Recording of the week: Frank Bowling on learning to draw

This week’s selection comes from Camille Johnston, Oral History Assistant Archivist. Darwin Building, Royal College of Art in the City of Westminster, London, U.K. Chmee2 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) Frank Bowling won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where he enrolled to study painting in 1959. In this…

Recording of the week: ‘I didn’t come into the jungle to look at trees and lianas!’

This week’s selection comes from Andrea Zarza Canova, Curator of World & Traditional Music. Cover of ‘Healing, Feasting and Magical Ritual. Songs & Dances from Papua New Guinea’ (TSCD918) Former senior producer for BBC Radio 3 John Thornley made this field recording in 1987, in Kei Village, near Mount Hagen,…

Recording of the week: Dusting books

This week’s selection comes from Camille Johnston, Oral History Assistant Archivist. Three men dusting books, one bent over © New York Public Library Archives, The New York Public Library John Milne, born in 1929 in Aberdeen, worked for Bisset’s Bookshop in the 1950s. In his life story recording he reflected…

Recording of the week: Richard Attenborough on Michael Powell

This week’s selection comes from Steve Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary and Creative Recordings. Richard Attenborough at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. Photo by gdcgraphics at https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/ CC BY 2.0 In a previous blog post I introduced the Anwar Brett collection. This comprises interviews and press conferences featuring film…

Recording of the week: ‘I didn’t catch any of that!’

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. In this audio clip, Iona McDonald describes a familiar experience – failure to understand someone from a different part of the country or English-speaking world. Extremely broad dialect speakers can occasionally seem unintelligible, even to speakers of closely…