Jessica Duchen pays tribute to Sir Stephen Cleobury who she interviewed for National Life Stories at the British Library.

This week’s selection comes from Dr Eva del Rey, Curator of Drama and Literature Recordings and Digital Performance. This week’s recording of the week features American poet Adrienne Rich reading her poem ‘Power’. Rich is performing at the 1st International Feminist Book Fair, London, 1984. The poem was first published…

Written by Delaina Sepko, Sound Collections Researcher. Hollywood Fights Back is a two part radio programme made and financed by the Committee for the First Amendment and broadcast on the American network ABC. The episodes aired on 26 October 1947 and 2 November 1947 respectively. The programme’s content is spread…

This week’s selection comes from Michele Banal, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage. Although that was not their primary intention, it was the Europeans who first brought the pampapiano to Peru’s Andean region of Cusco. Music was seen as an important component of evangelisation, but churches in the…

This week’s selection comes from Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Spoken English. ‘At the chemist’s’ is an early example of a sound recording made for the purposes of teaching English as a foreign language. Recorded in the 1930s by two UCL phoneticians, J.R. Firth (1890-1960) & Lilias Armstrong (1882-1937), it…