Free Thinking - Sound Frontiers: Books of 1946
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2016
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The novelist Benjamin Markovits, the literary historian Lara Feigel and the broadcaster and essayist Kevin Jackson join Matthew Sweet and an audience at Southbank Centre, London to explore some of the key books published in 1946 – a year in which Penguin Classics launched in the UK with a version of the Odyssey, Herman Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature, popular fiction included crime stories by Agatha Christie, Edmund Crispin and John Dickson Carr and children were reading Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, the first of Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and the second Thomas the Tank Engine book.
Their particular choices include Back, a novel by Henry Green, All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, Jill by Philip Larkin and The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
Recorded in front of an audience at Southbank as part of Sound Frontiers: Celebrating seven decades of pioneering music and culture from Radio 3 and the Third Programme.
Producer: Zahid Warley.
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 |
| 0:27.0 | when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | Welcome to the arts and ideas download from the free-thinking team at the BBC. |
| 0:44.3 | Thank you. ideas download from the Free Thinking team at the BBC. Hello and welcome to Freethinking, which has escaped from the concrete Anderson shelter |
| 0:49.2 | of Broadcasting House and emerged blinking into the light of the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank. |
| 0:56.0 | If we in this room had all been on this spot in 1946, what would we have experienced? |
| 1:01.5 | Well, we might have noticed a commotion at the Savoy Hotel on the other side of the Thames, |
| 1:07.0 | striking chambermaids and kitchen porters, shouting a slogan about doing something to the police, |
| 1:13.1 | which is also a track on the gangster rap album Straight Out of Compton by the NYU's. |
| 1:18.7 | There were guests, too, chucking pennies down at them in contempt. |
| 1:22.5 | Or we might have looked back towards Waterloo Station and seen what Alistair Cook saw that year, arriving to discuss |
| 1:28.8 | starting a radio column for the BBC. Waterloo, he said, was as dark as a catacomb. There was |
| 1:35.4 | everywhere a dire shortage of heat and electricity, coal, food. Soap was a luxury, napkins at meals, |
| 1:43.0 | long-forgotten, shoes worn thin. |
| 1:45.6 | A usually dapper friend of mine sat next to me the first evening, |
| 1:49.4 | raised his index finger and ran it reverently down the crease in my trousers. |
| 1:54.0 | He said, I haven't seen that for five years. |
| 1:57.2 | Even if you were shivering in crumpled trousers, though, |
| 1:59.9 | there would have been some consolations. |
| 2:01.6 | The thought perhaps that in Berlin, people were so hungry that they were boiling up wallpaper and eating the paste. |
... |
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