This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. After a summer in which most of us have holidayed in the UK, I’ve been fascinated on my travels to note a growing enthusiasm for commercial products that celebrate local speech and identity. Gift shops and craft stores…

Unfortunately, the third-party platform that the British Library uses for email notifications for our blogs is making changes to its infrastructure. This means that, from August 2021, we anticipate that email notifications will no longer be sent to subscribers (although the provider has been unable to specify when exactly these…

This week’s selection comes from Steve Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary and Creative Recordings. In this week’s ‘Recording of the Week’ we feature the stentorian tones of Louisa Ann Meurig Morris (1899-1991), who was well-known as a spiritualist and medium in the 1930s. In January 1931, she featured in the…

Richard Copeman with his Bettini cylinder (photo © Jonathan Summers) By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music In February 2020, just before lockdown, collector Richard Copeman contacted me about a concert cylinder he had just purchased in Paris. He wondered if we would like to make a digital transfer of…

This week’s selection comes from Giulia Baldorilli, Reference Specialist. In the last year of closed performance venues, we have almost forgotten what it means to go to the theatre. Photo by Alessia Chinazzo on Unsplash In this interview from 2008, recorded as part of the Theatre Archive Project, Barbara Silcock…