This week’s selection comes from Stephen Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary & Creative Recordings. It is now 10 years since the death of Norman Mailer, one of the best-known and most widely read US authors of the post-war period. This week’s recording features Mailer in discussion with Melvyn Bragg at… read more
This week’s selection comes from Tom Lean, Project Interviewer for An Oral History of British Science. On 8th November 1957, hundreds of British military and scientific personnel gathered at Christmas Island, a remote speck of land in the Pacific Ocean. They were there for Operation Grapple X, the first successful… read more
Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English, writes: We can all probably remember the first time we met a Scouser [= ‘person from Liverpool’] face to face. Leafing through Tony Crowley’s excellent Liverpool English Dictionary immediately transported me back to 1983 and a fellow first year student in halls of… read more
This week’s selection comes from Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music. Born in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a writer, poet, artist and teacher. He was the first Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1913, for his poetry collection Gitanjali…. read more
This week’s selection comes from Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music Recordings. Those of us brought up in the 1980s and 1990s only hearing Haydn performed on period instruments missed a lot. While these were innovative and fascinating, older recordings of symphony orchestras – with large string sections performing Classical… read more