The 2020 Wolfson History Prize: David Abulafia, Hallie Rubenhold, Prashant Kidambi
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From Indian cricket, a survey of the oceans to the women killed by Jack the Ripper: Rana Mitter with the second set of shortlisted authors for the history writing prize.
David Abulafia The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans Hallie Rubenhold The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper Prashant Kidambi Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire
You can hear the other shortlisted historians in a progarmme broadcast on May 12th and available as an Arts & Ideas Podcast. It features Marion Turner has written Chaucer: A European Life Toby Green is the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution John Barton is nominated for A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths
The winner of the 2020 Wolfson History Prize is announced on June 15th 2020.
In the Free Thinking archives you can find more history - Diarmuid McCulloch on Martin Luther in Breaking Free Martin Luther's Revolution https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08nf02y William Dalrymple on The Shadow of Empire and Colonialism https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000c0f7 Peter Frankopan and Maya Jasanoff on What Kind of History Should We Write https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00016vf Tracy Borman on the Tudors in The Way We Used to Feel https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003zp2 Fern Ridell, Kate Lister and Robin Mitchell on How we talk about women's bodies and sex https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f5n6
Producer: Robyn Read
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 when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:37.0 | Hello, in a moment, I'm going to let you loose on three fantastic historians |
| 0:41.1 | who are taking their place on the shortlist for the prestigious 2020 Wolfson Prize for History. |
| 0:46.6 | They'll be taking us across the oceans, onto the cricket field, |
| 0:50.0 | and into the hellish back streets of Victorian London. |
| 0:53.0 | But before we start on that journey, |
| 0:55.1 | a brief word. Hello, I'm Verity Sharp, and with us all in lockdown, time can hang heavy, |
| 1:03.3 | and things can get a little bit claustrophobic. So I'm here just to encourage you to go to the one |
| 1:09.6 | place where you can fly free, and that's your imagination. |
| 1:14.0 | And with Radio 3's Slow Radio Podcast, there is no limit to where we can go with that. |
| 1:20.1 | You can go there to listen to the sounds of birds. |
| 1:23.0 | You can visit the mountains, or you can remember our once bustling cities. You can hear tales of seals and |
| 1:30.7 | selky folk or listen to rain on a hot tin roof or discover the secrets of an ancient cathedral. |
| 1:38.6 | It's all there. Just step back and immerse yourself and search for slow radio on BBC Sounds. |
| 1:46.9 | Hello, today on Freethinking, we're going to slip away from lockdown by reminding |
| 1:51.3 | ourselves of the pleasures of leather on willow. And if that's not enough to make you long for |
| 1:56.2 | the outdoors, we're going to tease you a bit more with a trip not across one but three oceans. |
| 2:02.2 | We'll also take a rather darker journey to rediscover the voices silenced by the crimes |
... |
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