Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela,

Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin. Listen on BBC Sounds.

This is a download from the BBC. To find out more, visit BBC.com.ukuk slash radio four.

Hello on today's program,

What Dickens did wrong,

how we can learn to appreciate him better

by scrutinising his faults.

Wanted, dead or alive,

the art of choosing subjects for biographies.

But first, a little vinyl jazz

to get you in the mood.

Music a little vinyl jazz to get you in the mood. Charles Kinnard, one of the artists who formed the soundtrack to the latest book by Michael

Sheaubon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Uber-cool author of the likes of the adventures of cavalier in play and the Yiddish policeman's union.

Sheebon is to novelists what Quentin Tarantino is to movies,

a pop culture-guzzling, inventive voice deeply influenced by the prevailing forces of a 1970s childhood,

from black exploitation movies and comic superheroes to the groovy days

of funk and soul. Raised in the racially integrated social experiment that was Columbia, Maryland,

Sheebon's latest novel, Telegraph Avenue, examines the less idyllic reality of contemporary America.

Archie Stallings is an African-American who, along with

his white partner Nat Jaffe, earns a small independent record store locked in battle against an

urban mall developer who just happens to be America's fifth richest black man. Steeped in the romance

of the record player and displaying a forensic knowledge of obscure jazz funk, the novel riffs on the relationship between Brooklyn's owners, their wives Gwen and Aviva, who together run a midwifery business, and Archie's abandoned son, Titus.

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