Kenneth Steven considers the introduction of wild animals into the Highlands of Scotland, reflecting in poetry at the end of each Essay. A consignment of eight reindeer landed at Clydebank near Glasgow on April 12th in 1952 thanks to a Swedish Sami Mikel Utsi who hailed from a long line of reindeer herders. There were eight reindeer and they were from Mikel Utsi’s own family herd in Arctic Sweden. The crossing had taken four days and by all accounts it had been pretty rough. Those first eight be...
Nov 23, 2023•13 min
Writer and musician Kate Kennedy takes a personal look at five lost cellos, and what they can tell us of those who played and loved them and how our identities are shaped by the physical, social and psychological impacts of performance. What happens when you re-imagine what a cello can be? From pieces of derelict instruments, and offcuts of wood, along with cutting edge technology, Kate Kennedy is making a prototype of a new, hybrid cello, that looks nothing like we might expect. This is a cello...
Nov 23, 2023•14 min
Writer and musician Kate Kennedy takes a personal look at five lost cellos, and what they can tell us of those who played and loved them and how our identities are shaped by the physical, social and psychological impacts of performance. Destroyed and resurrected, how does an instrument's identity change? The 'Mara' Stradivarius is one of the greatest cellos in the world, but in the 1960s it was completely destroyed when the Trieste Trio nearly drowned jumping with it from a burning boat in thick...
Nov 23, 2023•14 min
Writer and musician Kate Kennedy takes a personal look at five lost cellos, and what they can tell us of those who played and loved them and how our identities are shaped by the physical, social and psychological impacts of performance. What does it mean to be saved by an instrument? Anita Lasker-Wallfisch became known as the cellist of Auschwitz. Her beloved Ventepane cello disappeared at the same time as her parents were taken by the Nazis from her home in Breslau (now Wroclaw). When she was s...
Nov 23, 2023•13 min
Writer and musician Kate Kennedy takes a personal look at five lost cellos, and what they can tell us of those who played and loved them and how our identities are shaped by the physical, social and psychological impacts of performance. An abandoned cello rescued from a skip stands alone under a pergola in an orchard of a stately home on the outskirts of Nottingham. In an eccentric experiment, created by one of the world experts in honeybees, apiarist and physicist Prof. Martin Benscik has donat...
Nov 23, 2023•14 min
Writer, musician and broadcaster Kate Kennedy takes a personal look at five lost cellos, and what they can tell us of those who played and loved them and how our identities are shaped by the physical, social and psychological impacts of performance. Can a cello hold its player's soul? Jewish-Hungarian Pal Hermann was hailed as 'the next Pablo Casals' in the 1930s. He is now completely forgotten. Kate Kennedy retraces his steps across Europe, with his unique Gagliano cello as he attempted to esca...
Nov 23, 2023•14 min
"Each remembered moment is a keyhole. Time doesn't 'flow like a river', doesn't exist in Odesa at all; the numbers of years, 1986 or 1989 or 2006 are like signs hanging about the corner grocery shop, with names of owners, swaying. In these streets, everything is ever-present. There are places like this on the planet: you can stop in the middle of the street and stick a finger into the skin of time, tear a hole, and see through." Across a week of personal essays, the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya ...
Nov 22, 2023•15 min
"Each remembered moment is a keyhole. Time doesn't 'flow like a river', doesn't exist in Odesa at all; the numbers of years, 1986 or 1989 or 2006 are like signs hanging about the corner grocery shop, with names of owners, swaying. In these streets, everything is ever-present. There are places like this on the planet: you can stop in the middle of the street and stick a finger into the skin of time, tear a hole, and see through." Across a week of personal essays, the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya ...
Nov 21, 2023•15 min
"Each remembered moment is a keyhole. Time doesn't 'flow like a river', doesn't exist in Odesa at all; the numbers of years, 1986 or 1989 or 2006 are like signs hanging about the corner grocery shop, with names of owners, swaying. In these streets, everything is ever-present. There are places like this on the planet: you can stop in the middle of the street and stick a finger into the skin of time, tear a hole, and see through." Across a week of personal essays, the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya ...
Nov 20, 2023•14 min
In this series of The Essay, five leading cultural voices choose a great work of art and talk about a small, under-appreciated aspect of the piece that carries great meaning for them. Art historian and author of The Story of Art Without Men, Katy Hessel draws our attention to the spine as a symbol of feminine strength and survival in Frida Kahlo's Broken Column. No matter how ambitious and brave she was in her painting, life was a constant battle: in love, in her physicality, and her struggle to...
Sep 29, 2023•14 min
Essays on the underappreciated aspects of well known pieces of culture. Writer Sarfraz Manzoor describes a moment from the film Field of Dreams and what it means to him.
Sep 28, 2023•14 min
It’s in the minutiae of masterpieces that we feel their thrill and power. In this series of The Essay, five leading cultural voices choose a great work of art and talk about a small, underappreciated aspect of the piece that carries great meaning for them. Spectator Literary Editor Sam Leith explores his fascination with a background figure in Judith Kerr’s classic picture book ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’. Producer: Sam Peach
Sep 27, 2023•14 min
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. In this essay, he focuses on Joan Williams and her novel Old Powder. After her first novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award, this one failed. Did her former lover William Faulkner have something to do with it? For much of the 60...
Jun 30, 2023•14 min
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. In this essay, he focuses on Philip Roth. Roth became permanently alienated from American Jews and even his own mother asked him if he was anti-Semitic. In light of his continuous production and the miraculous late flowering of his art, fr...
Jun 29, 2023•14 min
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. In this essay, he focuses on Norman Mailer. His reputation as a novelist had gone down the toilet before he reinvented himself with the non-fiction novel. But there was a cost. Writers should be read and not heard was the ethos of the prof...
Jun 28, 2023•14 min
Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. This essay looks at Amiri Baraka previously known as LeRoi Jones. He was seen as a genuine heir to James Baldwin. A decade younger than Baldwin, Jones/Baraka arrived in Greenwich Village just as the Beat scene was reaching its zenith. He w...
Jun 27, 2023•14 min
The 1960s are celebrated for the paradigm shift in American society. This shift was reflected in art and culture as well as politics. But these great changes were not accomplished without controversy. Even in the most slow-flowing art form, literature, great controversies burst out that are now forgotten, but they anticipate what is going on with today's cancel culture. They occurred without the multiplier effect of social media but dominated not just book pages but the society at large. Michael...
Jun 26, 2023•14 min
Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Roy McFarlane is revealing secrets about the area of Bilston in the Black Country. His focus is on Big Lizzy, an enormous blast furnace that dominated the skyline of the Black Country for decades. And also the black-owned Rising Star Night Club and Major's iconic Bilston chip shop. Roy was born in Birmingham but spent many years living in the Black Country. He’s a Poet and Playwright; has held the role of B...
Jun 16, 2023•13 min
Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. R.M. Francis is sharing the secret world of Wren’s Nest in Dudley. Once a site of intense mining, this was the UK’s first urban nature reserve. It’s world-famous geologically for its well-preserved Silurian coral reef fossils and is considered the most diverse and abundant fossil site in the British Isles. Surrounded by council houses, takeaways, pubs and supermarkets, Wren’s Nest is a very surprising place...
Jun 15, 2023•14 min
Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Brendan Hawthorne is revealing his hidden childhood world of Tipton. Think cooling towers, high-rise flats, scrapyard cranes and angel fish in the canal. Brendan is a poet, playwright, writer and musician who was born in Tipton in the Black Country. He’s released five collections of poetry and had two plays produced locally. He stood on Antony Gormley's Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square and appeared on BBC ...
Jun 14, 2023•14 min
Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Emma Purshouse is introducing a new visitor to St Barts Church which stands on the hill in Wednesbury. Think cock fights, an unimpeded wind from the Urals and orange chips. Emma was born in Wolverhampton and is a freelance writer, novelist and performance poet. She’s a poetry slam champion and performs regularly at spoken word nights including at The Cheltenham Literature Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, ...
Jun 13, 2023•14 min
Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Poet Liz Berry is taking a nighttime drive to the top of a hill in the Black Country to visit the ghosts of her childhood in Sedgley. Liz’s first book of poems, Black Country, a ‘sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands’ (Guardian) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award and Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Liz's pamphlet ...
Jun 12, 2023•14 min
Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. In this final essay of the series, Geoff Dyer retraces a pilgrimage to New Mexico, where DH Lawrence’s ashes were supposedly built into a concrete shrine near Taos at the request of his estranged wife Frieda. But were they actually his ashes? Dyer is a multi-award winning novelist and non-fiction writer. His many books include Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow...
Jun 09, 2023•14 min
Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Brandon Taylor travels uptown through a racially-charged Manhattan to Harlem, where Langston Hughes is buried in a library - literally underneath his prophetic words. Taylor is a New York-based fiction writer and essayist originally from Alabama. His novels include the Booker-shortlisted Real Life and The Late Americans, and he has also published a wide...
Jun 08, 2023•13 min
Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Helen Mort ventures up a Yorkshire hill to find Sylvia Plath’s much-vandalised gravestone, a battleground for those claiming the American poet's contested legacy. Born in Sheffield, Mort is an award-winning poet and novelist. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham
Jun 07, 2023•14 min
Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Tracy Chevalier strolls to Stinsford, the Dorset village where Thomas Hardy’s heart is poetically buried separately from his body at Poets' Corner, Westminster – echoing the writer’s divided self. Chevalier was born in America but now lives in Hardy's beloved home county, Dorset. She has written 12novels, including Girl with a Pearl Earring which w...
Jun 06, 2023•14 min
Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today in the first essay of a new series, Naomi Alderman goes in search of Mary Wollstonecraft's tomb in Old St Pancras churchyard - reputedly the spot where, among other things, Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley learnt to write. She sheds light on the life of this important feminist pioneer, offering a moving personal reflection on mother-daughter ...
Jun 05, 2023•14 min
Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go from the Russia, Persia, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Americas, making their homes and ca...
May 05, 2023•13 min
Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go from the Russia, Persia, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Americas, making their homes and ca...
May 04, 2023•13 min
Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go from the Russia, Persia, Morocco, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Americas, making their homes and ca...
May 03, 2023•13 min
