Our last Recording of the Week for 2018 comes from Stephen Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary & Creative Recordings. Actor, singer and writer Norman Beaton (1934-1994) recalls his early career steps in Liverpool, and how the production of his first play, the musical Jack of Spades, came about through a…

From William Wordsworth to Stevie Smith, generations of English poets have been inspired by place.Read more

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…

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.

This week’s selection comes from Stephen Cleary, Lead Curator of Literary & Creative Recordings. In this archive recording from the African Writers Club collection, South African poet and anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus reads the introductory poem from his debut volume Sirens Knuckles Boots. At the time of the book’s publication…