This week’s selection comes from Tom Lean, Project Interviewer for An Oral History of British Science. For nearly 60 years much of Britain’s electricity was supplied by a fleet of eleven Magnox nuclear power stations, built between the 1950s and the 1970s. They were the first series of full-scale nuclear… read more
This week’s selection comes from Rosy Hall, an ESRC-funded PhD student from Oxford University working with the BL’s Spoken English collections. Epic 3. b. colloq. (orig. and chiefly U.S.). Particularly impressive or remarkable; excellent, outstanding. (www.oed.com) According to one Urban Dictionary entry, the birth of ‘epic’ as a popular catchphrase… read more
Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English, writes: The recent publication of fixtures for the 2017-18 hockey season may have escaped the attention of many sports fans in the frenzy of Transfer Deadline Day, but this week’s friendly between Southgate and Durham University was a personal highlight as, with a… read more
Rosy Hall is an ESRC-funded PhD student from Oxford University working with the BL’s Spoken English collections. She writes: At the Evolving English exhibition at the British Library (2010-11), we asked visitors to submit recordings of their voices in specially designed telephone booths. Around 15,000 speakers took part, and the… read more
This week’s selection comes from Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music. Dr Peter Cooke has been researching music in Uganda since the 1960s. In 1968 he was in the Kisoro area in western Uganda where he recorded a few songs performed by members of the… read more