A Life Lived and Seen: a tribute to Anna Teasdale

Hester Westley pays tribute to Anna Teasdale who she interviewed for National Life Stories at the British Library.




Recording of the week: Pinglish code-switching

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Adam Cohn Many bilingual speakers demonstrate a fascinating tendency to code-switch – that is they alternate between different languages as circumstance dictates, generally subconsciously and often within the same utterance. Listen to Code Switching (BL…




Recording of the week: why you should listen to the common eider duck

This week’s selection comes from Eve-Marie Oesterlen, Lead Metadata Manager for the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage. As Lead Metadata Manager for the Unlocking Our Sound project I have less time than I would like to listen to the sonic treasures we retrieve from the vaults. One of my guilty pleasures,…




Recording of the week: Wax cylinder recordings of Nigerian music

This week’s selection comes from Dr Janet Topp Fargion, Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music. Northcote Whitridge Thomas The Library’s World and Traditional Music collections include some of the world’s earliest ethnographic recordings, made on wax cylinders. Amongst these is a collection of recordings made between 1909 and 1915…




Recording of the week: painting Winston Churchill

This week’s selection comes from Cathy Courtney, Project Director for Artists’ Lives, and Camille Johnston, Oral History Assistant Archivist. Elsbeth Juda (1911-2014), was born in Germany. She and her husband Hans Juda (referred to as ‘Hansie’ in this audio extract) settled in England as the threat of Nazism grew in…