Death of an Anarchist

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2016

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The controversial death in police custody of Italian anarchist, Giuseppe Pinelli, the Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett how Greece and Turkey almost came to war over a tiny rocky island in the Aegean sea, also the experimental film-maker Derek Jarman and how on Christmas day in 1968 Apollo 8 became the first spacecraft to leave the Earth's orbit and travel to the moon.

Photo:Giuseppe 'Pino' Pinelli, with his wife Licia and his daughters Silvia and Claudia. Credit: The Pinelli Family.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:04.7	the past brought to life by those who are there.
0:07.4	This week we've got the commander of the first American mission to go round the moon.
0:11.9	All of a sudden, hearing this total darkness was color.
0:15.0	The Earth was basically a blue marble with white clouds and sort of pinkish brown
0:20.0	continents you could see.
0:21.0	Also, we remember two towering figures from the world of art, the first. Chart know about films. Of course you see he had such an engaging personality. It was just wonderful to meet a real
0:35.9	rebel. And the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Beckett was one of the few people I've ever met who just really knew that as long as he was alive his
0:45.8	purpose was to write.
0:47.8	We'll get to that later, but first we're going back to Italy in the late 1960s when the country was driven by political violence from both left and right. Economic tensions and increasingly militant trade unions were tearing apart the fabric of Italian society. Acts of terror would be routinely blamed on
1:05.2	extremists from either political wing, anarchists or neo-fascists. The government was also
1:11.0	accused of running a strategy of tension,
1:13.1	indirectly carrying out attacks on its own people through proxy right-wing activists.
1:18.4	Anna O'Neill has been to Milan to hear about the true story behind one incident which inspired one of the playwright
1:24.4	Darrio Foes most popular works accidental death of an anarchist. The incident in
1:29.7	question was the tragic death of an Italian railway worker and anarchist
1:33.7	Giuseppe Pinelli who fell to his death while in police custody.
1:37.4	Now superintendent think carefully the report quotes you as having said
1:41.5	there are heavy suspicions pointing in his direction.
1:47.0	Did you say that?
1:48.0	Yes, in the beginning later.
1:50.0	The beginning, a good place to start, don't you agree?
	...

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