Podcasts about edwardian england

And we're back! This week, we're talking about Maurice (1987), the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster's startlingly progressive story of homosexual love in Edwardian England. The more things change, the more they stay the same, it seems. Next week, we'll be discussing The Princess Bride, so Gen-Xers and Millennials should get real excited!

Welcome to Reel Britannia-a very British podcast about very British movies ...with just a hint of professionalism. Back to 1949 this week and a darkly witty masterpiece of British cinema! An Ealing comedy blending sharp humour, class satire, and Alec Guinness playing eight roles. A timeless classic! Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) A Delightfully Dark Comedy of Class and Revenge Kind Hearts and Coronets, the crown jewel of British cinema's dark humour. If you haven't yet basked in its glory, let me paint the scene for you. Picture this: Edwardian England, an impeccable sense of manners, and a protagonist who's as calculating as he is charming—all wrapped in a story about climbing the social ladder by…murdering every single person standing in the way. Yes, murder. And somehow, it's positively delightful. The plot centers on Louis Mazzini (played by Dennis Price), who is probably cinema's most likable sociopath. Born into a working-class life, Louis has always resented his mother's noble family, the D'Ascoynes, who cast her out for marrying “beneath her station.” But when Louis's mother dies penniless and the snobbish D'Ascoynes refuse her last wish of burial in the family crypt, the gloves come off—Louis vows to avenge his mother's disgrace and reclaim his rightful place among the aristocracy. There's just one minor snag: eight D'Ascoynes stand between him and the title of Duke. A daunting task? Perhaps. But for Louis, it's all in a day's work. Now, what makes Kind Hearts and Coronets so uniquely brilliant is its approach to murder. This isn't your run-of-the-mill bloodbath; it's murder with panache, style, and an undeniable charm. Each of Louis's victims is played by the inimitable Alec Guinness, who dons eight different personas—from pompous aristocrats to eccentric eccentrics, each more absurd than the last. Guinness's performance is a cinematic tour de force, bringing every D'Ascoyne to life with precision and wit, ensuring no two murders feel the same. Louis may be methodical, but he's never boring—whether he's engineering an explosion or a “tragic” drowning, each act of homicide is artfully executed with a dose of dark humor. One of the joys of Kind Hearts and Coronets is its unashamed cleverness. The film wields irony like a rapier, slicing through social norms and class pretensions with a gleeful grin. Louis's ascent from working-class obscurity to the dizzying heights of the aristocracy is as much a critique of class inequality as it is a comedy of manners. His steely resolve to eliminate his relatives is matched only by his ability to deliver dry, razor-sharp commentary along the way. Dennis Price's impeccable delivery transforms Louis into a character you can't help rooting for—despite his penchant for, well, homicide. Of course, no tale of ambition and revenge is complete without a touch of romance. Louis's love life is deliciously complicated, involving a love triangle between Sibella (Joan Greenwood), his childhood sweetheart, and Edith (Valerie Hobson), the widow of one of his victims. Sibella is wonderfully wicked—a femme fatale with a voice like melted honey and an unapologetic thirst for social status. Edith, on the other hand, is all grace and dignity, providing a stark contrast to Sibella's conniving charm. Louis, being the opportunist that he is, juggles both women with alarming ease, adding an extra layer of intrigue to his already twisted pursuits. The film's finale is a masterstroke of irony and poetic justice. Just when Louis seems to have achieved everything he set out to accomplish, fate intervenes with one final twist—a testament to the film's commitment to keeping its audience thoroughly entertained until the last frame. Without spoiling too much, let's just say that Louis's razor-sharp intellect proves to be both his greatest strength and his Achilles' heel. Visually, Kind Hearts and Coronets is a treat for the eyes. Director Robert Hamer uses cinematography to accentuate the film's satirical tone, juxtaposing the grandeur of the D'Ascoyne estate with the cold, calculated reality of Louis's crimes. The costume design and period details immerse viewers in Edwardian England, while the film's score lends an air of sophistication to even its most macabre moments. It's a film that looks as good as it feels, capturing the essence of a bygone era with wit and style. What truly elevates Kind Hearts and Coronets is its audacity. It dares to make us laugh in the face of murder, to cheer for a protagonist whose moral compass is utterly skewed, and to see the absurdity in the rigid class structures of the time. It's a film that revels in its own wickedness, inviting viewers to join in the fun. And fun it is—rarely does a film blend darkness with levity so effortlessly, crafting a narrative that's as thought-provoking as it is entertaining. In summary, Kind Hearts and Coronets is a masterful dark comedy that stands the test of time. With unforgettable performances, sharp wit, and a plot that keeps you on your toes, it's a cinematic experience that delights in its own cunning brilliance.  "The D'Ascoynes certainly appear to have accorded with the tradition of the landed gentry, and sent the fool of the family into the church."   This and previous episodes can be found everywhere you download your podcasts Follow us on Twitter @rbritanniapod    Thanks for listening   Scott and Steven

TVC 684.1: Ed welcomes Nelson Aspen, award-winning entertainment reporter, one of the leading authorities on the subject of the sinking of the Titanic on Apr. 15, 1912, and the author of Kindred Spirits: A Titanic Tale. Inspired by Nelson's personal experiences, Kindred Spirits not only spans the time between the night when the Titanic met her tragic fate and the hedonistic party scene of contemporary Manhattan, but is a story of love and redemption that was denied to gay men at the time because of the constraints of Edwardian England. Topics this segment include why the Titanic tragedy has remained a source of fascination for more a century; how Nelson's knowledge of Titanic history helped actress Alexandra Boyd land a role in James Cameron's Titanic; and why moviegoers are drawn to "water stories" such as Titanic and The Poseidon Adventure. Kindred Spirits is available wherever books are sold through Red Sky Presents. Titanic Talk, the podcast co-hosted by Nelson Aspen and Alexandra Boyd, is available wherever you find podcasts. For our listeners in the greater L.A. metro area, Nelson will appear at the Titanic Anniversary Weekend aboard the RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach California on Apr. 12-13-14. For more on that, check out TitanicWeekend.com. He'll also be at the Lobby Lounge at the Four Seasons / Los Angeles on Tuesday, Apr. 15, the actual anniversary date of the sinking of the Titanic. For our listeners in New York, Nelson Aspen will appear at the Clay Restaurant in New York City on Tuesday, Apr. 29 and at Ortomare Ristorante in New York City on Friday, May 2. He also has events coming up in England and in Ireland during the last week of May, and in Baltimore and New York during the month of July. For details and more information, visit NelsonAspen.com

Imagine stepping into an opulent life in the golden age of Britain, where old money met new and elite lives played out in the great homes across the country. With acres of land and a collision of architectural styles, the rural palaces of Victorian and Edwardian England were the stages on which aristocracy performed. Adrian Tinniswood joins Royals, Rebels, and Romantics to discuss his new book The Power and the Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War.Show Notes:Carol Ann Lloydwww.carolannlloyd.com@shakeuphistoryshakeuphistory.bsky.socialpatreon.com/carolannlloydThe Tudors by NumbersCourting the Virgin QueenAdrian Tinniswoodadriantinniswood.com@AdeTinniswoodThe Power and the GloryNoble AmbitionsBehind the ThroneThe Long WeekendAND MORE!History shows us what's possible.

Christian Historical Fiction Talk is listener supported. When you buy things through this site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Roseanna White visits the podcast this week to talk about her new book, A Noble Scheme. We discuss if writing suspense is difficult, what inspired the series, and she shares her breast cancer journey. Patrons get to hear Roseanna's thoughts on why books set in Edwardian England retain their popularity.A Noble Scheme by Roseanna WhiteIn the opulent and perilous world of high society's most elite--and most dangerous--families, two investigators must set aside their broken hearts to uncover the truth.Gemma Parks is known to the London elite as G. M. Parker, a columnist renowned for her commentary on the cream of society. Behind the scenes, she uses her talents to aid the Imposters in their investigations by gathering intel at events and providing alibis for the firm's members through her columns. Yet her clandestine work would be more exhilarating if it weren't for the constant presence of the gentleman who broke her heart.Graham Wharton has never had eyes for anyone but Gemma, and she left his heart in tatters when she walked away from him. When the Imposters take on a new job to recover a kidnapped boy mistaken for his aristocratic cousin, Graham is determined to use the time with Gemma to not only restore the missing boy, but to also win back the only woman he's ever loved. As they trace the clues laid out before them, Graham and Gemma must devise a noble scheme to save the boy's life and heal their hearts."A Noble Scheme is as clever as it is glamorous."--LAURA FRANTZ, Christy Award-winning author of The Seamstress of AcadieGet your copy of A Noble Scheme by Roseanna White.Get the first book in the series, A Beautiful Disguise.Preorder book three,  An Honorable Deception.Roseanna White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she's homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.Being educated at St. John's College (the Great Books School) taught Roseanna to ask questions, to value conversation, and to never accept the simple answer without exploring it for herself. She and her family make their home in the mountains of West Virginia where she and her husband both grew up. Roseanna is a member of ACFW, a frequent speaker at writers events and small groups of readers, and an unabashed email addict.Visit Roseanna White's website.

     This week two movies where everyone is pretty awful and the title is wished upon everyone on screen.     A friend group of recent college graduates are horrific to everyone around them and to each other. Kevin is obsessed with his bff's girlfriend. Alec is a serial cheater who only cares about career advancement. Billy is a serial cheater and occasional rapist who only cares about getting fucked up and playing the sax. Jules is a serial cheater who only cares about sleeping with her boss and waiting for her stepmother to die. Kirby is a terrifying stalker obsessing over the medical student he went out with once four years ago. Wendy is a racist who has failed to launch from her disgustingly rich parents. Leslie is... there. Together they will not do much but we can always hope they die in... St Elmo's Fire.     The summer of 1900,12 year old Leo is spending his break as the guest of his wealthy friend, Marcus. Immediately on arrival, Leo beings to crush on the daughter of the house, Marian, who is engaged to a local lord. The whole family treats him like a pet instead of like a person but he's fine with being kept because they give him things. When Marcus finds himself bed ridden with illness, Marian uses it as a chance to press Leo into service delivering her explicit letters and return illicit rendezvous plans with the gentleman farmer next door. Passions and tensions simmer in a way they can only in pastoral Edwardian England. Will the lovers be caught embraced in hay? Will the local lord be able to get his rival to join the military and get out of his way? Will Leo realize that these people aren't worth the time and set a small fire in the night or is he doomed to forever be under their thumbs as The Go-Between?     All that and Dave indulges in violent revenge, Kevin refuses to see the fun in Paris, Tyler builds a new shrine, and Craig finds frustration in the loop. Join us, won't you?    Episode 365- Die in a Firenull

Christian Historical Fiction Talk is listener supported. When you buy things through this site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Become a patron and enjoy special perks and bonus content.Christian Historical Fiction Talk is listener supported. When you buy things through this site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Thank you all for being patient with me last week. As you know, I didn't get an episode out because I was away from home and reliable internet finishing my next book. To make up for it, there will be two episodes this week, Lord willing. Joanna Politano is up first.Joanna joins us to talk about her new book, The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple. We chat about the inspiration for this fabulous book, what film making was like in the very early 1900s, and if Joanna is anything like Lily Temple. Patrons get to hear about her experience homeschooling her kids and how she manages to find time to write.The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple by Joanna PolitanoPeter Driscoll, an underground investigator to the wealthy, has never met anyone like Lily Temple. The beautiful silent-film actress spins fairy tales and plays frivolous roles in front of the cine-camera, but beneath the costumes and stage makeup is a woman with a quick wit--and a murky past. Peter has been tasked with locating the legendary Briarwood Teardrop, an exquisite sapphire, which Lily wears beneath her gown. In order to stay close to her and hopefully unravel the mystery of her story--and the sapphire--Peter employs Lily's help on a case, which leads to a useful partnership. But as they are investigating together, Peter is also investigating Lily. The closer he gets to the truth, the more danger they face. And the closer he gets to Lily, the clearer it is that he needs her even more than she needs him.Award-winning author Joanna Davidson Politano whisks you away to Edwardian England in 1903 for a whimsical and layered tale that treads the crooked line between real and make-believe.Get your copy of The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple by Joanna Politano.More about Joanna:I'm a work-from-home mom of two fun and adventurous littles and we'll soon be homeschooling. I married my hero Vince, who is my love and my polar opposite. I write, he tears it up with the red pen. I break cars and other mechanical things, he puts them back together. He's nailed the “speak the truth” thing, and I bring the “in love” part. But the real spark to our marriage is that he does not like chocolate and I…  like it a normal amount. We love and live from our little house in the woods near Lake Michigan.Visit Joanna Politano's website.Create Harmony This is a podcast about setting an intentional rhythm, savoring life's blessings and ...Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

This week, Kathryn Hughes introduces her new book on the cat craze that swept Edwardian England; and she also tells us about an exhibition of the work of Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman. Plus a review of Sunjeev Sahota's The Spoiled Heart.'Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World', by Kathryn Hughes'Portraits to Dream In', at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 16 June, 2024'The Spoiled Heart', by Sunjeev SahotaProduced by Charlotte Pardy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dance which, from when it reached Britain in the early nineteenth century, revolutionised the relationship between music, literature and people here for the next hundred years. While it may seem formal now, it was the informality and daring that drove its popularity, with couples holding each other as they spun round a room to new lighter music popularised by Johann Strauss, father and son, such as The Blue Danube. Soon the Waltz expanded the creative world in poetry, ballet, novellas and music, from the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev to Moon River and Are You Lonesome Tonight.WithSusan Jones Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of OxfordDerek B. Scott Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of LeedsAndTheresa Buckland Emeritus Professor of Dance History and Ethnography at the University of RoehamptonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Egil Bakka, Theresa Jill Buckland, Helena Saarikoski, and Anne von Bibra Wharton (eds.), Waltzing Through Europe: Attitudes towards Couple Dances in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Open Book Publishers, 2020)Theresa Jill Buckland, ‘How the Waltz was Won: Transmutations and the Acquisition of Style in Early English Modern Ballroom Dancing. Part One: Waltzing Under Attack' (Dance Research, 36/1, 2018); ‘Part Two: The Waltz Regained' (Dance Research, 36/2, 2018)Theresa Jill Buckland, Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)Erica Buurman, The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2022) Paul Cooper, ‘The Waltz in England, c. 1790-1820' (Paper presented at Early Dance Circle conference, 2018)Sherril Dodds and Susan Cook (eds.), Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Dance and Music (Ashgate, 2013), especially ‘Dancing Out of Time: The Forgotten Boston of Edwardian England' by Theresa Jill BucklandZelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (first published 1932; Vintage Classics, 2001)Hilary French, Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion Books, 2022)Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2013)Mark Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (McFarland, 2009)Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (first published 1932; Virago, 2006)Eric McKee, Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time (Indiana University Press, 2012)Eduard Reeser, The History of the Walz (Continental Book Co., 1949)Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 27 (Macmillan, 2nd ed., 2000), especially ‘Waltz' by Andrew LambDerek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2008), especially the chapter ‘A Revolution on the Dance Floor, a Revolution in Musical Style: The Viennese Waltz'Joseph Wechsberg, The Waltz Emperors: The Life and Times and Music of the Strauss Family (Putnam, 1973)Cheryl A. Wilson, Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009)Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (first published 1915; William Collins, 2013)Virginia Woolf, The Years (first published 1937; Vintage Classics, 2016)David Wyn Jones, The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2023)Sevin H. Yaraman, Revolving Embrace: The Waltz as Sex, Steps, and Sound (Pendragon Press, 2002)Rishona Zimring, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Ashgate Press, 2013)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the dance which, from when it reached Britain in the early nineteenth century, revolutionised the relationship between music, literature and people here for the next hundred years. While it may seem formal now, it was the informality and daring that drove its popularity, with couples holding each other as they spun round a room to new lighter music popularised by Johann Strauss, father and son, such as The Blue Danube. Soon the Waltz expanded the creative world in poetry, ballet, novellas and music, from the Ballets Russes of Diaghilev to Moon River and Are You Lonesome Tonight.WithSusan Jones Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of OxfordDerek B. Scott Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of LeedsAndTheresa Buckland Emeritus Professor of Dance History and Ethnography at the University of RoehamptonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Egil Bakka, Theresa Jill Buckland, Helena Saarikoski, and Anne von Bibra Wharton (eds.), Waltzing Through Europe: Attitudes towards Couple Dances in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Open Book Publishers, 2020)Theresa Jill Buckland, ‘How the Waltz was Won: Transmutations and the Acquisition of Style in Early English Modern Ballroom Dancing. Part One: Waltzing Under Attack' (Dance Research, 36/1, 2018); ‘Part Two: The Waltz Regained' (Dance Research, 36/2, 2018)Theresa Jill Buckland, Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)Erica Buurman, The Viennese Ballroom in the Age of Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2022) Paul Cooper, ‘The Waltz in England, c. 1790-1820' (Paper presented at Early Dance Circle conference, 2018)Sherril Dodds and Susan Cook (eds.), Bodies of Sound: Studies Across Popular Dance and Music (Ashgate, 2013), especially ‘Dancing Out of Time: The Forgotten Boston of Edwardian England' by Theresa Jill BucklandZelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz (first published 1932; Vintage Classics, 2001)Hilary French, Ballroom: A People's History of Dancing (Reaktion Books, 2022)Susan Jones, Literature, Modernism, and Dance (Oxford University Press, 2013)Mark Knowles, The Wicked Waltz and Other Scandalous Dances: Outrage at Couple Dancing in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries (McFarland, 2009)Rosamond Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (first published 1932; Virago, 2006)Eric McKee, Decorum of the Minuet, Delirium of the Waltz: A Study of Dance-Music Relations in 3/4 Time (Indiana University Press, 2012)Eduard Reeser, The History of the Walz (Continental Book Co., 1949)Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol. 27 (Macmillan, 2nd ed., 2000), especially ‘Waltz' by Andrew LambDerek B. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris and Vienna (Oxford University Press, 2008), especially the chapter ‘A Revolution on the Dance Floor, a Revolution in Musical Style: The Viennese Waltz'Joseph Wechsberg, The Waltz Emperors: The Life and Times and Music of the Strauss Family (Putnam, 1973)Cheryl A. Wilson, Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2009)Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (first published 1915; William Collins, 2013)Virginia Woolf, The Years (first published 1937; Vintage Classics, 2016)David Wyn Jones, The Strauss Dynasty and Habsburg Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 2023)Sevin H. Yaraman, Revolving Embrace: The Waltz as Sex, Steps, and Sound (Pendragon Press, 2002)Rishona Zimring, Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain (Ashgate Press, 2013)

On the final episode of Historical Fiction: Unpacked, I talk with Joanna Davidson Politano about her latest novel, The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple. We had a wonderful conversation about the silent film industry, the part gardens play in this story, and Joanna's research and writing process. Here's a description of the novel: In her newest narrative, Politano once again whisks readers away to Edwardian England, where an unlikely duo—an underground investigator and a silent-film actress—join forces to uncover secrets and solve cases. But the most baffling case still remains. Dive into the past for a whimsical and layered tale that will leave readers breathless but craving more of Politano's mesmerizing tales. Peter Driscoll, an underground investigator to the wealthy, has been tasked with uncovering the legendary Briarwood Teardrop, an exquisite sapphire, which is currently in the possession of beautiful silent film actress, Lily Temple. In order to stay closer to her, he employs Lily on one of his cases, which leads to a useful partnership. Lily is both charming and quick-witted, but behind her costumes and make-believe world is a woman with a murky past—that includes the Briarwood Teardrop, which she will neither part with nor explain its presence. As she continues to work with Peter, her own story weaves in and out of their encounters, and hints about her background begin to surface. As Peter draws closer to the truth about Lily's past, danger draws closer to both of them. It is soon obvious that he needs her help as much as she needs his, especially when his life is dependent on Lily's ability to spin a believable tale. Purchase The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple on Amazon (affiliate). Check out Joanna's website, and follow her on Facebook, and Instagram. Ways you can help the show: Join the Historical Fiction: Unpacked Podcast Group on Facebook! Be sure to visit my Instagram, Facebook, and website. Subscribe to my mailing list (email newsletter) here. Follow the show on Instagram! Purchase Alison's historical novel, One Traveler (affiliate). Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. If you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, you help support my work without paying any more for the product. Thank you for your support!

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Whenever I get a chance to chat with Joanna Davidson Politano, I know I'm going to have a good time, and this time was no exception. With her new book, The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple releasing this April, she has a lot of fun preorder stuff going on that you won't want to miss hearing about, but even better, she shared a lot of interesting information about the earliest days of silent films. Listen in to learn all about it note: links may be affiliate links that provide me with a small commission at no extra expense to you. Why Historical Research Creates Some of the Best Fiction Ever! The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple takes place at the beginning of the Edwardian period and showcases England's approach to the silent movie scene. From slapstick ridiculousness to the whole of Cinderella squeezed into three minutes, the shows weren't what you'd expect, but they were exciting and innovative. Joanna has turned that scene into the story of a silent film star who isn't known for telling the truth but does have a sapphire that some think she shouldn't. Add in a rigid police inspector and a lot of mystery, and I think we can safely say that Joanna has done it again! Plus... we got a hint of what's coming next.  Am I the only one going, "Hmmm... what kind of title will this one get???"? The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple by Joanna Davidson Politano Peter Driscoll, an underground investigator to the wealthy, has never met anyone like Lily Temple. The beautiful silent-film actress spins fairy tales and plays frivolous roles in front of the cine-camera, but beneath the costumes and stage makeup is a woman with a quick wit--and a murky past. Peter has been tasked with locating the legendary Briarwood Teardrop, an exquisite sapphire, which Lily wears beneath her gown. In order to stay close to her and hopefully unravel the mystery of her story--and the sapphire--Peter employs Lily's help on a case, which leads to a useful partnership. But as they are investigating together, Peter is also investigating Lily. The closer he gets to the truth, the more danger they face. And the closer he gets to Lily, the clearer it is that he needs her even more than she needs him. Award-winning author Joanna Davidson Politano whisks you away to Edwardian England in 1903 for a whimsical and layered tale that treads the crooked line between real and make-believe Preorder your copy of The Elusive Truth of Lily Temple for 40% off with free shipping from BakerBookHouse.com and then go to Joanna's FACEBOOK PAGE to fill out a form to enter her giveaways!  And don't forget to check out her Reader Group on Facebook. Also... GoodReads and BookBub are good places to follow authors. Like to listen on the go? You can find Because Fiction Podcast at: Apple  Castbox  Google Play Libsyn  RSS Spotify Amazon and more!

The perfect childhood and the failure of utopian experiments in living in Edwardian England were explored by AS Byatt in her 2009 novel The Children's Book. In this conversation with Matthew Sweet recorded in that year, they discuss her writing life, mythologising childhood and her meetings with Iris Murdoch, about whom she wrote two critical studies. A lecturer in English literature, AS Byatt's books drew on a wide range of reading and visiting art galleries and museums. In 1990 she won the Booker prize for her novel Possession. You can find other conversations with writers on the Free Thinking programme website in a collection called Prose, Poetry and Drama

Robert Stillman, an eighteen-year-old Londoner, has few expectations when he travels to Nottingham to study with the Reverend George Langstaff. Life has not treated Robbie well recently: his mother's death has left him in the custody of an uncle who has neither the patience to deal with nor the ability to appreciate a young man whose greatest pleasure in life is to draw. The Reverend Langstaff, however, turns out to be exactly the kind of mentor Robbie needs: a wise and tolerant country parson on the brink of retirement, well able to foster his newest pupil's strengths. When Robbie meets and falls madly in love with their neighbor, Anton Harrington, it would seem that his life is complete. But this is Edwardian England, and men who love men live at risk of arrest and imprisonment under the harshest conditions. Anton, who is older by more than a decade, knows this all too well. Although he loves Robbie in return, Anton has spent years covering up both his dangerous romantic inclinations and his socialist political views. The emotional cost of concealing his self and his past inhibit Anton's ability to sustain any intimate relationship. Cowell explores the ways in which Robbie and Anton negotiate their way past these emotional and societal pitfalls with warmth, understanding, and respect. And although she surprises us with her conclusion, her ending feels exactly right. Stephanie Cowell is the author of Marrying Mozart, Claude and Camille, and other works of historical fiction. The Boy in the Rain (Regal House Publishing, 2023) is her latest novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Robert Stillman, an eighteen-year-old Londoner, has few expectations when he travels to Nottingham to study with the Reverend George Langstaff. Life has not treated Robbie well recently: his mother's death has left him in the custody of an uncle who has neither the patience to deal with nor the ability to appreciate a young man whose greatest pleasure in life is to draw. The Reverend Langstaff, however, turns out to be exactly the kind of mentor Robbie needs: a wise and tolerant country parson on the brink of retirement, well able to foster his newest pupil's strengths. When Robbie meets and falls madly in love with their neighbor, Anton Harrington, it would seem that his life is complete. But this is Edwardian England, and men who love men live at risk of arrest and imprisonment under the harshest conditions. Anton, who is older by more than a decade, knows this all too well. Although he loves Robbie in return, Anton has spent years covering up both his dangerous romantic inclinations and his socialist political views. The emotional cost of concealing his self and his past inhibit Anton's ability to sustain any intimate relationship. Cowell explores the ways in which Robbie and Anton negotiate their way past these emotional and societal pitfalls with warmth, understanding, and respect. And although she surprises us with her conclusion, her ending feels exactly right. Stephanie Cowell is the author of Marrying Mozart, Claude and Camille, and other works of historical fiction. The Boy in the Rain (Regal House Publishing, 2023) is her latest novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Robert Stillman, an eighteen-year-old Londoner, has few expectations when he travels to Nottingham to study with the Reverend George Langstaff. Life has not treated Robbie well recently: his mother's death has left him in the custody of an uncle who has neither the patience to deal with nor the ability to appreciate a young man whose greatest pleasure in life is to draw. The Reverend Langstaff, however, turns out to be exactly the kind of mentor Robbie needs: a wise and tolerant country parson on the brink of retirement, well able to foster his newest pupil's strengths. When Robbie meets and falls madly in love with their neighbor, Anton Harrington, it would seem that his life is complete. But this is Edwardian England, and men who love men live at risk of arrest and imprisonment under the harshest conditions. Anton, who is older by more than a decade, knows this all too well. Although he loves Robbie in return, Anton has spent years covering up both his dangerous romantic inclinations and his socialist political views. The emotional cost of concealing his self and his past inhibit Anton's ability to sustain any intimate relationship. Cowell explores the ways in which Robbie and Anton negotiate their way past these emotional and societal pitfalls with warmth, understanding, and respect. And although she surprises us with her conclusion, her ending feels exactly right. Stephanie Cowell is the author of Marrying Mozart, Claude and Camille, and other works of historical fiction. The Boy in the Rain (Regal House Publishing, 2023) is her latest novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

Before James got bit by a dog (he's fine) he rather liked these furry animals. We take you to a recording pre-bite when he and the other hosts were 100% gung-ho on the beloved canines. Introducing Dean Spanley (2008)! Directed by Toa Fraser and starring Jeremy Northam, Sam Neill and Peter O'Toole! If you're a NZer you might vaguely recall this movie, if you're from elsewhere you probably don't have a clue! But what is this forgotten film all about? Set in Edwardian England where upper lips are always stiff and men from the Colonies are not entirely to be trusted, Fisk Senior has little time or affection for his son, but when the pair visit an eccentric Indian, they start a strange journey that eventually allows the old man to find his heart. Is Dean a name or a title? Will Peter finally win his Oscar? (No. He was not even nominated for this) and what happens when national treasure Sam Neill sups on a particular wine?

Book Title: Pygmalion Author: George Bernard Shaw Episode: Number 100 | Part 2 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ "Pygmalion" offers a sharp commentary on the rigid class structure of Edwardian England and questions the malleability of human identity and the ethics of transforming someone into a different social mold. The title itself alludes to the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who falls in love with his own creation. The play has been adapted into various forms, including the famous musical "My Fair Lady," cementing its enduring relevance and impact on literature, theater, and discussions about social norms. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ About the author: Shaw was also a committed socialist and used his plays and essays to advocate for social and political change. He believed in the importance of education, rational thought, and individuality. His plays were known for their clever dialogue and satirical humor, which effectively conveyed his ideas and criticisms. In 1925, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his contributions to literature, particularly his ability to skillfully mix humor and social criticism. He continued to write and engage in public discourse until his death on November 2, 1950, in Ayot St Lawrence, England, at the age of 94. George Bernard Shaw's legacy endures through his thought-provoking plays, essays, and ideas, which have continued to influence literature, theater, and discussions on social and political issues. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Additional Resources Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw http://www.loyalbooks.com/book/pygmalion-by-george-bernard-shaw    

Jessica tells listeners about a heartwarming and magical queer fantasy series by Freya Marske: The Last Binding. Set in an alternative Edwardian England, this charming trilogy is full of magic, contracts and conspiracy. The first two titles in the series are A Marvellous Light and A Restless Truth. The final book of the trilogy, Power Unbound, will be available in November 2023. Find these titles in the FVRL collection: https://fvrl.bibliocommons.com/v2/search?query=Marske%2C%20Freya&searchType=author

The sheep are all sheared and we're dancing and drinking in the warm June sun. We're transported back to simpler and more innocent times with more than a whiff of nostalgia the loss of our connection to the land. And yet nothing is ever quite as straightforward as it seems, and this song is no exception. While delving into its theatrical past I once again get into that most thorny of issues – what is a folk song, and what should we do with them today?But mostly I have lots of fun singing about sheep.MusicInstrumental version was collected by John Broadwood in c.1843The original stage version, The Sheepsheering Song: https://www.vwml.org/search?view=search&q=rn812Sheep-shearing song, collected by the Hammond brothers: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4434118 Cecil Sharp – Folk Songs from Somerset: https://archive.org/details/FolkSongsFromSomerset/page/n3/mode/2up (my version takes a few liberties)The Horses Go Fast: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4434118?read-now=1&seq=2#page_scan_tab_contents  ReferencesMainly Norfolk on The Sheep Shearing Song: https://mainlynorfolk.info/steeleye.span/songs/thesheepshearingsong.html Eric Saylor: Folksong revival in the early 20th Century https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-music/articles/folksong-revival-in-the-early-20th-century https://www.efdss.org/learning/resources/beginners-guides/35-english-folk-collectors/2446-efdss-cecil-sharp Shudofsky, M. M. (1943). Charles Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Drama. ELH, 10(2), 131–158. https://doi.org/10.2307/2871662 John Francmanis (2002) National Music to National Redeemer: The Consolidation of a 'Folk-Song' Construct in Edwardian England. Popular Music 21 (1) 1-25As always, I'm grateful to the contributions of those who have posted on Mudcat over the years.  

Send us a Text Message.“Downton Abbey” is a popular period drama set in Edwardian England that details the life of the Crawley family, their motley crew of servants and of course Dame Maggie Smith playing the ever witty and sharp tongued granny. Love her. But Downton, with its iconic Gothic facade is a real place. It's actually called Highclere Castle and, did you know the real story of its inhabitants is truly stranger than fiction? Let's fix that. Sources: Stuff You Missed in History Class  podcast “The Cursed Tomb of King Tut”Unexplained Mysteries podcast “Curse of the Pharaohs - King Tut's Tomb”https://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-downton-20140105-story.htmlhttps://www.readersdigest.ca/culture/highclere-castle-downton-abbey/https://www.veranda.com/luxury-lifestyle/a36175010/highclere-castle-history/https://blog.newspapers.com/highclere-castle-the-real-life-downton-abbey/https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a28984430/downton-abbey-crawley-family-true-story/https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/1888680https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/15/lady-almina-downton-carnarvon-reviewhttps://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/the-real-downton-abbey-sordid-affairs-153592https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/George_Herbert,_5th_Earl_of_Carnarvonhttp://www.unmuseum.org/mummy.htmSupport the show! Buy Me a CoffeeVenmo @Shea-LaFountaine

The complete audiobook is available for purchase at Kobo.com: https://www.kobo.com/au/en/audiobook/eliza-33 Eliza By Barry Pain Narrated by Graham Scott A pompous and pooterish city clerk with social pretensions relates anecdotes of suburban life in Edwardian England, as he and his patient and long-suffering wife, Eliza, deal with various crises and contretemps—including the vexed question of visiting cards; a malfunctioning music player; the mistreatment of the narrator's hat; a mushroom (or toadstool) in the front garden; and the ongoing struggle to balance the household accounts …

Join Lucy and Cecil in Chapter9 of "A Room with a View," where their upcoming engagement is the talk of the town. Revel in the delightful awkwardness of garden parties and misfit country neighbors, as Lucy navigates the tricky waters of social expectations and her own feelings.Cecil, however, is not entirely pleased with the congratulations and smirking old ladies that come with the news of their engagement. Despite his irritation, Lucy finds herself quite enjoying the event, and even has some fun at the expense of a stuffy dowager.Later, they see Sir Harry Otway in passing, and find he is trying to find tenants for his nearby properties. Lucy has a brilliant idea to introduce him to two gentlewomen, Miss Teresa and Miss Catharine Alan, as potential tenants to save the neighborhood from a wave of vulgarity. Cecil and Lucy leave Mrs Honeychurch, and decide to walk back together. Cecil surprises Lucy when he requests permission to kiss her. The moment turns out to be awkward and anticlimactic, leaving them both feeling disappointed.Listen to this engaging chapter and be whisked away to the enchanting world of Edwardian England, where love, humor, and confounded expectations reign supreme.

The Brown Dog Affair was a series of demonstrations and riots surrounding a statue that had been erected in the Battersea area of London, commemorating dogs who had been killed due to vivisection. Research: "Ethical Treatment of Animals." The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, edited by Jacqueline L. Longe, 3rd ed., vol. 1, Gale, 2016, pp. 376-380. Gale In Context: Science, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3631000262/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=c1943190. Accessed 2 Mar. 2023. "How the cruel death of a little stray dog led to riots in 1900s Britain; Novelist campaigns for statue of terrier experimented on by scientists to regain its place in a London park." Guardian [London, England], 12 Sept. 2021, p. NA. Gale OneFile: Business, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A676433834/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=87481e5c. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023. "London by numbers: The brown dog riots; Source: `The Brown Dog Affair' by Peter Mason, Two Sevens Publishing." Independent on Sunday [London, England], 26 Oct. 2003, p. 7. Gale In Context: Global Issues, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A109233128/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=bf321fb5. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023. "Students looked as its throat was cut. Then it was taken away to be killed: But the brown dog couldn't rest in peace. Barry Hugill recalls the first animal rights riots." Observer [London, England], 30 Mar. 1997, p. 18. Gale OneFile: Business, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A76406108/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=3162fdcd. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023. “Final report of the Royal Commission on Vivisection.” London. His Majesty's Stationery Office. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112089397381 Bates, A.W.H. “Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain: A Social History.” Te Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. 2017. Bates, A.W.H. “Boycotted Hospital: The National Anti-Vivisection Hospital, London, 1903–1935.” Journal of Animal Ethics 6 (2): 177–187. 2016. Boston, Richard. "The Brown Dog Affair." New Statesman, vol. 126, no. 4339, 20 June 1997, p. 48. Gale OneFile: Business, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A20534445/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=dc5e8d6f. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023. Cruelty to Animals Act. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1876/77/pdfs/ukpga_18760077_en.pdf Effron, Jack Edward. “The battle of the vivisected dog.” Hekoten International: A Journal of Medical Humanities. Volume 10, Issue 4– Fall 2018. https://hekint.org/2018/03/21/battle-vivisected-dog/ Ford, Edward K. (1908) The Brown Dog and His Memorial (London: Euston Grove Press), 56 pages. 2013 complete facsimile of 1908 pamphlet. https://profjoecain.net/eyewitness-brown-dog-affair-edward-ford/ Galloway, John. “Dogged by Controversy.” Nature. Vol. 394. August 1998. Galmark, Lisa. “Women antivivisectionists - the story of Lizzy Lind af Hageby and Leisa Schartau.” Animal Issues, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2000. Kean, Hilda. “An Exploration of the Sculptures of Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Brown Dog, Battersea, South London, England.” Society & Animals 11:4. 2003. Lansbury, Coral. “The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England.” The University of Wisconsin Press. Nina. “The Brown Dog Affair (1903 - 1910).” The Medicine Chest. University of Cape Town. https://ibali.uct.ac.za/s/LBNNIN001-medicinechest/item/19397 Lind-af-Hagby, L. and L.K. Schartau. “The shambles of science: extracts from the diary of two students of physiology.” 1904. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27101200M/The_shambles_of_science Stourton, Edward. "When the fate of a dog tore a nation in two; A famous case of animal cruelty sets Edward Stourton and Kudu on a missio." Daily Telegraph [London, England], 3 Apr. 2010, p. 30. Gale OneFile: Business, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A222925631/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=0f1914aa. Accessed 1 Mar. 2023. Thornton, Alicia. “Portrait of a Man and His Dog: The Brown Dog Affair.” 10/22/2012. UCL Research in Museums. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2012/10/22/portrait-of-a-man-and-his-dog-the-brown-dog-affair/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Meg watches Something Wild for the first time in thirty years and sees what was hiding in plain sight. Jessica travels from Edwardian England to 80s NYC to chart the epic life and times of Quentin Crisp.

The Christmas Eve ghost story is a fine old tradition associated with Victorian and Edwardian England, one now making a comeback on both sides of the Atlantic. Since 2018, Bone and Sickle has enthusiastically embraced the custom. Our offering for 2022, is “Smee” written by A.M. Burrage in 1931 and read for us by Mrs. … Read More Read More The post A Christmas Ghost Story appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

Moving on from burning London, our TARDIS team take a well deserved break in Edwardian England where The Doctor actually plays cricket for once! I sure hope there isn't a murder mystery in this episod-- OH DEAR GOD NO Follow the podcast on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FriendWatchPod Patreon where you can find commentary tracks, notes, early access to next week's Doctor Who episode! https://www.patreon.com/gamblord

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

Tonight, we'll read the final excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.To listen to this series easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In the last episode, the gang is back together, and Badger, Rat and Mole devise a plan to reclaim Toad Hall for their friend, and take it back from the stoats and weasels that have overrun it.— read by V — Listen Ad-Free on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.To listen to this series easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In the last episode, Toad is a washer woman on the run, boldly stealing his way across the countryside, until . Now, he is on the run. The strong arm of the law almost catches him when he lands in a river and is saved by his old friend, Ratty. Listen Ad-Free on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We first encounter failure in learning to walk—we fall down, the root definition of failure. Coming up short is a lifelong experience that stretches from mishaps and lapses to shock waves that shake our lives. Failure can make us doubt our worth, shatter certainties, and fill us with shame. Failure punctures ego's false sense of sovereignty. When we are out of alignment with inner or outer life, a gap opens, and we fall victim to ambition, misjudgment, or impulsivity. Failure is a call to self-confrontation, humility, and resilience. We can recognize the limits of our conscious attitude and our dependence on the unconscious. Failure can imbue us with a higher sense of purpose that is in service to a greater good, including our own. Here's The Dream We Analyze: “A woman (like my wife, but more mysterious and mischievous) and I were given a mission. The Sun was setting, and we were told that if we traveled toward the sunset, or rather—since we were to leave in the morning—with the rising Sun to our backs, we would reach Norway. We came to a narrow, concealed canyon with train tracks, and the woman caused a cave-in that forced the train to stop. It was carrying some sort of ore. We met the crew without raising their suspicions, and they took us through the canyon's closed, concealed entrance into their country. One of the crew pointed out in the distance a harbor full of the end product of the ore: beautifully and skillfully crafted boats. You had to be a citizen of their country to own one, but people from around the world came to rent them. He then took us into a wood-paneled room (like from a club in Edwardian England) and showed us a rapier and broadsword, also made from the ore. As he demonstrated how to use and care for them, I felt intimidated or unsure about being able to use them myself.”   GIVE US A HAND! Become our patron: https://www.patreon.com/ThisJungianLife RESOURCES: Learn to Analyze your own Dreams: https://thisjungianlife.com/enroll/

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.To listen to this series easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In the last episode, Toad can't help himself but steal automobiles to race through the English countryside. This lands him in jail, but a kindly maiden takes pity on him and helps him break free. Now, he is on the run.— read by V — Listen Ad-Free on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Episode Seventy-Seven: Tolkien (2019)We're still not doing Victorian England. This week it's a bunch of schoolboys and Edwardian England. One of these schoolboys might've grown up to become one of the most beloved and influential authors of the English language, but you're going to watch him throughout his youthful shenanigans. Nicholas Hoult returns as everyone's favorite fantasy author. Unfortunately, James knows a thing or two about this guy... Logo design by: https://www.fiverr.com/ideahitsIntro voiceover by: https://www.youtube.com/kevincrockerheyjameswatchthis@gmail.comFollow us @heyjameswatch

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.To listen to this series easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In this episode, we learn of the downfall and comeback for the exuberant and foolish toad.— read by 'V' — Listen Ad-Free on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.This series does not require you to follow a plot between episodes, however if you would like to start from the beginning and listen easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In this episode, Rat encounters a wayfarer, the Sea Rat, and invites him to lunch. The Sea Rat regails him with tales of maritime adventures and invites Rat to join him. — read by 'V' — Listen Ad-Free on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

 In this episode, we look at Christmas in wartime, both on the home front and in the front line.  We talk about a lucky purchase from a small Northamptonshire auction house that provided insight not only into the political history of South Africa, but also an affectionate Christmas gift sent to a soldier in 1916 who was to lose his life just sixteen days later, in tragic circumstances. Fifty-six men with the surname Christmas lost their lives in World War One, and we look at two of these soldiers, who came from very different ends of the social spectrum, and both of whom died in trench raids on the front.Captain Bernard Christmas came from a well-to-do family, was educated at Public School, and lived off private means.  Private Walter Christmas, by contrast, grew up in the slums of East London and was employed as a "pure worker" in a leather factory, one of the most ghastly jobs in all of Edwardian England.  We discover why cigarettes were the true gift of love for a man in the trenches, how an unfortunate mix-up involving a Christmas pudding and pigeon led to "Captain Custard" gaining his nickname, and why you should never accept a Christmas drink from a drunk Army chef.  We finish our episode at the grave of the fabulously named Private Bertie Snowball and hear about how his legacy lives on through the Carnoustie golf club.I wish each and every one of you a very Happy Christmas and peaceful New Year - Footsteps of the Fallen will be back in 2022!Support the podcast:www.buymeacoffee.com/footstepsblogwww.patreon.com/footstepsofthefallenSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/footstepsofthefallen)

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.If you'd like to start with the first episode, it aired on March 22, 2021. To follow along easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In the last episode, a crowd of chilly field mice sing a Christmas Carol at the mole's front door, and Mole and Rat invite them in for some mulled ale and a delicious meal.— read by 'V' — Listen Ad-Free on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The Wind in the Willows is a children's book by the British novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternatingly slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphized animals: Mole, Rat (a European water vole), Toad, and Badger. They live in a pastoral version of Edwardian England.This time just the story of "Mole" Chapter 1Can't sleep? Let the dulcet voice of Erik Braa reading the classics take over for jumping sheep. These tales, narrated in a soothing, calm voice are designed to turn sleeplessness into somnolence. Tune in, zonk out.

Tonight, we take you back to Edwardian England. When man's thirst to understand the natural and supernatural was at an all time high. It was on the quest for such knowledge that a telegram was sent to Arthur Samuels of London University. A telegram which lead him to investigate … The Horror of Cardmoor Abbey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.If you'd like to start with the first episode, it aired on March 22, 2021. To follow along easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In the last episode, the two little friends Water Rat and Mole are headed back after a long day to their home on the river, which is really the Rat's home. Suddenly the Mole remembers his original mole den home, and the urge to visit becomes to strong to ignore.— read by 'V' — Listen Ad-Free on Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Travis interviews author Freya Marske about her debut fantasy novel, A Marvellous Light, which is available now from Tordotcom. Red White & Royal Blue meets Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in debut author Freya Marske's A Marvellous Light, featuring an Edwardian England full of magic, contracts, and conspiracies. Freya and Travis discuss the best gins, building books around an emotional spine, and the highlights of her unofficial Smut Writing Course. Want your message featured on the podcast? Find out more here. About Freya Marske: Freya Marske lives in Australia, where she is yet to be killed by any form of wildlife. She writes stories full of magic, blood, and as much kissing as she can get away with. Her hobbies include figure skating and discovering new art galleries, and she is on a quest to try all the gin in the world. Her short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways, and several anthologies. In 2020 she was awarded the Australian National SF (Ditmar) Award for Best New Talent. Find Freya on Twitter, the Be the Serpent podcast, or at her website, freyamarkse.com. Find Us Online: Blog Discord Twitter Instagram Support Us: Become a Patron Buy Us a Coffee Music: Intro: "The Legend of Iya" courtesy of https://philter.no Outro: "A Quest Unfolds" courtesy of https://philter.no This episode of The Fantasy Inn podcast was recorded in the unceded territory of the S'atsoyaha (Yuchi) and ᏣᎳᎫᏪᏘᏱ Tsalaguwetiyi (Eastern Cherokee Band) peoples. Some of the links included in these show notes are affiliate links and support the podcast at no additional cost to you. If it's an option for you, we encourage you to support your local bookstores! The blog post accompanying this episode can be found at https://thefantasyinn.com, along with fantasy book reviews, author interviews, and more fantasy content.

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.If you'd like to start with the first episode, it aired on March 22, 2021. To follow along easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In the last episode, the two little friends Water Rat and Mole spend more time in Mr. Badger's cozy underground dwelling with Mr. Otter before returning safely home.— read by 'V' — See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.If you'd like to start with the first episode, it aired on March 22, 2021. To follow along easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.In the last episode, the two little friends Water Rat and Mole pay a surprise visit to Mr. Badger during a snow storm. They are treated to the badgers warm hospitality, and meet other various guests that drop by, including Mr. Otter.— read by 'V' —See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.If you'd like to start with the first episode, it aired on March 22, 2021. To follow along easily in order, go to snoozecast.com/series.Grahame grew up on the River Thames. As secretary of the Bank of England, he told his son bedtime stories that evolved into this book after he took an early retirement.In the last episode, the innocent Mole isn't content with hibernating overwinter in the cozy domicile of his friend the water rat. He becomes obsessed with finding the mysterious Mr. Badger, who lives somewhere in the Wild Wood. Mole sets out to find him, and the Rat goes out to rescue him when he gets lost.— read by 'V' —See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tonight, we'll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.If you'd like to start with the first episode, it aired on March 22, 2021.Grahame grew up on the River Thames. As secretary of the Bank of England, he told his son bedtime stories that evolved into this book after he took an early retirement.In the last episode, new friends Mole and Rat have a picnic on the river bank, and take an accidental plunge in the river afterwards. Later, they pay a visit to the estate of The Toad to see what he was up to. The Toad's newest passion was for his fancy carriage he referred to as a gypsy caravan. The Toad hoped for company to join him on the open road and tries to convince his visitors to come along.— read by 'V' —See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tonight, we’ll read another excerpt from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.Grahame grew up on the River Thames. As secretary of the Bank of England, he told his son bedtime stories that evolved into this book after he took an early retirement.In the last episode, Mole was spring cleaning his underground burrow when he was hit hard by spring fever. He ran up into the sunshine and befriended a water rat on the River Thames. The mole then not only sees a river for the first time but has his first boat ride. We will pick up at the start of their delicious picnic.— read by 'V' —

In today's painting analysis we will be looking at the 1913 painting 'Self Portrait with Nude' by Laura Knight.  At the time of painting women were not allowed to paint from live models or it was generally considered vulgar, due to this her work was widely criticised for it's defiance in challenging the status quo.In this episode we will explore the context of the Edwardian era and a bit about the role of the self portrait in art history.Images Instagram - @themuseumoffemininitySourceshttps://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jul/06/laura-knight-unashamed-illustratorhttps://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/dame-laura-knight-1424https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw03686/Laura-Knight-with-model-Ella-Louise-Naper-Self-Portrait

Tonight, we’ll read the opening to “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame, published in 1908. This story was suggested by our patron, Lucienne.This story centers around four small animals: Mole, Rat, Toad, and Badger. Their stories take place in the countryside of Edwardian England.Grahame grew up on the River Thames. As secretary of the Bank of England, he told his son bedtime stories that evolved into this book after he took an early retirement.— read by 'V' —

Shrabani Basu, author of The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer, shares the surprising story of George Edalji, who was wrongly accused of fatally maiming cattle in 1903. She reveals how this miscarriage of justice exposed the simmering racial tensions of Edwardian England and captured the imagination of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode we talk to Dr Andrew Hignell about Alfred Holsinger, A Sri Lankan cricketer who plied his trade in Edwardian England and Wales as well as a chat with Janaka Ranweera, uncle of current Sri Lankan Test cricketer Lasith Embuldeniya.

The Christmas ghost story was a staple of winter festivities in Victorian and Edwardian England, so we thought we'd discuss one of the most famous ones: Elizabeth Gaskell's “The Old Nurse's Story.” The story is told in first person. The nurse, now an older woman, is speaking to a little girl about when her mother was a little girl. The nurse, then a young woman, found herself in a creepy old manor house in the middle of a cold and snowy winter, the only caretaker of the little girl, who had recently lost both her parents. The manor house belonged to a relative, and in Gothic fashion, secrets abound in the old home. No one ever enters the east wing, which has been permanently closed. And there is also the troubling presence of a little ghost child, who appears outside at windows during snow storms. Is she begging to be let into the warm house, or is she beckoning the nurse's charge out into the cold?  Recommended in this episode: Valancourt Book's collections of Christmas Ghost Stories and T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones Please rate and review us, or better yet, tell a friend.  Our social media is @MonsterWrote on Twitter and Instagram. Our email is monsterwrote@gmail.com. This episode was produced and researched by Lisa and Mel. Theme music is “Misconception” by Nicolas Gasparini, used with permission. 

This is the first in a series of podcasts brought to you from the BSSH's 2020 Conference, which was held online in the last week of August. The first panel is introduced by BSSH Chair Dr Raf Nicholson and chaired by Dr Conor Heffernan and features two papers by leading British sports historians, Professor Martin Polley of De Montfort University and Dr Luke Harris of the University of Birmingham talking about sport in Edwardian England. Martin talks about C.R. Ashbee, the Arts & Crafts Movement, and Sport in the Cotswolds, 1902-1908. He highlights the way in which sport and recreation were central to Ashbee's thinking about constructing a model community in Chipping Camden, and talks about the practical ways in which his ideas were implemented. Luke discusses the career of the Edwardian runner Jack Price and his turn to professionalism in the 1900s. Price's career illustrates the development of running as a professional career in the 1900s and Price's role as one of the key athletes and trainers of his era.

This is the first in a series of podcasts brought to you from the BSSH's 2020 Conference, which was held online in the last week of August. The first panel is introduced by BSSH Chair Dr Raf Nicholson and chaired by Dr Conor Heffernan and features two papers by leading British sports historians, Professor Martin Polley of De Montfort University and Dr Luke Harris of the University of Birmingham talking about sport in Edwardian England.

It was 1987 and Merchant Ivory (with help from Channel 4) embarked on an adaptation of EM Forster's novel Maurice - a story of forbidden gay love in Edwardian England. It had an all star supporting cast including Simon Callow, Denholm Elliot, Billie Whitelaw, Barry Foster and Ben Kingsley, A landmark movie for Merchant Ivory (producers of, among others Room With a View and Howard's End), it launched the careers of three young stars - James Wilby (as Maurice Hall), Hugh Grant (as Clive Durham) and Rupert Graves (as Alec Scudder). Here James reminisces with Ashley Byrne about playing the lead. The Distinct Nostalgia theme is owned by MIM Productions and composed by Rebecca Applin and Chris Warner. From now onwards you can enjoy 4 NEW Distinct Nostalgia shows every single week ...Tuesday is specials day and for the next few weeks it's the home of Kelly's Heroes with Queer as Folk star Craig Kelly.Thursday is now Distinct Nostalgia soap day. Loads of retro soap chat with the actual stars who were there ... The regular Distinct Nostalgia programme moves to Saturdays with a variety of shows celebrating all our tv and film yesterdays.And of course we’ve also got the Distinct Nostalgia Mind of the Month Quiz with Andy Hoyle.Distinct Nostalgia - 4 Times A Week plus a treasure trove of programmes to listen to any time at DistinctNostalgia.comSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/distinctnostalgia)

Episode Nine's Game Changer traces its roots back through 1970's game shows and 1950's Golden Age Television all the way back to Edwardian England.Check out David's writing at The Daily Worker Placement.Support us on Patreon!Intro Music: Violet World by Aquartos - https://artlist.io/jp/song/7373/violet-worldIncidental music used in this episode in public domain, retrieved from archive.org:"The Typewriter", Leroy Anderson and His 'Pops' Concert Orchestra"Thunderbird", Ray Anthony and His Orchestra"Chicken Fried Steak", Lenny White

Use code "SENDMETOSLEEP" for 10% off Kokoon Sleep Headphones: https://kokoon.io/discount/SENDMETOSLEEP Welcome to the World's sleepiest podcast. Want bonus episodes and exclusive access? Visit https://sendmetosleep.com/podcast/ for more information. For tonight’s bedtime sleep story, I’ll be reading “The Wind in the Willows Chapter 2: The Open Road”, by Kenneth Grahame. The Wind in the Willows is a classic novel by Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternatingly slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals: Mole, Rat (a European water vole), Toad, and Badger. They live in a pastoral version of Edwardian England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie, and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames Valley. If you enjoy the podcast, please consider subscribing so you can stay up-to-date with new weekly episodes. Visit our website: https://sendmetosleep.com/ Get bonus episodes and exclusive access: https://sendmetosleep.com/podcast/ Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sendmetosleepco/ Do not listen to this sleep story whilst driving or operating machinery. Please only listen to this sleep stories podcast in a safe place where you can relax and fall asleep. Send Me To Sleep accepts no responsibility or liability for any injury, loss or damage as a result of this recording.Support the show (https://sendmetosleep.com/podcast/)

Welcome to the World's sleepiest podcast. Want bonus episodes and exclusive access? Visit https://sendmetosleep.com/podcast/ for more information.For tonight’s bedtime sleep story, I’ll be reading “The Wind in the Willows Chapter 1: The River Bank”, by Kenneth Grahame.The Wind in the Willows is a classic novel by Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternatingly slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals: Mole, Rat (a European water vole), Toad, and Badger. They live in a pastoral version of Edwardian England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie, and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames Valley.So let your eyes fall heavy and your breath soften, as we settle in for a peaceful night’s sleep…Visit our website: https://sendmetosleep.com/ Get bonus episodes and exclusive access: https://sendmetosleep.com/podcast/ Read along with us: https://sendmetosleep.com/wind-in-the-willows/ Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sendmetosleepco/ Do not listen to this bedtime story whilst driving or operating machinery. Please only listen to this bedtime sleep story in a safe place where you can relax and fall asleep. Send Me To Sleep accepts no responsibility or liability for any injury, loss or damage as a result of this recording.Support the show (https://sendmetosleep.com/podcast/)

Step In Time to the podcast that puts the Plus in Disney Plus, Talking The Mickey. This week, Ellie's choice, brings us to Edwardian England and the 'Age of Men' (at least according to Mr. Banks), in Mary Poppins. Ellie, Georgia, Ethan, and Ian discuss the turbulent relationship between P.L. Travers and the Walt Disney company, consider which characters may be sociopathic, learn about a tapestry of casting considerations, and debate the quality (and difficulty) of some of the accents in the only Disney film to be nominated for Best Picture in Walt's lifetime. Throw on some Disney Plus, and catch up on some great Disney content and then join the conversation on Twitter (@talkthemickey) or Instagram (@talkingthemickey).

On today's episode, Adam interviews YA Queen Cassandra Clare! They discuss her new Shadowhunter novel Chain of Gold, her research into Edwardian England, and they have a long conversation about tattoos. Her friend (and previous PBN guest) Holly Black naturally comes up as well. Today’s episode is sponsored by Grove Collaborative. Visit grove.co/pbn to get a free five piece cleaning set from Mrs. Meyer and Grove as part of your first order

Tonight’s readings comes from Joan and Peter. Written by H. G. Wells and published in 1918, this book looks at late Victorian and Edwardian England and the period just prior to World War 1. My name is Teddy and I aim to help people everywhere get a good night’s rest. Sleep is so important and my mission is to help you get the rest you need. Each episode is designed to play in the background, while you slowly fall asleep. The podcast is completely free and it’s the support from listeners that allows me keep bringing out more episodes. If the podcast helps, please subscribe and leave a review, it really does help out. You can also say hello at Boreyoutosleep.com where you support the podcast. I’m also now on Twitter and Instagram @BoreYouToSleep In the meantime, lie back, relax and enjoy the readings. Sincerely. Teddy --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/boreyoutosleep/support

Part 2 of "The Wind in the Willows," presented by our friends over at ASMR Radio. The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals in a pastoral version of Edwardian England. Enjoy! --- Artist: ASMR Radio Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-353595461 --- Listen to Sleep and Relax ASMR & Friends on your favorite podcast directory: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2RKJerO Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2H4sfMS Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2Fkr7lM Stitcher: https://bit.ly/2AECMbY Overcast: https://bit.ly/2QxN6rf Podbean: https://bit.ly/2H4qBe8 Anchor: https://bit.ly/2shxyyd Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/Aoo0 --- Email: Hello@SleepandRelaxASMR.com Website: www.SleepandRelaxASMR.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/asmrandchill/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/asmrandchill/support

Chapter 1, part 1 of "The Wind in the Willows," presented by our friends over at ASMR Radio. The Wind in the Willows is a children's novel by Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals in a pastoral version of Edwardian England. Enjoy! --- Artist: ASMR Radio Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-353595461 --- Listen to Sleep and Relax ASMR & Friends on your favorite podcast directory: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2RKJerO Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2H4sfMS Google Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2Fkr7lM Stitcher: https://bit.ly/2AECMbY Overcast: https://bit.ly/2QxN6rf Podbean: https://bit.ly/2H4qBe8 Anchor: https://bit.ly/2shxyyd Pocket Casts: https://pca.st/Aoo0 --- Email: Hello@SleepandRelaxASMR.com Website: www.SleepandRelaxASMR.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/asmrandchill/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/asmrandchill/support

Jared, Oriana and Ned discuss Jared’s choice of topic: friendship! Friendship in Middle-earth is a key part of many different characters’ lives, and how it both plays out in stories and simply exists in its own right is well worth considering, from the primary friendship of Frodo and Sam to many other examples throughout the legendarium. How does Tolkien’s own socialization in Edwardian England shape both the friendships of his own life and his portrayals of it in his writing? Is his near-exclusive focus on male-to-male friendships potentially alienating? What are some counterexamples of the strong friendships he portrays—friendships that end in disaster, or false friendships that never were? Perhaps above all else, what makes Tolkien so open to portraying deep visible emotions in his male friendships, and how does that contrast with how male friendships are often shown in modern American creative arts?

Like too many of us, I hated history classes throughout my school career, and only realized as an adult that there are few things more interesting to ponder than the ways people lived and thought in different times and places than my own. After all, we’re all stuck in our own time, limited by our culture, consciousness, and whatever knowledge we may possess of what came before. Maybe that explains part of the appeal of historical fiction like the series Downton Abbey, set in a great Edwardian country house in the early 20th century. My guest today is stage and screen Director Michael Engler. He’s the director of the new Downton Abbey feature film, and he directed episodes of Downton Abbey, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, 30 Rock and much more for TV. Meticulously recreating one corner of Edwardian England and building original story worlds within it, Downton Abbey is part romantic comedy, part historical drama grappling with the tensions of class and society at the sunset of empire. Surprise conversation starters in this episode: Comedian Pete Holmes on visualization  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Johny Pitts, Caryl Phillips and Nat Illumine discuss the idea of Afropean identity with Matthew Sweet. Plus New Generation Thinker Dina Rezk on Jehane Noujaim's Oscar nominated documentary The Square and Egyptian politics. Georgia Parris discusses her first film Mari - a family drama of birth, death and contemporary dance. Johny Pitts is one of the team behind https://afropean.com/ an online multimedia, multidisciplinary journal exploring the social, cultural and aesthetic interplay of black and European cultures. He runs this with Nat Illumine. Johny Pitts has just published a book Afropean: Notes from Black Europe Caryl Phillips' most recent novel A View of the Empire at Sunset is inspired by the travels of the writer Jean Rhys who moved from Dominica to Edwardian England and 1920s Paris and his first play Strange Fruit (1980) is being re-staged at the Bush Theatre in London until July 27th 2019. Mari by Georgia Parris is at selected cinemas from June 21st 2019. New Generation Thinkers is a scheme run by the BBC and the AHRC to select ten academics each year who can turn their research into radio. You can hear more from the 2019 Thinkers in this launch programme https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004dsv Dina Rezk teaches at the University of Reading. You can find extended conversations with Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Spike Lee and Paul Gilroy included in our playlist on the Free Thinking website and available as BBC Arts&Ideas podcasts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04ly0c8 Producer: Fiona McLean

Why was Mrs Humphrey Ward a hate figure to the women of Britain? A remarkable life as the highest paid woman in Victorian and Edwardian England, along with her considerable charitable work, all came crashing down when she made a fundamental mistake that saw her publicly vilified. Discover her story in this episode.

A Room with a View is a 1985 British romance film directed by James Ivory, screenplay written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and produced by Ismail Merchant, of E. M. Forster's novel of the same name (1908). The film closely follows the novel by use of chapter titles to distinguish thematic segments. Set in England and Italy, it is about a young woman named Lucy Honeychurch in the restrictive and repressed culture of Edwardian England, and her developing love for a free-spirited young man, George Emerson. It stars Helena Bonham Carter as Lucy and Julian Sands as George, and features Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, and Simon Callow in supporting roles. The film received universal critical acclaim and was a box-office success. At the 59th Academy Awards, it was nominated for eight Academy Awards (including Best Picture), and won three: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Design. It also won five British Academy Film Awards and a Golden Globe. In 1999, the British Film Institute placed A Room with a View 73rd on its list of the Top 100 British films of the 20th century. Each episode my friend Tyler and I analyze the editing of one iconic movie scene like this one and you can follow along. So turn on the podcast, bring up the youtube clip by clicking the link below (when we tell you) and let's get into it: Room With A View - Lying to George (https://youtu.be/T8TV9I4sSdI) ----- We also talk about the note process in the editing. What are good ways

Edwardian England This is from a small selection of the pieces I created in 2013 to pitch to a 4 year BBC radio project dramatising the first world war from 1914 to 1918. I composed 14 pieces, here you will find 11 of them. Unfortunately none of the piece were chosen for the production... All pieces composed by Steve Wilson

James Wilby remembers starring in Maurice, a story of the forbidden love between two men amid the stifling conformity of Edwardian England. As James Ivory's film adaption of EM Forster's novel returns to cinemas this summer Wilby looks back on filming alongside Hugh Grant and how the film was overlooked in Britain in in 1987. Rosamund Pike and director Patrick Kennedy talk about the art of phoning it in. From their short film, The Human Voice, which consists entirely of Rosamund on the phone for 18 minutes to some of cinema's must iconic on the phone scenes. Presenter: Antonia Quirke Producer: Kate Bullivant.

Patrick Gale discusses his novel, A Place Called Winter, set at the beginning of the 20th century. The life of Patrick's own great-grandfather Harry Cane provides the backdrop for a fictional story about the character Harry Cane, who leaves behind his wife and daughter in order to keep a scandalous love affair with another man quiet, and emigrates to the harsh wilderness of Canada. Harry signs up for an emigration programme to the newly colonised Canadian prairies. Remote and unforgiving, his allotted homestead in a place called Winter is a world away from the suburbs of turn-of-the-century Edwardian England. And yet it is here, isolated in a seemingly harsh landscape, under the threat of war, madness and an evil man of undeniable magnetism that the fight for survival will reveal in Harry an inner strength and capacity for love beyond anything he has ever known before. Patrick Gale describes how he followed in his great-grandfather's footsteps and travelled to Winter in Saskatchewan and learned about those pioneering communities and their relationship with the Cree, the Native North American tribe. And how the character Troels Munck was named for a Danish man who bidded to appear in Gale's next novel at a charity fundraiser. Presenter : James Naughtie Producer : Dymphna Flynn April's Bookcub choice : The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (2016).

Philip Blond, Eliza Filby, Tom Simpson and Simon Heffer join Rana Mitter to look back to Edwardian England and at conservative thinking now. New Generation Thinkers Eleanor Lybeck and Leah Broad share their research into touring opera and the links between Sibelius's music for theatre and his symphonies. Simon Heffer's latest book is called The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880-1914 Opera: Passion, Power and Politics opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum on September 30th. Tickets cost £19 and BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting the operas featured in the exhibition. The BBC Symphony Orchestra embark upon a cycle of Sibelius to mark 100 years since Finland gained independence. Catch up with tonight's performance of Sibelius 5 on the Radio 3 website. Eliza Filby is the author of God and Mrs Thatcher Philip Blond is the Director of think tank Res Publica. Tom Simpson is a New Generation Thinker and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford You can find a discussion of The Union Jack and of George Dangerfield's The Strange Death of Liberal England in the Free Thinking collection of Landmarks on our website. Producer: Luke Mulhall.

"A Death By Any Other Name", Tessa Arlen's eagerly awaited third mystery, is set in the mansions of Edwardian England at a time of upheaval and social change. It will be released on March 14, when Tessa will greet her fans for a book signing at Eagle Harbor Books beginning at 5 pm. In this podcast, Tessa talks with BCB host Channie Peters about the overarching theme of her mystery series, and the theme of her latest book. She explains why she loves writing about this era in the early decades of the 1900s. And she describes the social and economic changes of a declining British dominance with America in the ascent, as the world catapulted toward what became the "Great War" -- the same era depicted in Downton Abbey. Tessa acknowledges that all of that makes for a rich backdrop for a murder mystery -- her third. Gardeners will also love "A Death By Any Other Name" as the murder mystery unfolds amidst a club of English aristocracy competing to breed the best tea rose. Gardeners will be able to wallow in horticultural detail and the essential considerations of rose breeding. If there were a genre for intelligent and historically steeped mystery writing, Tessa's series would certainly fall in that category. A reader may be impressed by the beautiful writing and the extensive research into the historical period - the immediate lead up to the war, the shifting way of life for both the aristocracy and the working classes - and its sociological impact. Credits: BCB host: Channie Peters; BCB audio editor and social media publisher: Barry Peters.

Though associated with heritage films—lush period films typically set in Britain's imperial past—producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala collaborated since the early 1960s on a variety of literary adaptations. Masterfully constructed, Merchant-Ivory films came to symbolize a certain type of prestige film—for better and worse. Perhaps the pinnacle of their collaboration was Howards End (92), based on the E. M. Forster novel about class and inheritance set in Edwardian England. In anticipation of the theatrical run of its new 4K restoration, Michael Koresky, Editorial Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Farran Smith Nehme, FILM COMMENT columnist and regular contributor for the New York Post, and Digital Editor Violet Lucca discussed the artful, complex adaptation and other Merchant-Ivory classics.

Rana Mitter talks to playwright Anders Lustgarten whose latest work is set in a small village in China, Rotten Peach Village, over 60 years. Communism arrives and the villagers embrace it. Lustgarten has also written a new play partly inspired by the painter Caravaggio which opens at the RSC at the end of this year. Also a consideration of the satirical short stories about Edwardian England published by Saki - the pen name of Scottish author Hector Hugh Munro (1870 - 1916). Rana is joined by the novelist Naomi Alderman and Saki expert Nick Freeman.Cartoonist Riad Sattouf describes his graphic novel memoir, The Arab of the Future. And Rana gets to grip with what we could possibly mean by a thing, with philosopher Guy Longworth The Sugar-Coated Bullets of the Bourgeoisie by Anders Lustgarten runs at the Arcola Theatre in London 7 – 30 April before opening the 10th High Tide festival of new writing in Suffolk in September. The Arab of the Future by Riad Sattouf is out now. Producer: Luke Mullhall

Downton Abbey fans worried about post-series withdrawal - worry not! You can re-immerse yourself in Edwardian England in Tessa Arlen's historical novels ... with a murder mystery added for good measure. Eagle Harbor Book Company (our outstanding independent bookstore on Winslow Way) will celebrate the release of Tessa's new second book with a launch party on Thursday, March 31 at 7:30 pm. In addition to “light eats” and some fizzie beverages, Tessa will delve into stories of her books that benefit from her own English origins. And we can expect more to come, since her publisher and readers have clamored for a series. Tessa Arlen's first book, "Death of a Dishonorable Gentleman", set in the English countryside and an aristocratic family home during the early 20th century, has all the beautiful detail of English gardens and scenic vistas, plus the culinary details of dinner parties. But lest we be lulled into the bucolic life of the rich and famous in Edwardian England, murder during a gala event keeps our brains abuzz with the whodunit. Tessa's second book "Death Sits Down to Dinner" takes us to London where the same aristocratic family owns a town home with similar upstairs/downstairs intrigue. But in this even more exciting novel, the murder occurs at a dinner party celebrating Winston Churchill's 39th birthday. Tessa includes extensive historical research, and five actual historical figures who add interest and further intrigue to the murder mystery, with a surprise ending. You'll find this 14-minute podcast conversation with Tessa a delight. And it foreshadows a fun and engaging author event at Eagle Harbor Books on March 31, when Tessa will share a surprise announcement. Visit Tessa's website. Credits: BCB host: Channie Peters; BCB audio editor and social media publisher: Barry Peters.

“Downton Abbey fans will be delighted with its Edwardian England setting…the story offers all of Brockway’s signatures: laugh-out-loud dialogue, complex characters, and a deeply rewarding, sweet, and sexy slow-build romance,” says RT Book Reviews of The Songbird’s Seduction by Connie Brockway. Get it for only $1.99 until 3/5! For more info, visit www.Kindlelovestories.com.  

THE HORROR OF CARDMOOR ABBEY (HORROR) Tonight, we take you back to Edwardian England. When man's thirst to understand the natural and supernatural was at an all time high. It was on the quest for such knowledge that a telegram was sent to Arthur Samuels of London University. A telegram which lead him to investigate ... The Horror of Cardmoor Abbey. Darker Projects  

Dr Jane Hamlett Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London) Dr Alastair Owens (School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London) Abstracts Dr Jane Hamlett Institutional Things: Material Culture and Patient Experience at Bethlem, 1870-1910 This paper draws on research for the ESRC At Home in the Institution Project -- a cross-institutional study of space and material culture in lunatic asylums (as they were known to contemporaries), schools and lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian England. Built en masse in the nineteenth century, institutions created new material worlds that their inmates had to try and negotiate. The paper will examine interior decoration, furnishing and provision of goods within asylums. Taking Bethlem Hospital, then based in Lambeth, as a case study, I will explore the efforts made to domesticate this establishment through home-like décor. However, the main focus will be patients' responses to and engagement with material culture. The paper will draw on a unique collection of hundreds of letters preserved in Bethlem's case books, which offer an unparalleled record of inmates' reactions to their environments and the things they thought were most important. In a highly controlled material world, small goods, the portable and peripheral, became vital to patients as they attempted to maintain identity and agency within institutional walls. Dr Alastair Owens People and things on the move: domestic material culture, poverty and mobility in Victorian London The development of what Alan Mayne and Susan Lawrence (1999) termed ‘ethnographic’ approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. Building on critiques of such approaches, this paper examines the material culture of poor households in Victorian London. Drawing upon a study of Victorian archaeological remains excavated from a site in Limehouse in London’s East End, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, it aims to place ‘mobility’ as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place and poverty. While historians and archaeologists have tended to regard mobility as an obstacle to understanding the lives of the poor, here I want to show how by examining the temporal routines and geographical movements of people and things across a variety of time frames and spatial scales, we can perhaps better grasp the struggles and uncertainties of life in Victorian London’s most socially deprived communities. I conclude that as historians of material culture, we need to be more open to the restlessness and dynamism of people and objects.

Institute of Historical Research At home in the institution: material life in lunatic asylums, lodging houses and schools in Victorian and Edwardian England Jane Hamlett (RHUL) Studies of the Home

Francine Stock begins her exploration of the culture of the Great War in 1914 with the mobilization of the word. For more than 40 years the next war to come had been a staple of fiction. England had been invaded, bombed and conquered before a shot had ever been fired in anger and now the war was upon us. What unfolded in the first weeks in the towns of villages of Belgium turned the war into a cultural struggle for survival and intellectuals and authors were soon seen as crucial to the war effort. From Arnold Bennett to Israel Zangwill, the literary giants of Edwardian England went to war. Producer Mark Burman. Part of WW1 on the BBC - bbc.co.uk/ww1

Actor Jefferson Mays is only one man, but he’s happy not to limit himself to a single role when he goes on stage. In 2004, Mays won a Tony Award and several other awards for his two-character turn in Doug Wright’s play, I Am My Own Wife. But now he's quadrupled that load in the new musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder at the Walter Kerr Theatre on Broadway. The show is set in Edwardian England, where Mays plays eight members of a high-born family who all fall victim to a distant relative with murder on his mind. The show is directed by Darko Tresnjak, the book is by Robert L. Freedman, the score is by Steven Lutvak, and Freedman and Lutvak collaborated on the lyrics. Is A Gentleman’s Guide a killer entertainment, or merely deadly? New York Times theater critic Charles Isherwood offers a review.

Dad is on point and seems to understand most of the goings on in a vampire, zombie, and magic infested Edwardian England. Dad likes class structure with vampires, humans, and zombies Patrick is distracted by the sexy mai

Kelly and Tom take a ride on the Good Ship Maggie Smith as they recap Downton Abbey S1:E4.  On their journey, they discuss various ways Mary Crawley might kill herself, make inevitable Clue jokes, come down with a case of Thomas fever, investigate the ancestries of Kelly Clarkson and Morrisey, and find out how hard people who are not Sybil fought for the vote.  Tom reveals that he is a fan of Daisy’s hat while Kelly sits in the hall.  They make an important announcement that affects ALL of the Tenants, and then they Make Way for Branson! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Kelly and Tom are joined by San Francisco comedian Natasha Muse to recap Downton Abbey S1:E3 and learn how everything can get cancer, meet Laura Linney’s ghostly cinematographer, tag along on the most unsuccessful date, discover how Sybill invented the topsy tail, read the stud book, and lament Edwardian England’s lack of emoticons.  Also up for discussion: a rape of a different color, the innocent sleep of the ginger, limpigators, Maggie Smith’s “A-Team” connection, and “Buckin Around with Edith Crawley.” See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, Babe Ardy, with her Helpers Sarah and Amy take on board Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series, fresh off a two-week promotional tour for the latest book in the series, The Pirate King. Apart from the world of swashbuckling on the silver screen and women in the canon (with a particular emphasis on blondes), we also talk about Sherlockian scholarship, Russell on screen, and how to successfully cross the worlds of Edwardian England and modern-day San Francisco. For your further edification, links to things we mention in this episode: You can find out all about Laurie on, and if you're on Twitter, you can follow and . : the first of two volumes of Sherlockian scholarship, co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger. The second volume is still under way. : A collection of short stories inspired by the Sherlock Holmes canon, also co-edited with Leslie S. Klinger. Short story authors include Neil Gaiman, Lee Child, and Margaret Maron. : A free ebook with excerpts from each of the Russell books, in case the podcast has made you curious and you want to start reading ;) : The crossover of the worlds of Kate Martinelli and Mary Russell. : Les Klinger's edition of the Canon. Prepare for a lot of footnotes.

Night Terrors – Episode 014:  The Horror of Cardmoor Abbey Tonight, we take you back to Edwardian England. When man’s thirst to understand the natural and supernatural was at an all time high. It was on the quest for such knowledge that a telegram was sent to Arthur Samuels of London University. A telegram which […] The post NT – EP 014: The Horror Of Cardmoor Abbey first appeared on Darker Projects.

Tonight, we take you back to Edwardian England. When man's thirst to understand the natural and supernatural was at an all time high. It was on the quest for such knowledge that a telegram was sent to Arthur Samuels of London University. A telegram which lead him to investigate ... The Horror of Cardmoor Abbey.Listen The Horror of Cardmoor Abbey(31:18, 31.8 MB mp3, released 2007.04.05)Written by Paul ManneringFeatured in the cast were:David Nagel as Arthur SamuelsGareth Preston as The Station MasterDavid Ault as Doctor Earnst HauberElie Hirschman as the Homunculi.Laura Post as SusanShane Harris as JonathanThe series is produced and directed by Mark BruzeeCo-production by Chris SnyderPostproduction by MJ CogburnThe executive producer for Darker Projects is Eric Busby