Revisit: 2019 Wolfson History Prize Discussion
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2020
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From classical birds to Nazi legacies, Oscar Wilde to Queen Victoria in India, early building to maritime trading: Rana Mitter and an audience at the British Academy debate history writing and hear from the six historians on the 2019 shortlist. The books are:
Building Anglo-Saxon England by John Blair Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice by Mary Fulbrook Trading in War: London’s Maritime World in the Age of Cook and Nelson by Margarette Lincoln Birds in the Ancient World: Winged Words by Jeremy Mynott Oscar: A Life by Matthew Sturgis Empress: Queen Victoria and India by Miles Taylor
The winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2019 was Mary Fulbrook. You can find Free Thinking discussions with the 2020 shortlisted historians being broadcast on Radio 3 and available as Arts & Ideas podcasts and there is a playlist showcasing new academic and historical research here https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90
Producer: Jacqueline Smith
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 |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, |
| 0:34.5 | music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Ron Amitter, and thanks for listening to this episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:41.2 | As part of our current focus on the best history writing, |
| 0:44.2 | here's a chance to hear the discussion I chaired with the finalists for the 2019 Wolfson History Prize, |
| 0:49.5 | recorded with an audience at the British Academy. |
| 0:51.8 | And if you want to know who won, I promise I can reveal that |
| 0:54.7 | at the end of the discussion. Happy listening. |
| 1:00.6 | Hello, today we're looking forward to the past as we meet the finalists for Britain's |
| 1:09.9 | most prestigious award for history, the Wolfson Prize. |
| 1:12.6 | The winner receives a cheque, or possibly a post-law, or do they still have those, I wonder, of 40,000 pounds, |
| 1:19.6 | and the accolade of having written a history book that's impressed fellow historians and the wider public alike. |
| 1:25.6 | We're at the British Academy in London, the UK's home |
| 1:29.3 | for humanities and social sciences, where our six finalists are champing at their documents, |
| 1:34.7 | and what they all have in common is that they take a period that you may think you know and then |
| 1:40.5 | surprise you with it. So let's meet our authors. Miles Taylor, your book is Empress, |
| 1:47.3 | Queen Victoria and India. When you were researching this book, did you find out anything that made |
| 1:52.8 | you think, I wish they'd put that on that TV drama about Victoria they have on Sunday nights? |
| 1:58.6 | In 1838, she sent the first ever mango from Bombay. |
| 2:04.5 | Mangos had never been seen in Britain nor eaten, and she gets the first one. |
| 2:09.4 | In a later film, Victoria and Abdul that some of the audience might have seen, |
... |
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