Saxophone diplomacy and bulletproof vests

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 25 July 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Natalia Grincheva, an expert in cultural diplomacy from Lasalle, University of the Arts in Singapore.

We start by hearing about when US president Bill Clinton was presented with a saxophone on a 1994 visit to Prague and he and the Czech president Vaclav Havel performed together on stage.

Then, India’s first female anthropologist, Irawati Karve.

Twenty years on, the cousin of John Charles de Menezes, describes the day the unarmed Brazilian man was shot dead by anti-terrorism police in London.

Plus, the discovery of the super-strong fibre Kevlar in 1965 which was used in bulletproof vests.

And finally, 50 years on from the premiere of the Broadway hit A Chorus Line, an original cast member shares her memories.

Contributors:

Urmilla Deshpande – granddaughter of Irawati Karve.

Patricia da Silva – cousin of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Baayork Lee – Connie in A Chorus Line

Plus, archive recording of Stephanie Kwolek, and material from the Vaclav Havel Center and the William J Clinton Presidential Library.

(Photo: President Bill Clinton accepts a saxophone as a gift from a Belgian delegation in 1994. Credit: Luke Frazza/AFP via Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Zing Singh. And I'm Simon Jack. And Good Bad Billionaire is back. It's the podcast
0:06.1	exploring the lives and livelihoods of some of the world's richest people. But this time there's a twist.
0:11.3	On Good Bad Dead billionaire, we are looking back on the lives of some titans of U.S. industry.
0:16.4	Like the first ever billionaire, John D. Rockefeller. The founder of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford.
0:21.8	And the First Lady of Wall Street, Hetty Green.
0:24.2	And Simon and I are asking you if they were good, bad or just another billionaire.
0:28.3	Good bad billionaire.
0:29.4	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:36.4	Hello and welcome to The History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson,
0:41.2	the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:44.4	This week, India's early 20th century anthropologist who studied tribes in the rainforests to dispel racist theories.
0:52.1	They would have to process the samples that they took in the night
0:56.9	and then go to sleep.
0:58.9	And as soon as they took the blood samples out,
1:00.6	all the mosquitoes would come swarming.
1:02.6	Also, 20 years on, the fatal shooting of an unarmed Brazilian man
1:06.4	by police in London,
1:08.1	50 years after its Broadway premiere,
1:10.3	how a chorus line took the world by storm,
1:13.2	and the inventor of the fibre five times stronger than steel that has multiple uses.
1:18.8	Here we have a helmet reinforced with Kevlar, airplane. Kevlar is also used in helicopters,
1:26.5	in the space shuttle.
	...

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