Recording of the week: ‘English atheist’

This week’s selection comes from Dr Paul Merchant, Oral History Interviewer. Nearly twenty years ago, on the 4th of March 1999, an interviewer working for BBC Radio Thames Valley’s contribution to the enormous BBC Millennium Oral History Project – ‘The Century Speaks’ – visited a local school to interview an…




The MiniDisc revival starts here (maybe)

Sony launched the first MiniDisc players and recorders in 1992. MiniDiscs were small (around 2¾” square) floppy-disk-style cartridges with an 80-minute recording capacity, intended to supplant the tape cassette format. Some major-artist commercial albums were issued as pre-recorded MiniDiscs, and the Library has a few examples of these in its…




Behind the Scenes of the Man Booker: a National Life Stories film

2018 marks the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize, here at National Life Stories, we thought it would be a good moment to delve into our Oral History collections to see what we could find out about its history.




Sir Francis Chichester talks to Lady Chichester from Gipsy Moth IV

Dr Emma Greenwood, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage, writes: Sir Francis Chichester’s record-breaking circumnavigation of the globe in 1966-1967 is a legendary accomplishment in yachting and sporting history. When he sailed back into Plymouth Sir Francis was greeted by a fleet of small boats, thousands of fans…




Recording of the week: adrift on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean

This week’s selection comes from Dr Eva del Rey, Curator of Drama and Literature Recordings and Digital Performance. Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (1865-1940) was a British physician, medical missionary and humanitarian, who worked on the Newfoundland and Labrador coast, Canada for over forty years. In 1908, on his way to…