Recording of the week: Death’s-head hawk-moth (Acherontia Atropos)

Lifecycle of the Death’s-head hawk-moth in Elizabeth Anne Kemp, Drawings and watercolours of English insects. 1803–25. Add Ms 17696-17698. On Monday 22 May, I was listening to BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. It was on ‘birds and moths’ and featured the British Library’s very own Wildlife and Environmental Sound…




Recording of the week: Windrush Voices

For this week’s ‘Recording of the Week’ the Library’s Schools Team celebrates Windrush Day. Windrush Day is this week on June 22nd, the date in 1948 when the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. This week, and all year round, the British Library Schools Team run a session that looks at…




Recording of the week: False Lamkin

An illustration of a person hanging from the gallows; a witch burning a sleeping couple while a demon carries off a child. Woodcut, 1790. Death and murder are hardly rare events in British folksong, but there’s something uniquely disturbing about the implacable way in which the bogeyman Lamkin goes about…




Recording of the week: Seabirds in a plastic world

A northern gannet, a seabird with a white body, beige head and blue eyes, sits on a pile of blue and red fishing rope and holds a clump of it in its beak. Photo credit: Thomas Haeusler. Today is World Environment Day 2023. This year, it is hosted by Côte…




Animals: Art, Science and Sound

Animals: Art, Science and Sound is the first major exhibition to explore the many different ways in which animals have been written about, visualised and recorded over time. Focusing on the British Library’s extensive natural history collections, the exhibition brings together chronologically and geographically diverse material produced over the past…