Recording of the week: Virginia Woolf’s voice

This week’s selection comes from Sarah O’Reilly, oral historian and interviewer for National Life Stories on the Authors’ Lives project. Enter the Sir John Ritblat Treasures Gallery on the upper ground floor of the British Library in London and on your left you’ll find a pair of headphones. Through it…

Recording of the week: James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union

By Steve Cleary, Lead Curator, Literary and Creative Recordings. The British Library launches a new web resource this week. It is called ‘Speaking Out’, and it seeks to explore the spoken word in its most forceful guise: that of the public address. Through historical archive recordings, together with new essays,…

‘Violence, shock, life’: the sounds of Pierre Boulez’s formative years

Pierre Boulez (1968) Guest blog by Edison Fellow Dr Caroline Potter Pierre Boulez was one of the most important musicians of the 20th and early 21st centuries. His own music is often considered forbiddingly cerebral, not least because musicologists have tended to focus on its construction, but I contend that…

Recording of the week: Carol Ann Duffy reads ‘Mrs Midas’

This week’s selection comes from Dr Eva del Rey, Curator of Drama and Literature Recordings and Digital Performance. I have been listening to Carol Ann Duffy reading her poem ‘Mrs Midas’ at an English PEN event held in London in 1994. King Midas is known in Greek mythology for his…

Recording of the week: Mohamed Choukri at the ICA

This week’s selection comes from Steve Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary and Creative Recordings. Tangier, Morocco by Brett Hodnett – used under Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA-2.0 Today’s selection features the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri (1935-2003), recorded at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, 22 September 1992. Choukri’s first volume…