Recording of the week: Barnacle geese at Mersehead Reserve

This week’s selection comes from Harriet Roden, Digital Learning Content Developer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. Human imagination has often shaped colourful tales. Superstitions are born from the indescribable and the unexplained. Even the call of seals has been woven into legend and folklore, transforming into sightings of mermaids, sirens…

Recording of the week: Women’s workwear in the 1960s

This week’s selection comes from Camille Johnston, Oral History Assistant Archivist. Speeding The Mail: An Oral History of the Post Office, CD published by the British Library and the British Postal Museum and Archive, 2005. In 1969 Morag Simpson MacDonald responded to an advert in the Sunday Times for a…

Linton Kwesi Johnson awarded PEN Pinter Prize 2020

Poet Linton Kwesi Johnson has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize 2020. Sarah O’Reilly looks at Johnson’s career through his life story oral history interview for ‘Authors’ Lives’.

Recording of the week: Barbara Kruger in conversation

This week’s selection comes from Dr Eva del Rey, Curator of Drama and Literature Recordings and Digital Performance. Barbara Kruger, ‘You Are Not Yourself’, 1981 © Image: callejero / VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-ND Listen to a recording of visual artist Barbara Kruger in conversation with the art historian Griselda Pollock…

The Santals, Scandinavian missionaries, and salvage ethnomusicology: an encounter of three worlds

Since 2015, Christian Poske has conducted his PhD research on the Bengal recordings of the Arnold Bake Collection. A Collaborative Doctoral Scholarship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, situated his PhD within two institutions: the British Library Sound Archive and SOAS, University of London. He conducted his fieldwork…