The mechanics behind bird flight have fascinated and inspired humans for centuries. From Leonardo da Vinci to the Wright Brothers, this seemingly effortless process has captivated and influenced some of the finest scientific and engineering minds in history. Wings aren’t just for flying though. For some species, wings are also…

The British Library recently launched a new online learning resource, Voices of the Holocaust, as part of Unlocking Our Sound Heritage. The new website features a curated selection of audio clips, pulled mainly from four collections of oral history interviews with Holocaust survivors held at the British Library’s sound archive….

Sergei Rachmaninoff (Bain News Service, publisher – Library of Congress) By Jonathan Summers, Curator of Classical Music I recently acquired for the British Library Sound Archive an important collection of discs professionally recorded from radio broadcasts during the 1930s. The donor, Mike Sell, had known Harold Vincent Marrot in the…

On 11 March 1946 Hanns Alexander arrested Rudolf Höss, a German SS officer who was the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz. Hanns, who was born in Berlin in 1917, fled Nazi persecution in the late 1930s because he was Jewish. He fled to England with his parents and siblings, and joined…

Artist Sophie Herxheimer, creator of the artwork for the British Library’s new Voices of the Holocaust website, reflects on her approach to contextualising and representing the voices of Holocaust survivors. This collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors encompasses themes of war, suffering, imprisonment, exile and loss. But there are also…