpiece on the beauty of its prose (especially if you can read it in the French) as well as the refinement of its sensibility and the inherent drama of its plot.