Anne Enright + the value of gossip

Arts & Ideas

BBC

Society & Culture

4.2 • 599 Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Irish novelist Anne Enright talks to Laurence Scott about her new book Actress and being the inaugural Irish laureate, plus a discussion of gossip past and present with Emily Butterworth, Daisy Black and political journalist and writer Marie Le Conte.

Anne Enright's novels include The Gathering; The Forgotten Waltz and The Green Road.

Emily Butterworth works on early modern literature and thought, with a particular interest in Montaigne and in deviant speech and language. Her book The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France, looks at forms of excessive speech – babble, gossip and rumour – and why they were considered so personally and politically dangerous in the sixteenth century.

Daisy Black researches medieval history at the University of Wolverhampton and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the AHRC to put academic research on the radio. She writes about women in performance in The Routledge History of Women in Early Modern Europe. Her book Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama is out this year.

Marie Le Conte is a political journalist who has worked for the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard and BuzzFeed. Her book Haven't You Heard? Gossip, power, and how politics really works explores the potency of gossip in the Westminster bubble.

You can find Matthew Sweet and guests discussing What is Speech? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3

Producer: Paula McGinley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?
0:23.3	It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream.
0:28.8	Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds.
0:33.2	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:36.8	Hello, I'm Lauren Scott.
0:38.5	Thanks for listening to this Arts and Ideas podcast from the BBC.
0:42.0	In this episode, we'll be discussing performance and charisma with the novelist Anne Enright.
0:46.7	And don't tell a soul.
0:48.9	But we're also exploring the value of gossip today and in the 16th century.
0:53.8	Obviously, you didn't hear this from me.
0:56.7	But first...
0:57.8	Hello, I'm Jessica Curry, host of the Sound of Gaming podcast.
1:02.5	If you love video game music or chatting over a cup of it with some amazing composers as much as I do,
1:08.5	then you really must come on over and join us. I'll be meeting a
1:12.6	different composer each week to talk about their work in games, chatting about the music
1:17.8	in some of my favourite scores, and lifting the lid on just what us composers are getting up to
1:23.4	behind the curtain while you're playing. Search BBC Sounds for Sound of Gaming and hit subscribe to listen now.
1:34.8	Hello.
1:35.9	In 2002, my creative writing lecturer was teaching us about really good first lines and literature.
1:41.9	Some, he said, are meant to make you gasp. Then he picked up a
1:45.8	novel by the Irish writer Anne Enright. It was called The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, and he read us
1:51.0	the opening sentence, which went, Francisco Salano Lopez put his penis inside Eliza Lynch
	...

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