Podcasts about Peckham Rye

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

«Wir haben wirklich unser Bestes gegeben», sagt My Morning Jacket-Keyboarder Bo Koster im Sounds!-Interview über das zehnte Album seiner Southern-Rock-inspirierten Kapelle. Und er hat verdammt recht. «Is» ist das beste My Morning Jacket-Album seit Jahren. All Killer, no Filler – dem Quintett aus Louisville, Kentucky ist mit ihrer neuen Platte ein wirklich hervorragender Wurf gelungen. Von den härteren Rockern wie «Half a Lifetime» bis zu den dreamy Balladen wie «Time Waited»: Es sind alles starke Songs, welche My Morning Jacket aus den rund 100 Demos, die Sänger und Songwriter Jim James für das Album geschrieben hat, ausgewählt haben. Dafür musste man jedoch auch ein paar Umwege gehen, wie Koster, der auch schon in der Tourband von Roger Waters spielte, im Interview erzählt. Mit «Half a Lifetime» zum Beispiel, gibt's auf der neuen Platte einen Song, dessen Demoversion bereits 20 Jahre zurückgeht. «Is» ist das neue Sounds! Album der Woche. Noch Platz im Plattenregal? Dann live Sounds! hören! Wir verlosen jeden Abend bis Freitag eine Vinyl-Ausgabe des Albums. +++ PLAYLIST +++ · 22:56 – ANWAY von FROWN LINE · 22:52 – PECKHAM RYE von MONTE MAI · 22:48 – YOU GOT TIME AND I GOT MONEY von SMERZ · 22:43 – PURE LOVE von DJ KOZE FEAT. DAMON ALBARN · 22:39 – THE STEPS von HAIM · 22:37 – JEALOUS BOY von THE BUG CLUB · 22:32 – THE WOLF von WITCH POST · 22:29 – LIFE DURING WARTIME von TALKING HEADS · 22:26 – BACKFLIP von CAMILLA SPARKSSS · 22:21 – SEXY CLOWN von MARIE DAVIDSON · 22:18 – JESUS WITH GLASSES von URGES · 22:15 – CORRIDOR von URGES · 22:10 – FAKE PLASTIC TREES von RADIOHEAD · 21:55 – MAYBE WHEN WE'RE 30 von SPORTS TEAM · 21:50 – I'M IN LOVE (SUBARU) von SPORTS TEAM · 21:45 – EVERYDAY MAGIC von MY MORNING JACKET · 21:40 – DIE FOR IT von MY MORNING JACKET · 21:36 – WORDLESS CHORUS von MY MORNING JACKET · 21:29 – HALF A LIFETIME von MY MORNING JACKET · 21:26 – BREATHE von PINK FLOYD · 21:20 – ROCKMAN von MK.GEE · 21:16 – OUT IN THE OPEN von MY MORNING JACKET · 21:09 – I CAN HEAR YOUR LOVE von MY MORNING JACKET · 21:06 – TIME WAITED von MY MORNING JACKET

This round Sukh Ojla drops in to chat weird dates, double standards and what if Voldemort was the virus. Please enjoy this rereleased episode as part of our Best of Dating Games series. Join our Subscription on Apple Podcasts for ad free episodes + bonus content Check out our award winning mental health podcast HERE Find more from Bobby HERE

"I've never met anyone who knew what they were doing; we're all just making it up." Host: Michael Dargie, THEREBELREBELPODCAST.COM Guest: Sam Conniff, THEUNCERTAINTYEXPERTS.COM In this episode of The RebelRebel Podcast, host Michael Dean Dargie sits down with the audacious and insightful Sam Conniff, author of "Be More Pirate." From the sunny streets of South London to the historical pockets of Peckham Rye, Sam takes listeners on an enlightening journey through his unique perspective on life, leadership, and the power of rebellion. Sam opens up about his personal struggles and triumphs, revealing how he found clarity in uncertain times and the driving force behind his mission to encourage others to embrace their inner pirate. His book, "Be More Pirate," serves as a manifesto for those looking to break free from societal constraints and redefine success on their own terms. The conversation delves into the historical roots of piracy, highlighting how these rule-breakers of the past can serve as modern-day role models for professional and personal rule-breaking. Sam passionately discusses the importance of interoception, the eighth sense, and how it can guide individuals through the choppy waters of uncertainty. Listeners are treated to an array of fascinating stories, from the strategic retreats of Queen Elizabeth I to the rebellious acts of Golden Age pirates, and how these historical narratives can inspire contemporary acts of courage and innovation. Sam also shares insights from his current work, leading the world's largest research study into the human impact of uncertainty, offering practical advice on how to harness this often-daunting force for positive change. Whether you're a seasoned rebel or a pirate in waiting, this episode is packed with wisdom, humour, and actionable insights that will leave you inspired to chart your own course. Cool Things Sam Says "Interoception will be your ability to navigate by running your fingers in the water and feeling the currents." "The change we need won't come from the places it's supposed to; it requires professional rule-breaking." "When you realize there's no singular right, it becomes a terrifying and liberating place to live." "I've never met anyone who knew what they were doing; we're all just making it up." Episode Highlights Sam Conniff's journey from uncertainty to clarity. The historical significance and modern-day relevance of piracy. The concept of interoception and its role in navigating uncertainty. Sam's work with the Uncertainty Experts and its impact on individuals and organizations. Practical advice for rebels and pirates in waiting. Links from Episode Sam Conniff website: [samconniff.com](https://www.samconniff.com/) Sam Conniff's book: [Be More Pirate](https://bemorepirate.com) Uncertainty Experts: [uncertaintyexperts.com](https://uncertaintyexperts.com) Michael Dargie: [MichaelDargie.com](https://michaeldargie.com)

We're edging closer to THE PRIME, but today we chat about The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Spark's novels are incredibly fun, but this might be the wildest, featuring an incredible character name (Dougal Douglas), a lot of absenteeism, a textile factory, a Nun Tunnel, and dancing. Lots of dancing.Click here to subscribe to our Substack and find us on the socials: @lostinredonda just about everywhere.Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by TrafficLogo design: Flynn Kidz Designs

Chessie chats with Soni Marques the founder of Peckham-based open-access print studio Sonsoles. Chessie & Soni discuss the importance of providing access to print facilities for young people entering the industry, the challenges of making your studio open access and we also hear about the crowdfunder aiming to help Sonsoles continue to thrive. Sonsoles was founded in 2012 by Soni Marquez and is a fully equipped Open Access screen print studio situated in a friendly warehouse 5 minutes away from Peckham Rye station in South East London. Run by artists based in London- Royal College of Art MA Printmaking graduates. You can find out more about Sonsoles at: http://sonsolesprintstudio.co.uk/ Or alternatively over on their Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/sonsolesprintstudio THIS PODCAST SPONSORED BY  Blind Maggot - Limited edition t-shirts https://www.blindmaggot.co.uk GET £10 OFF USING DISCOUNT CODE : SQUEEGEE Magna Colours - Waterbased ink specialists https://www.magnacolours.com  M&R - Screen printing equipment https://www.mrprint.com Target Transfers - Heat presses and transfers https://www.targettransfers.com Screen Print World - Discount code CRP5 https://screenprintworld.co.uk?wlpr_ref=r_d6eoujawx DISCOUNT CODE: SQUEEGEE Adobe Creative Cloud Discount Code - Software for creatives https://prf.hn/l/oVbML1W ^LINK FOR DISCOUNT ^ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ OUR AFFILIATES  Screen Print World - Screen Printing Equipment https://screenprintworld.co.uk/ DISCOUNT CODE  for Separation Studio NXT : CRP5 Separation Studio NXT - Artwork Separation Software https://solutionsforscreenprinters.com/separation-studio-nxt/ DISCOUNT CODE FOR Separation Studio NXT  : CRP5 Annettte & Co - The best PROFIT FIRST accountant https://www.annetteandco.co.uk/chessie/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ FREE SCREEN PRINTING RESOURCES & TEMPLATES https://www.squeegeeandink.co.uk/product-category/downloads/ SCREEN PRINTING TUTORIALS https://www.squeegeeandink.co.uk/product-category/screen-print-tutorial-videos/ SCREEN PRINTING BLOG https://www.squeegeeandink.co.uk/blog/ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ INSTAGRAM @squeegee_and_ink https://tinyurl.com/m52wej83  TIKTOK @squeegee_ink https://tinyurl.com/5cmnsw4b

Muriel Spark was a prolific poet and novelist who was nominated for the Booker Prize three times over the course of her writing career. In 1981, Spark's Loitering with Intent was shortlisted for the prize alongside that year's eventual winner Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. The novel is a wonderfully gossipy and entertaining literary joyride which sees a would-be novelist takes inspiration from her life only to find the tables are mysteriously turned – and it's our August Book of the Month. In this episode Jo and James: Continue getting to know each other by chatting about the life event James would start his memoir with and Jo's favourite albums of all time Share a brief biography of Muriel Spark Give a slightly spoiler-y account of happens in Loitering with Intent Discuss how much of Muriel Spark's writing may be influenced or based on her own life Consider why Muriel Spark is not as widely read now as she once was Who should read Loitering with Intent Reading list: Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark The Public Image by Muriel Spark The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan A full transcript of the episode is available at our website. Follow The Booker Prize Podcast so you never miss an episode. Visit http://thebookerprizes.com/podcast to find out more about us, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Tiktok @thebookerprizes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artist Song Time Album Year RanestRane Stargate 14:40 Starchild 2018 The Wood Demons Arithmomania 9:14 Angels of Peckham Rye 2020 Crippled Black Phoenix Wyches and Basterdz 4:56 Banefyre 2022 Spacegoat Doomensional 4:32 Superstition 2016 Lesoir Babel 20:04 Babel 2022 Spring Golden Fleece 6:49 Spring 1971 The Master's Apprentices Games We Play 11:11 A Toast to […]

Oneika Raymond travels to the heart of Peckham, a bustling neighborhood in South London just a few miles southeast of the Thames River. There, she joins local author Jendella Benson for a walking tour of the district she holds dear. Peckham is where Jendella set her debut novel, Hope and Glory, in order to pay tribute to the town and its Nigerian-British community.Oneika meets up with Jendella at Peckham Rye station to kick off the tour of Rye Lane, Peckham's main thoroughfare and the place to shop its local markets, dine on international flavors, and people watch. No matter the day of the week, Rye Lane is buzzing thanks to its numerous markets, food vendors, and beauty salons.  Then, Jendella takes Oneika to Peckhamplex, a cinema tucked back from Rye Lane. With its £4.99 tickets, it's a staple for a casual night out. They also view Peckham Portraits, a collection of images of iconic Black British actors changing the face of cinema.From there, Oneika and Jendella duck into a traditional indoor Peckham market, where they marvel at the textiles, imported peanuts, and shea butter. It's truly one-stop shopping, and indicative of the entrepreneurial spirit of the neighborhood. The last stop on the tour is Peckham Palms, a modern interpretation of Peckham's indoor markets, and a Black-women led mall that's supporting local innovation. Peckham is a Black-beauty hub, and the Palms provides affordable rent and fosters community. They end the day at The Flygerians, a café-in-residence at the Palms run by local sisters Jess and Jo Edun. While chowing down on Nigerian street food specialties like jollof rice bowls and efo riro, Oneika and Jendella discuss how Peckham inspired Hope and Glory, how reading can be one of the most authentic ways to travel, and Jendella's best advice to engage with the community when you visit Peckham.To read full episode transcripts from About the Journey and see photos of each featured destination, head to About the Journey on Marriott Bonvoy Traveler. Starting this season, you can also watch videos from select episodes on our Marriott Bonvoy YouTube channel.

Artist Song Time Album Year Go Go Penguin GoGo Penguin Everything Is Going to Be OK 4:42 Everything Is Going to Be OK 2023 Lakiko Lakiko Tobogan 4:14 What To Do, How To Live? 2023 The Wood Demons The Wood Demons Big Game Fishing 5:04 Angels of Peckham Rye 2020 Rachel Flowers Rachel Flowers My […]

This week: the Frieze art fair and spring auctions in New York. As the Frieze Art Fair returns to The Shed in Manhattan, coinciding with the season's big auctions, The Art Newspaper's live editor, Aimee Dawson, and our contributing editor Anny Shaw take the temperature of the market in New York. Just as we completed the episode, the US Supreme Court ruled that Andy Warhol infringed on the photographer Lynn Goldstein's copyright when he created a series of silkscreens based on her photograph of the late rock singer Prince. Coincidentally, we had already recorded an interview with our New York correspondent Laura Gilbert about the fact that a Manhattan judge last week refused to throw out two photographers' long-running copyright lawsuits against the artist Richard Prince, for his New Portraits series, which appropriated their original images. The case is bound to be affected by the Supreme Court's decision, as Laura tells us. And this episode's Work of the Week is Metronome by Sarah Sze, a new site-specific work made for a former first class waiting room at Peckham Rye station in south London, which until recently had been almost derelict. We speak to Sarah about her new installation.Frieze New York continues until Sunday, 21 May.Listen to an interview with Virginia Rutledge, the art historian and lawyer, about the Andy Warhol/Lynn Goldsmith case in The Week in Art episode from 24 June 2022.Sarah Sze: The Waiting Room, Artangel at Peckham Rye Station, London, until 17 September. Sarah Sze: Timelapse, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, until 10 September. Listen to the podcast A brush with… Sarah Sze, from 29 September 2021. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

THIS WEEK on the GWA Podcast, we interview one of the most renowned artists working today, SARAH SZE! Working across sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, video, and installation – and the culmination of them – Sze's creations often take the form of a planetarium, a colosseum, a work-in-progress laboratory. Often held up by precarious stick-like structures and formed around everyday objects (and, more recently, moving images), her works behave – for me – as the greatest visual microcosm for the information and images inundating today's fast moving, internet-filled world. In dialogue with art historical predecessors who worked with the readymade at the start of the 20th century – as well as challenging traditions in genres, such as the still life – Sze borrows from everyday materials. These include wire, congealed paint, tape measures, scissors, newspapers – as well as images and films taken on her iPhone as if to give prominence to mundane, mass-produced objects. Born in Boston, Sze earned a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Already when she was just in graduate school, an exhibition at MoMA PS1 saw her transform both the museum and sculpture itself. This quickly progressed to Sze working with projections and objects – from plastic water bottles to razor blades, q-tips and ladders – and work on an immersive scale that activated the viewer to be part of the time-based work, as well as challenging the notions that everything in her artworks is actually what is used to require to make the piece itself. In 2003, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship; in 2012 she took over New York's High Line; in 2013 she represented the US at the Venice Biennale; in 2017, her permanent mural “Blueprint for a Landscape” opened at the 96th Street station of the Second Avenue subway in Manhattan. Last month she opened a monumental exhibition titled “Timelapse” at the Guggenheim, and next month will transform a disused Victorian waiting room at Peckham Rye station in London into an installation commissioned by Artangel. FURTHER LINKS! https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/sarah-sze-timelapse https://www.victoria-miro.com/artists/33-sarah-sze/ https://gagosian.com/artists/sarah-sze/ https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/sarah-sze/ https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_sze_how_we_experience_time_and_memory_through_art#t-542032 Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Research assistant: Viva Ruggi Sound editing by Mikaela Carmichael Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/ THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY OCULA: https://ocula.com/

"the hapless soldier's sigh runs in blood down Palace walls" 

The post At Peckham Rye by Clare Pollard appeared first on A Mouthful of Air.

Charity Wakefield's passion for the natural world shone through when we caught up at her local green space. I met the actor, environmentalist and Woodland Trust ambassador at Peckham Rye Park to talk about trees, wildlife and acting. Charity explains how nature has made her happy since the tree-climbing, den-building days of her childhood. She is concerned that people have lost their connection with the environment, but is hopeful for the future and encourages us to recognise that we can all make a difference. She believes in ‘people power'. We also talk eco-friendly fashion, filming comedy-drama The Great and climbing a tree to learn her lines in Lewisham! Don't forget to rate us and subscribe! Learn more about the Woodland Trust at woodlandtrust.org.uk Transcript You are listening to Woodland Walks, a podcast for the Woodland Trust, presented by Adam Shaw. We protect and plant trees for people to enjoy, to fight climate change and to help wildlife thrive. Adam: Charity Wakefield is an actor, environmentalist and Woodland Trust ambassador. She starred in BBC One's production of Rapunzel, Constance in The Three Musketeers at the Bristol Old Vic, and Elaine in the Graduate at the New Vic. She had a lead role as Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and has been in Doctor Who, the Halcyon, Bounty Hunters, amongst other productions. And she's now starring in the TV series, The Great about Catherine the Great. Well, I met her at her local park to talk about acting and the importance of the natural world. Charity: So now we are at Peckham Ride Park, which has been my local park for most of my time in London. I now have a baby so there's lots of kinds of mother and baby groups around the area. I have lots of friends here still. Adam: Are you a country girl or did you grow up in the city, or? Charity: Erm, I, I never thought of myself as a country girl. I did grow up though in and around East Sussex. I used to live in a couple of different places down there. We moved a bit as a kid. Adam: Sorry, why don't you, you grew up in the country, why did you not think of yourself as a… Charity: I don't know Adam: You know you thought of yourself as you felt your inner urban woman early on? Charity: I just don't think I grew up with any sense of identity if I'm honest, because I also live a little bit in Spain when I was very small. And like I said we moved around quite a lot. So actually I'm an actress and I trained at drama school and going to drama school at the time of going to university for most people if you do that, that was the first time I really had this interest to work out where I was from, or you know you kind of try to identify yourself by telling each other, and also drama school, in particular, you're looking at different kind of life experiences and personality traits, because it's material for you, right? So, you start kind of realising ‘oh I that this background or that background'. Yeah, for me, being from the countryside just meant desperate driving as soon as I can. I could drive about a week after my birthday because I had secret driving lessons with friends and my dad and stuff. Yeah, I guess I have always loved the countryside and I sort of you know had friends you know the family were farmers and we used to go and make camps in the woods. Adam: Well, that's good, and talking of woods we seem to be, what's down there? That's a very wooded area, shall we go, you lead on, but shall we go down there? Or Charity: This is the Common, this is Peckham Ride Common, and erm I think it was, has been around for at least a couple of hundred years and it's a really big open space with some really huge trees in the middle. They're probably like, lots of them are London planes and oak trees, and I think this section we're about to walk into was actually sort of closed off at the beginning I think it was a big common and this was owned by an estate. A sort of family estate and then opened a bit later which is why as you can see it is much more formal Adam: I was going to say, so we are leaving a sort of really a very large green area with the Shard poking its head above the trees, so your urban environment, but walking into this much more formal sculptured… Charity: And actually you can walk the whole perimeter of this, and this is quite close to the road here but the other side is as you can see really big open and free, so it must have been quite weird at sort of the end of the 1800s, I suppose that kind of bridge between a really rich family that owned this huge part of the park in the middle, so this is yeah, now we are under these beautiful red-leaved trees, you probably know what that tree is? [Laugh] Adam: No, no, no, no, let's not embarrass each other by [Laugh] Charity: [Laugh] Okay no tree testing Adam: No tree testing [Laugh] Charity: Okay Adam: Well, this is, this is beautiful, so let's… there's a lovely, lovely bench with a dedication actually, some flowers connected to that. So why don't we have a sit down here and just have a chat? So, first of all, you mentioned you went to drama school, what drama school was it? Charity: I went to the Oxford School of Drama, which was the smallest, most obscure place I could have probably have found [Laugh] but it probably was the best place for me actually. It's funny, sometimes what's for you won't pass you as they say, erm a tiny drama school in the middle of the north of Oxfordshire. Acting is really hard and part of it is the marathon of it and the difficulties of getting jobs and everybody says this but failing continually and feeling like you haven't actually achieved things perfectly. In the theatre that means doing a show and there being some moments during the night where you think ‘uh that didn't work out right' and you have to be that kind of person that is interested in those kinds of faults and failures and wants to try different things and fix things and part of gaining that resilience is what I think drama school is all about. Adam: I mean apart from, I do want to talk to you more about your acting, but apart from that you do have what I see as quite a close connection to nature, reading a lot of your social media and learning about your activities, so tell me a bit about that, what is it? What is that connection and why do you feel it? Charity: I think growing up, albeit in a kind of little village or a town, but kind of in the countryside it was quite… it was a bit freer back then, I think it was different days, the early 80s. being allowed to sort of wander off, with friends and go into kind of woodlands and stuff. I think, I just feel very happy when I am in nature and I am interested in the differences, everything is growing and changing all the time. And it was interesting I went to LA once, and I thought this is so strange to me because the seasons aren't so apparent. Particularly when you live in the countryside your so kind of affected by those changes and erm I really love animals and I love knowing the circle of life, like where those animals came from, how they're are fed, what they do naturally, and then getting older you start to understand a bit more about the history and human history and how we have you know got to where we are today the kind of beginnings of farming and how society functions and unfortunately we are at a point now where we've outgrown ourselves, and how do we kind of pair that back? How do we get back? Adam: When you say we've outgrown ourselves what do you mean? Charity: I think humans have outgrown ourselves in a sense I think Adam: In what sense? Charity: In the sense that we've lost track I think of the essence of how you, I think yeah, we've lost track of how life is interconnected with nature. Because we're pushing technology further and further and some people are saying the answer is to eventually get into space rockets and go and start a new community on Mars and to me that's mad because I feel like we have everything that we need on this planet. And we just need to reconnect everything. Adam: Why do you think that disconnection has happened then Charity: Yeah well, I think it's a big question. Because I think it happens on so many levels. I think that there is a disconnect with people who are very very fortunate and have a hell of a lot of money, and in some ways don't notice the effect that their companies or their personal lives might be having on the environment because they are so loaded that they get given their food people and they probably never see plastic packaging to know that it exists because they are just delivered things Adam: Right Charity: and they don't really realise the impact that they're having, they're living kind of you know the high life Adam: Sure, do you think we're all living that sort of life? Charity: No, I don't Adam: Or it's just the 1%, or the quarter of the 1%? Charity: No, I don't, I think there are lots of people that are the absolute opposite. They haven't got the time, the money and the education to be able to do anything about it even if they did notice that there is an issue. Adam: And yet it is curious that isn't it, because and yet David Attenborough the national hero, his television programmes are all watched, and you know Charity: But they're not watched by everybody. Adam: They're not watched by everybody but there seems… I mean I get the feeling that you know there's this weird thing where everybody's talking about the environment and very concerned about it, even if perhaps if we're not changing our lifestyle, but my, my sort of view is that people do get it even if they're not changing their behaviour. You, you feel differently, I think. Charity: I think that there's, I think there's lots of people on those both extremes that don't get it at all and I also see lots and lots of people living on the poverty line, particularly where I live in the Borough of Lewisham, who are, and I know some people are working crazy hours and don't have time to think about it. About any kind of impact, and certainly don't have time to do complicated recycling or and they don't have the budget to be able to shop in a kind of, what we would probably on our middle-class wage perceive as a kind of eco conscious way. And because what's difficult is even if you do do that it's very hard to sort of balance what is the best consumer choice to make. As we all know, so we're in a difficult way, but what I do believe is that I believe in people power, and I as you say David Attenborough has made a huge impact and it is much more in the mainstream, hugely so in the mainstream in the last couple of year, and I do think its down to kind of lockdown and people staying at home and having the chance to stop and think and reconnect with their immediate environment but whether that's in a high-rise flat looking out listening to the lack of airplanes, being able to hear nature more, or somebody that's got, you know, fifty acres and has decided to buy a diamond Jubilee woodland for the Woodland Trust, you know, that there, I think we are kind of you united as we are the people who had a chance to stop and listen and look and then it's about people that are in positions of power and money to give us a direction to go in. to give us a positive idea Adam: So, apart from being intellectually being engaged with this, you're worried about it, you're clearly worried about it, you do a lot of things. Charity: mmm Adam: actually, so tell me about the lots of things you do Charity: err well I really love… I've always…So, fashion is a part of my job in the sense that I have to wear lots of different clothes, and um for my work Adam: well then you were recently in The Great Charity: That's right so I do a TV show, period TV show, and so I Adam: So, there's lots of costumes Charity: there's lots of costumes, I don't really have control over where those costumes are made and bought, but sometimes I do so, for example, if I'm producing a film or if I'm in a low-budget theatre production, I might provide my own clothes for that theatre production, and if producing then I am certainly in charge of deciding where we can get clothes, so for example, we go to charity shops and second-hand places because there is so much stuff in the world already. And I try to do that in my personal life. Adam: But do you have a label, a fashion label? Charity: No, nothing like that no Adam: But you, but you talk a lot about conscientious fashion on social media Charity: Yeh, I do because erm, …. Erm I am looking for the word, influencers! And stuff like that because I get approached for things like that and so I'm very conscious that If I am going to be in front of any kind of camera people are going to make a judgment or think that might be a good idea to wear, so I try to conscious about what I'm wearing if in the public in any way. And really that's just an extension of my real life, I've always shopped in charity shops, when I was growing up that was because we didn't have any money, so my clothes were given to me by other families, or when I first started to work, which was around fourteen, I worked in a strawberry farm – that was my first job! And my second job was in another strawberry farm, picking strawberries and my third job was the same strawberry farm but in the grocery shop. Adam: Okay, you got promoted! Charity: Promoted Adam: Promoted out of the fields! Charity: Absolutely, literally up the hill Adam: and Charity: I've become extremely aware of how difficult it is to manage woodland, and I didn't even know that as a concept, I just thought that big areas or parkland or woodland or farmland, I had not concept really of how that was looked after, and that's one thing that I think is I don't know, its both inspired me and made me realise what a huge challenge it is to be able to reforest large areas and the other fact of everything being so slow – trees reaching their maturity at such a slow rate – and that being a very difficult kind of challenge to sort of ask people to become involved with because I think when you're asking people to you know kind of sympathise with a charity or donate money to a charity in some ways its more difficult to say this is an extremely slow process but we need your help urgently… so it has been interesting to learn about that side of things. And I've also been deeply shocked and saddened about how many of our ancient woodlands and hedgerows and trees that are still being cut down in this country, partly for huge roadways but partly for new buildings and farmland and that does feel quite urgent to me. But yeah I've learnt a lot. I think one of my favourite things has been seeing the tree listening which I put on my Instagram if anyone wants to have a look Adam: So, tell me about tree listening. Charity: so, there's a way to hear the water being filtered up and down trees and it's the most beautiful sound and to me, it's a sound that I could go to sleep to. I keep thinking, I must try and find if there's a recording online that I can grab and put on my phone to listen to at night-time. And it gives you that sense of the tree being alive in the here and now. Trees grow so slowly it's sometimes quite difficult to think if the as, as kind of, living in the same time zone as us. So, hearing that, that's a very present sound really, I don't know, it makes you… it makes you want to hug the tree even more [laugh] Adam: Are you a bit of a tree hugger? Charity: Yeah, yeah, I am! Adam: Do people spot you in Peckham? Strange woman hugging trees? Charity: I do sometimes do that, the weird thing is, this was, I was in a different park in Lewisham, and I'd actually climbed the tree because I just felt like it and I also had some lines to learn. And it was quite an empty park and I thought well this is fine, and I was in a tree learning my lines and a lady came and she saw my bags on the floor and she was so freaked out she just looked up and saw me in this tree, and I have to say it was a weird sight. I have to really say Adam: [Laugh] Charity: This is so weird, I'm an actress and I don't know what I'm doing, sorry Yeah, I just, yeah, I love…I think it was also, when I was growing up, a bit of a place to kind of go and hide, you know if you're kind of stressed out or worried as a kid, and rather than run away, go and climb a tree and be up really high – it completely changes your perspective. Adam: Has having a child changed your perspective at all? Charity: I think it just strengthened my love of nature because it's the first thing that you teach kids about. All of the books that people give you are all about spotting different animals and trees, and the sunshine and the bees, everything he loves is related to outdoors, I mean that's, it's his first summer, he's fifteen months old and erm I've moved to a new house recently and been trying to work the garden a bit because it was very very overgrown. So, it's been my great pleasure to be outside and doing lots of digging and his first proper words has been digging, dig, dig, because he heard me say digging and he just started saying dig, dig, dig. [Laugh] Adam: Fantastic Charity: He said that before mummy or daddy. Adam: So, are you optimistic, I mean all those things you talked about erm are you optimistic that the world for your child will actually, things will get better during his early life? Or not? Charity: I feel burdened with the worry of it, and I try to not think about it, because the world is huge and there's only so much, I can do. I do feel optimistic in the human endeavour and human invention and ingenuity. But I am sad that it's going to get to a point of huge environmental catastrophe before real change is made by our governing bodies. But then if you look back at the pictures just pre-industrial revolution of these thousands and thousands of huge billowing chimney pots in London and you know, they're not there now, and the world is a lot greener than it was then, at least in cities. So, I kind of, yeah, I have hope otherwise you know… what's the point? Adam: I mean it's interesting isn't it, there's… I often think about how to shape the narrative here because I think often the narrative of ecology and the environment is one of ‘there's an impending disaster' you know ‘it's all terrible' and I'm not saying that's not true, but I think it's hard for people to engage with because it's like ‘well what, what can I do about that?' and I think it was, hopefully, I got this right, I think it was Barrack Obama who wrote a book on it called the Audacity of Hope and you talked about hope and it is this sort of weird thing, actually to be hopeful is an extraordinary thing, it is audacious to be hopeful and that might be, might be a better message actually, that there is this big challenge and actually the audacity of hope in what can, can we do, individually? Individuals can make a difference. You know yes joining the Trust and what have you, and doing other things, and planting a single tree Charity: I think you also have to look after yourself as a human in the world. Try to give yourself time and love and energy. Then you'll be in a really good spot to be able to help other things and other people and the environment. It's very difficult like I say if you're on the breadline and you're exhausted to actually have the headspace and the energy to do stuff. And you know, and so those people that are unable to do that we need to, I do believe, socially we need to enable people to be able to care for the environment. If you're in a position where you do have enough money, and you do have enough time, and you still feel worried, then there's tons you can do on a day-to-day level. And I actually think that action is much more infectious than talking. I know we're talking here today, but the best thing that I have probably ever done is about two or three years ago I just wrote on Twitter I'm giving up plastic for the month of January, this was before it was kind of fashionable to that and rather than saying everyone should do this, everyone should do that, I just said ‘this is what I'm doing'. I didn't even talk about it. I just said ‘I'm gonna do this' and so many of my friend's a couple of months later said ‘oo you said that and actually, I tried it as well', they didn't even talk to me about it they just kind of tried it. They started, whenever they came over, they said ‘we I didn't bring, I didn't buy any plastic because I knew you weren't interested' I thought wow! You just actually have to put a stick in the mud sometimes and say this is what I'm doing, and try to have the energy to stick to it, and of course, we have… we can't be perfect… the world is set up in a certain way at the moment as consumers, as everything is wrapped in plastic, it's very difficult to get around without, you know in lots of places, without a car because public transport has a lot to be desired and it's expensive, but if you can try to support things that are doing the right thing, that will slowly, slowly build, and if you can have joy in that, that builds as well. Adam: It is interesting to me, we tend to do what our friends do, or people we know do, so, and that's why a single person can make a difference isn't it because, a friend will copy you. And suddenly what you do isn't a single thing, it's a big thing. That's, that's amazing. So, look we're in this park which is very nice. I'm not sure I've met one leaf yet; we're meant to be walking around and I lazily dragged you to this chair! But, have you, I mean there's lots of Woodland Trust places outside of London, they are quite close but also quite far. Have you been to many? Are there any that stick in your mind? Charity: I've been to Hainault, and I've been to Langley Vale. What I would love to do is go to Scotland, I know there's lots of work happening there at the moment and I'd really like to visit, it's really interesting to see the difference between a very very ancient woodland and something that's quite newly developed, and I know that there are some places that the Woodland Trust are trying to connect two different forests, and I think, is it the pine martin (?) that they are trying to get to, sort of, repopulate? And it's very difficult to do that because they like travelling and so you have to have a long distance in between, you know, one dense forest and another dense forest for them to actually want to stick around. So, I would kinda like to see that in action. Adam: Well, the Langley Vale Forest, I have just been to, and it features in our previous podcast. All the commemoration of the First World War. Which I think was one of the most interesting and sort of, I don't know, shocking, I don't know, because there's a lot of… it commemorates really terrible events, but in a sort of, living memory, which I thought was really forceful. And that's I think one of the more interesting podcasts so if you listen to this one, but also that one, I also thought that one was great. So, it's amazing to sort of talk to you about this, but as you were saying, you are an exceptionally busy actor as well, so you're doing… is The Great still in production? Charity: It is, we're filming season three at the moment. Adam: Wow, so how many programmes in a season? Charity: so, there's ten episodes in each season, and the first two have come out via Hulu, and, in America and STARZPLAY, the first season was out on Channel 4 a couple of years ago and the second season is coming out this summer, on Channel 4, and we're filming season three. So, um, it's a lot of fun, it's very silly and it was lovely to be doing something, I was so lucky to be working during the last lockdown, albeit with really rigorous Covid protocols in place, we managed to get it done. Adam: Well fantastic, I will watch out for the next season! And all of your stuff on social media and everything. It's been a real pleasure talking to you Charity, thank you very much! Charity: Thanks. Well thanks to Charity for taking me on a tour of her local small, wooded area in South London, and do remember if you want to find a wood near you, well the Woodland Trust has a website to help. Just go to woodlandtrust.org.uk/findawood. Until next time happy wandering. Thank you for listening to the Woodland Trust Woodland Walks. Join us next month when Adam will be taking another walk in the company of Woodland Trust staff, partners, and volunteers and don't forget to subscribe to the series on iTunes, or wherever you're listening to us, and do give us a review and a rating. And why not send us a recording of your favourite woodland walk to be included in a future podcast? Keep it to a maximum of five minutes and please tell us what makes your woodland walks special. Or send an email with details of your favourite walk and what makes it special to you. Send any audio files to podcast@woodlandtrust.org.uk and we look forward to hearing from you.

The Sunday League Show - Episode 36 Jamie, Steve, Graham and Andrew bring you the latest news, reviews and interviews from the OBDSFL, WESFA & Southern Sunday. The lads discuss the results and Games of the Week from the OBDSFL, WESFA and Southern Sunday. The lads from Peckham Rye joins us to talk about their season in WESFA's Division 5. Podcast Sponsors Down to Play, Sports King TV, Baldon Sports Youth, Skipper, Grassroots (GRF), Awards FC, Magpie Recruitment and NJPGD. Charity XI Sponsors: NJPGD, Stop Bullying (Baldon Sports FC), Arithmetic Accountants, Black Eagle Athlete and Player Packs. #STAYSTRONG #12THMAN

We'll be back with a new episode next week so please enjoy this favourite from the archive: This round Sukh Ojla drops in to chat weird dates, double standards and what if Voldemort was the virus. Join our Subsription on Apple Podcasts for ad free episodes + bonus content Check out our award winning mental health podcast HERE Find Bobby on Twitter or Instagram

Big Finish Audio recently released a brand new Sherlock Holmes adventure, the Seamstress of Peckham Rye. We review the production with Michael Feir. Fern Lulham highlights a scheme designed to engage and encourage young people from all UK communities to explore their possibilities in Olympic and Paralympic sports. This Emancipation Day, August 1, you can experience a week of digital activities from the Ontario Heritage Trust that celebrate and explore Ontario's Black communities and Black heritage. We learn more about this. It's the Thursday Buzz with Bill Shackleton. We flip through quirky stories from around the globe with Jeff Ryman, on What in the World. Today's guest for our Roundtable conversation is Jim Krysko, AMI Content Development Specialist in Edmonton.Find Kelly & Company on YouTube! About AMI AMI is a media company that entertains, informs and empowers Canadians with disabilities through three broadcast services — AMI-tv and AMI-audio in English and AMI-télé in French — and streaming platform AMI+. Our vision is to establish AMI as a leader in the offering of accessible content, providing a voice for Canadians with disabilities through authentic storytelling, representation and positive portrayal. To learn more visit AMI.ca and AMItele.ca. Find more great AMI Original Content on AMI+ Learn more at AMI.ca Connect with Accessible Media Inc. online: - X /Twitter @AccessibleMedia - Instagram @AccessibleMediaInc / @AMI-audio - Facebook at @AccessibleMediaInc - TikTok @AccessibleMediaInc - Email feedback@ami.ca

Big Finish Audio recently released a brand new Sherlock Holmes adventure, the Seamstress of Peckham Rye. We review the production with Michael Feir.Find Kelly & Company on YouTube! About AMI AMI is a media company that entertains, informs and empowers Canadians with disabilities through three broadcast services — AMI-tv and AMI-audio in English and AMI-télé in French — and streaming platform AMI+. Our vision is to establish AMI as a leader in the offering of accessible content, providing a voice for Canadians with disabilities through authentic storytelling, representation and positive portrayal. To learn more visit AMI.ca and AMItele.ca. Find more great AMI Original Content on AMI+ Learn more at AMI.ca Connect with Accessible Media Inc. online: - X /Twitter @AccessibleMedia - Instagram @AccessibleMediaInc / @AMI-audio - Facebook at @AccessibleMediaInc - TikTok @AccessibleMediaInc - Email feedback@ami.ca

This week, Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas are joined by Nick Groom, Professor of Literature in English at the University of Macau, to discuss William Blake, who saw wonders everywhere (including a tree on Peckham Rye), and communicated them urgently in art and poetry – what does he have to tell us now?; the critic and writer Michael Kerrigan guides us through the ‘improbably enthralling mundanities' of the Uruguayan novelist Mario Levrero; plus, a dazzling history of Sicily, the demise of local journalism, and ‘bald' philosophy.William Blake Vs the World by John HiggsThe Luminous Novel by Mario Levrero, translated by Annie McDermottPanic as Man Burns Crumpets: The vanishing world of the local journalist by Roger LytollisBald: 35 philosophical short cuts by Simon CritchleyThe Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean history by Jamie MackayA special subscription offer for TLS podcast listeners: www.the-tls.co.uk/buy/podProducer: Ben Mitchell See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nick and Benji present… Dr Watson is in the house! Plus Five-Star-Five…Reviews - Doctor Who: Colony of Fear… Behind-the-scenes and Drama Tease - Sherlock Holmes: The Seamstress of Peckham Rye.

This round Sukh Ojla drops in to chat weird dates, double standards and if Voldemort was the virus.Come join our Patreon for extended ad free episodes + bonus content HERE Check out our award winning mental health podcast HERE Find Bobby on Twitter or Instagram

Big Interview - WESFA Andrew speaks to Peckham Rye, Springhill Utd Reserves, Highfield Rovers and SCT 90 representatives repsectively about all things grassroots. Podcast Sponsors Down to Play, Sports King TV, Home Food Plug, Baldon Sports Youth, Champagne Poker, Skipper & Clare Barnett Graphic Design Charity XI Sponsors: TW Drainage, ReQuest, Warrens Roofing & Dave Cumberbatch Photography, NJP Graphic Design and Erith and Belvedere #selk #footballfamily #wegoagain #staystrong #12thman

With the ongoing pandemic resulting in hundreds of football games being played out in empty stadiums, finding a suitable venue for the return of At The Match has proved a bit trickier than usual. Luckily, fans are allowed to watch one of the most interesting and vibrants clubs in South London, so Andy and Luke packed the microphones onto the P4 bus and headed to Peckham Town FC! Set up by then 13-year-old Bryan Hall in 1982 after sticking a poster up on a tree in Peckham Rye park, the club has been built on the tireless work of hundreds of volunteers and remains a bedrock of local community. Andy and Luke speak to founder Bryan about how the club continues to represent the diversity and spirit of the area after forty years, while manager Mary Phillip explains how she got involved with the club and her experience as the first woman to manage a men’s team to success in an FA senior trophy. We even get to see some cracking football, as Peckham play some lovely stuff and stick five past Stansfeld!Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Pod #31 of 50 - Duke (Sports King Tv & Peckham Rye FC) Podcast Sponsors Down to Play, Danson Property Services, 19 Summers, Abal Pest Control, Baldon Sports Youth & Clare Barnett Graphic Design Charity XI Sponsors: TW Drainage, ReQuest, King of Hearts Productions & Dave Cumberbatch Photography #selk #footballfamily #wegoagain #asktwice #staystrong #50pods #50days

Andrew, Gibs and Jamie review last week's games and review next week's games of the week. George from Duchess of Kent joins us to discuss the new WESFA club. Gibs is joined by team mate Ricky to get us up to date with the new improved Peckham Rye. Sponsored by Down to Play, Danson Property Services and 19 Summers. This show is dedicated to the recovery of the Duchess of Kent Club Official taken ill over the weekend. #selk #footballfamily #wegoagain #asktwice #staystrong

PLUG - Brick Brewery 6th Birthday 7th December - you should go! https://www.brickbrewery.co.uk/category/event/ Go to our website to see links to all we talk about: www.pubtrotters.wordpress.com This month, we are back, after a large hiatus, of decision making, moving houses (both Nick and Roxy have moved) and generally being busy. This month, Nick is joined again by Mark and in spirit by Niall (sadly cancelled last minute, due to illness. PS We are aware we missed #8, its coming out in Jan, this one just talks a bit about Xmas.Roxy, has sadly decided to leave the Pubtrotters Pubcast team, as she has gone on to continue her amazing professional career and contnue her studies. We wish Roxy all the best and hopefully she can join us again in the future sometime. Thank you Roxy for all you've done to get pubcast going. We love you x The hosts gathered, banging at the gate at Brick Brewery Taproom, in Peckham Rye. In this podcast we talked Millenials, Mop Muff and Special occasions. This week we are joined in Beer and Pub lovers corner by Founder and Owner of Brick Brewery Ian.

DON'T FORGET - LINKS TO ALL BEERS AND PUBS WE MENTION CAN BE FOUND ON OUR WEBSITE - www.pubtrotters.wordpress.com In our 2ND JULY EPISODE (that's right we did two because we love it so much), Pubtrotters Pubcast were at the wonderful (https://www.brewbynumbers.com)Brew by Numbers Peckham Barrel Store, a taproom underneath Peckham Rye arches. This month, Roxy is joined by fellow pubtrotters Niall and Sonia (Sonia's first time), Nick can't make it, as you'll hear, he was off playing Mario Kart. The hosts gathered, as usual, at early doors and discussed pineapple curry (not recommended), how Italians drink more beer than Brits and a useful, not so useful beer map. In Beer lovers corner we were joined by Floris, who is the Head of all retail at Brew by Numbers and shares his expertise and love of warm beer with us.

Dean from Bexley Utd and Duke and Danny from Peckham Rye join us for our last team guest slot of 2018/19 season. Sponsored by Down to Play app (@downtoplay_app) and Danson Property Services Leagues covered: @OBDSFL and @WESFA_Football

Kenningwell from OBDSFL Baldon Reserves, Peckham Rye, Turk Ocagi and Springhill Utd from WESFA. Sponsored by @DowntoPlap_App, Danson Property Services and Cup show sponsored by @SparklenShinec

Orpington Rovers from OBDSFL and Bexley Athletic, Russellers, Sporting Greenwich and Welling Town join us for the podcast. Get the Down To Play App, visit Danson Property Services and go watch Peckham Rye on YouTube.

We take you on a merry tour of the magical land of Peckham in South London, courtesy of Muriel Spark and her superb (and remarkably short) novel 'The Ballad of Peckham Rye'. We start at the address in Camberwell where Muriel Spark lived and wrote the book. We then follow a number of lost - or perhaps completely mythical - pathways down the old Surrey Canal, past a number of long-gone pubs in Peckham & Nunhead, before emerging on to the ancient Rye - where Boadicea may or may not have popped her clogs. Tim gets very excited about the number of pubs you get to visit by following this book - some of them still there and serving pints! Our mission at the 'CuSpec' Book Club is to road test works of fiction that appear to be curiously specific about dates and locations. We go to the places mentioned and see if descriptions are accurate, journey times credible, dates and days all in order. Along the way, we learn things about the book and its author.For early access to ad-free episodes - and exclusive access to all our show notes, maps, photos and videos - please support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/curiouslyspecific. Get early access to new episodes and bonus content Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Pearson is an artist who works from his studio in the Bussey Building in Peckham, South London. His paintings are often built from studies from life and he is regularly seen on the streets of Peckham and around the station, drawing and taking photographs. In this episode he talks about his work as a record of change in the area, his fascination with Peckham Rye station, and his art school that encourages everyone to look closer and learn to draw. Follow Mark on Instagram @MarkPearsonArt Follow Mark on Twitter @markpearsonart Follow me on Instagram @thegitajoshi See the blog post here https://thecuratorssalon.com/blog-1/mark-pearson

For the 105th Second-Hand Book Factory, Charles Adrian is joined in Peckham Rye by consultant and project manager James Bottomley. They talk about some classic, visceral, virtuosic poetry, some classic British comic writing and some terrifyingly topical American counterfactual writing. James is Vera Chok’s flatmate. Vera has been interviewed repeatedly on the podcast. Episode image is a detail from the cover of The Plot Against America by Philip Roth, published by Vintage in 2005; book design by Robert Oberholzer. More information, including book listings, at http://www.pageonepodcast.com/

The Most Ugly Child: The Bottle and The Fall (Copper and Lace,self-released)Brigitte DeMeyer and Will Kimbrough: Broken Fences (Mockingbird Soul,BDM Music)T Sisters: Make It Rain (T Sisters,Three-headed Sounds)Bob Cheevers: Is It Ever Gonna Rain (Fifty Years,Howling Dog Records)Brent Cobb: South of Atlanta (Shine On Rainy Day,Low Country Sound)Kent Eugene Goolsby: Loveless Prayers (Temper of The Times,self-released)Jim Lauderdale: If I Can't Resist (London Southern,Proper Records)Aaron Lee Tasjan: 12 Bar Blues (Silver Tears,New West)Margo Price: Hands of Time (Midwest Farmer s Daughter,Third Man Records)Darlingside: White Horses (Birds Say Deluxe,More Doug Records)Sarah Jarosz: Ring Them Bells (Follow Me Down,Sugar Hill)Blue Rose Code: Edina (The Ballad of Peckham Rye,Ronachan Songs)Sam Baker: Odessa (Pretty World,self-released)Heidi Talbot: A Stranger To Me (Here We Go 1,2,3,Under One Sky Records)Kim Edgar: Things Crack, Then Shatter (Stories Untold,Quietly Fantastic Music)Tift Merritt: Wait For Me (feat. Sam Beam) (Stitch Of The World,Yep-Roc)Tom Paxton: The First Thing I Think Of (Boat In The Water,Pax Records)Ags Connolly: When The Loner Gets Lonely (Nothin' Unexpected,At The Helm Records)Benjamin Folke Thomas: Safe and Secure (Copenhagen,Louvaio)Pickxen: Broken (Picks 'n Vittles,self-released)Robert Vincent: Time Won't Wait (I'll Make The Most of My Sins,At The Helm Records)C. Daniel Boling: Leadbelly, Woody and Pete (These Houses,Berkalin Records)Jonah Tolchin: I Wonder (Thousand Mile Night,Yep-Roc)Rayna Gellert: Strike The Bells (Workin's Too Hard,Storysound Records LLC)Janet Robin: Take Me As I Am (Take Me As I Am,Little Sister Records)The Grahams: The Lonely Ones (feat The Milk Carton Kids & K Pattengale) (The Grahams and Friends (Live in Studio),Three Sirens Music Group)MC Hansen: Shallow Water, Rolling Hills (With Any Luck,Sentimental Music)Reto Burrell: How Many Doubts (Side A&B,TOURBOmusic)Sean Taylor: Heartbreak Hotel (feat Eliza Gilkyson) (Flood and Burn,self-released)

In 1966 the artist Tom Phillips set himself a task: to find a second-hand book for threepence and alter every page, by painting, collage or cut-up techniques, to create an entirely new version. He found his threepenny novel in a junk shop on Peckham Rye, south London. It was A Human Document (1892), an obscure Victorian romance by W. H. Mallock. First published in 1973, A Humument—as Phillips titled his altered book—quickly established itself as a cult classic. Since then, Phillips has been working towards a complete revision of the original A Humument, replacing pages in successive editions. This process is now finished. This final edition presents, for the first time, an entirely revised and complete version of A Humument and brings to a close half a century of artistic endeavor. Tom Phillips writes: “I took a forgotten novel found by chance. I mined, and undermined its text to make it yield alternative stories, erotic incidents and surreal catastrophes, which lurked within its wall of words. I replaced with visual images the text I’d stripped away. A Humument began to tell, amongst other memories, dreams and reflections, the sad story of Bill Toge, one of love’s casualties.” Find out more at www.tomphillips.co.uk

ahead of my set at Peckham Rye Festival I did a live mix on The Soul Diaries - presented by Nikita who also curated the stage I'm playing on at the festival. - www.k2rah.com/music follow me: k2rah.com/links download: bit.ly/1pytaHY more mixes: soundcloud.com/k2rah/sets/selections _ check out: #TheSoulDiaries - https://soundcloud.com/nikitachauhan & Peckham Rye Festival https://soundcloud.com/peckhamryefest _ enjoy

Brennen Leigh: You Gotta Be Puttin' Me On (Brennen Leigh Sings Lefty Frizzell,Line In The Sound)Jim Lauderdale: Why Does God Let It Happen (Soul Searching Vol 1 - Memphis,Sky Crunch Records)Jeanne Jolly: Matches and Gasoline (A Place To Run,Ramblewood Records)Buddy & Julie Miller: Gasoline & Matches (Written in Chalk,New West)Cris Cuddy: October Morning (October Morning,Vanishing Castle)Adam Holmes: Oh My God (Heirs and Graces,Gogar Records)Joey Maloney: Teardrop Scars (Plant a Story,Noisetrade)Shawn Mullins: Ferguson (My Stupid Heart,Caroline International US)Butch Parnell: Innocence (The Brightness EP,Noisetrade)Gordie Tentrees: Camelot Motel (Less Is More,Continental Song City)Falls: Argentina (Omaha,Universal)Frankie Lee: Know By Now (American Dreamer,Loose)Lynn Jackson: Next Best Thing (Songs of Snow, Rain and Remembering,Busted Flat Records)Sturgill Simpson: Life Of Sin (Metamodern Sounds in Country Music,Loose)Angaleena Presley: Knocked Up (American Middle Class,Thirty Tigers)Roddy Hart: Send A Message (Sign Language,Vertical Records)Anderson East: All I'll Ever Need (Dellilah,Low Country Sound / Elektra)Justin Currie: If I Ever Loved You (What Is Love For,Rykodisc)Rod Picott: Uncle John (Fortune,Welding Rod Records)Frazey Ford: I Like You Better (Obadiah,Nettwerk)Jenny Ritter: Weathervane (Bright Mainland,self-released)Lera Lynn: Refrain (The Avenues,self-released)Karen Matheson: Ci an Fhidheall/Cupair thu, taillear thu (Urram,Vertical Records)Kimmie Rhodes: Darlin' Oh Darlin' (Cowgirl Boudoir,Sunbird Records)Lindi Ortega: Tell It Like It Is (Faded Gloryville,Last Gang)Gretchen Peters: Blackbirds (Blackbirds,Proper Records)Noah Gundersen: Jealous Love (Carry The Ghost Primer,Noisetrade)Patty Griffin: You Never Asked Me (Servant of Love,Pgm)Jason Isbell: If It Takes A Lifetime (Something More Than Free,Southeastern Records)Blue Rose Code: One Day At A Time (The Ballads of Peckham Rye,Ronachan Songs)

Cory Branan: Sour Mash (The No-Hit Wonder,Bloodshot Records)Parker Millsap: Quite Contrary (Parker Millsap,Okra Homa)Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives: I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome (Saturday Night / Sunday Morning,Thirty Tigers)Amy Lavere: Lousy Pretender (Runaway s Diary,Archer Records)Carrie Elkin and Danny Schmidt: Kiss Me Now (For Keeps,Red House Records)Ben and Ellen Harper: Break Your Heart (Childhood Home,Concord Music Group)Bruce Robison and Kelly Willis: I'll Go To My Grave Loving You (Our Year,Thirty Tigers)The Westies: Hell's Kitchen (West Side Stories,self-released)Malcolm Holcombe: The Music Plays On (Pitiful Blues,Gypsy Eyes Music)Matt Harlan: Slow Moving Train (Raven Hotel,Berkalin Records)Blue Rose Code: One Day At A Time (The Ballads of Peckham Rye,Ronachan Songs)Del Amitri: Move Away Jimmy Blue (live) (Into The Mirror,Groovy Tunes)Ben Glover: Blackbirds (Atlantic,Carpe Vita Creative)Mark Erelli: Handsome Molly (Milltowns,Hillbilly Pilgrim Records)Ramshackle Union Band: Lullaby For The Lost (R U B,self-released)Craig Moreau: Stranded (The Daredevil Kid,self-released)The Early Mays: Red Bud (The Early Mays,self-released)Eliza Gilkyson: Eliza Jane (Nocturnal Diaries,Red House Records)Rosanne Cash: Money Road (The River and The Thread,Decca)Rodney Crowell: Fever On The Bayou (Tarpaper Sky,New West)John Gorka: She's That Kind of Mystery (Bright Side of Down,Red House Records)Luke Tuchscherer: Two Ships (Caroline Please) (You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense,The Little Red Recording Company)Phantom Limb: Missy (The Pines,Naim Edge)Anna Mitchell: Tennessee (Fall Like That EP,self-released)Run Boy Run: Heavy The Sorrow (Something To Someone,Sky Island Records)The Thompson Family: Right (feat. Teddy Thompson) (Family,Concord Music Group)Colin Clyne: Merry Go Round (The Never Ending Pageant,Fat Hippy Records)Annie Keating: Know How To Fall (Make Believing,self-released)Gina Villalobos: Tears Gone By (Sola,self-released)Esther Rose Parkes: Slaking The Dust (The Other Country,self-released)Vincent James: Winter's Hand (The Wilderness EP,Noisetrade)Lily and Madeleine: Stuck on the Puzzle (Rabbit, Run For It,Noisetrade)Jessie Kilguss: You Didn't Do Right By Me (Devastate Me,self-released)Mandolin Orange: The Runaround (This Side of Jordan,Yep-Roc)Augie Meyers: Counting Drops of Rain (Santa Fe,El Sendero Records)The Stray Birds: The Bells (Best Medicine,Yep-Roc)Balsam Range: Songs I've Sung (Five,Mountain Home)

The Hillbenders: Past The Point Of Rescue (Can You Hear Me?,Compass)The Whiskey Belles: Pills I Took (Whiskey Woman,self-released)Hank Williams III: My Drinkin' Problem (Straight to Hell,Borough Music)Hank Williams: Your Cheatin' Heart (40 Greatest Hits,Polydor)Annie Keating: Sunny Dirt Road (Make Believing,self-released)Chastity Brown: Honey Bee (Long Way,Creative and Dreams Music Network)Michelle Lewis: Running Back Home (The Part of Us That Still Remains,self-released)Matt Ellis: Running Back Home (The Greatest Escape,self-released)Daniel Meade: Sometimes A Fool's The Last To Know (Keep Right Away,From The Top Records)Jesse Macht: Broken Faith (Suitcase Heart,self-released)Blue Rose Code: True Ways of Knowing (The Ballads of Peckham Rye,Ronachan Songs)Boo Hewerdine: Joke (My Name In The Brackets,Reveal Records)Matt Costa: Josephine (Assorted Since 2004,Noisetrade)Carrie Elkin and Danny Schmidt: Longing Moves The Ocean (For Keeps,Red House Records)Lily and Madeleine: Stuck on the Puzzle (Rabbit, Run For It,Noisetrade)Esther Rose Parkes: Slaking The Dust (The Other Country,self-released)JD McPherson: Why Lady Why (The Warm Covers EP,Noisetrade)Patty Griffin: Wade in the Water (feat Regina McCrary and Mike Farris) (Downtown Church,EMI)Mike Farris: Mary Don't You Weep (Salvation in Lights,INO Records)Nugent and Belle: Bones (Seeing Stars,self-released)Wild Ponies: The Truth Is (Things That Used To Shine,Continental Rose)The Stray Birds: Black Hills (Best Medicine,Yep-Roc)Augie Meyers: Never Thought I'd Fall In Love Again (Santa Fe,El Sendero Records)Jacob Latham: Where Do We Go From Here (Midnight Train,self-released)Doug Seegers: She's In A Rock 'n' Roll Band (Going Down To The River,Rounder)John Gorka: Holed Up In Mason City (Bright Side of Down,Red House Records)The Westies: Hell's Kitchen (West Side Stories,self-released)Stephen Simmons: Hearsay (Hearsay,self-released)Run Boy Run: A Dream in the Night (Something To Someone,Sky Island Records)Heath McNease: Along Came Molly (Among Thieves,Noisetrade)Del Amitri: Driving With The Brakes On (live) (Into The Mirror,Groovy Tunes)Hal Ketchum: Midnight Works For Me (I m The Troubador,Music Road Records)

Ryan Adams: Firecracker (Gold,Lost Highway)The Thompson Family: Right (feat. Teddy Thompson) (Family,Concord Music Group)Richard Thompson: Crawl Back (Under My Stone) Live (Semi-Detached Mock Tudor,Beeswing Records)The Westies: Bars (West Side Stories,self-released)Heather Lynne Horton: Come To Me (Postcard Saturdays,self-released)Michael McDermott: Can't Sleep Tonight (Ashes,Pauper Sky Records)Doug Seegers: Burning A Hole In My Pocket (Going Down To The River,Rounder)Buddy Miller: This Old World (The Universal United House Of Prayer,New West)Jim Lauderdale: Doin' Time in Bakersfield (I'm A Song,Sky Crunch Records)Mindy Smith: On Top of The World (with Inland Sky) (2014 Nashville Indie Spotlight,Noisetrade)Nugent and Belle: This Delicate Heart (Seeing Stars,self-released)Blue Rose Code: Where The Westlin' Winds Do Carry Me (The Ballads of Peckham Rye,Ronachan Songs)Daniel Meade: Always Close To Tears (Keep Right Away,From The Top Records)Jessie Kilguss: Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight (Devastate Me,self-released)Matt Costa: Whiskey and Wine (Assorted Since 2004,Noisetrade)Run Boy Run: Heavy The Sorrow (Something To Someone,Sky Island Records)Loreena McKennitt: The Lady of Shallott (The Journey So Far,Quinlan Road)James Grant: A Tale Best Forgotten (w/ Monica Queen) (I Shot The Albatross,Vertical Records)Del Amitri: Move Away Jimmy Blue (live) (Into The Mirror,Groovy Tunes)The Dirty Beggars: Come Away With Me (Time To Reminisce,Wayward Sounds Records)Front Country: Long Ago, Far Away (Sake Of The Sound,self-released)John Moreland: Blues and Kudzu (On The Throes,Last Chance Records)Seth Wood: In Silence (San Francisco EP,Noisetrade)Sean McConnell: Maybe You Can Love Me Anyway (Mementos and Fortunes,Noisetrade)Sarah McQuaid: The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face (The Silver Lining (promo single),Waterbug)Emily Smith: John O' Dreams (Echoes,White Fall)Augie Meyers: Counting Drops of Rain (Santa Fe,El Sendero Records)John Gorka: Honeybee (Bright Side of Down,Red House Records)John Hartford: The Tall Tall Grass (Natural To Be Gone 1967-1970,Raven Records)Annie Keating: Know How To Fall (Make Believing,self-released)

Carrie Rodriguez: Never Gonna Be Your Bride (Seven Angels on a Bicycle,Train Wreck)Marty Stuart & His Fabulous Superlatives: I'm Blue, I'm Lonesome (Saturday Night / Sunday Morning,Thirty Tigers)Stephen Simmons: I Ain't Lonely (I'm Just Lonesome) (Hearsay,self-released)Jim Lauderdale: I Lost You (I'm A Song,Sky Crunch Records)Jessie Kilguss: You Didn't Do Right By Me (Devastate Me,self-released)Daniel Meade: Help Me Tonight (feat. Diana Jones) (Keep Right Away,From The Top Records)Diana Jones: Willow Tree (My Remembrance Of You,Newsong Recordings)Blue Rose Code: One Day At A Time (The Ballads of Peckham Rye,Ronachan Songs)Del Amitri: Be My Downfall (live) (Into The Mirror,Groovy Tunes)Craig Moreau: Stranded (The Daredevil Kid,self-released)Red Molly: I Am Listening (The Red Album,self-released)Carrie Elkin and Danny Schmidt: Kiss Me Now (For Keeps,Red House Records)Sam Baker: Button by Button (Say Grace,Music Road Records)Cory Branan: Sour Mash (The No-Hit Wonder,Bloodshot Records)Parker Millsap: Truck Stop Gospel (Parker Millsap,Okra Homa)Matt Ellis: I Don't Mind Losing (The Greatest Escape,self-released)The Stray Birds: Never For Nothing (Best Medicine,Yep-Roc)Wes Kirkpatrick: Without You (Short Dream,Noisetrade)Curtis McMurtry: Ezekial (Respectable Enemy,Berkalin Records)Matt Jordan: Over Me Tonight (Nothing Like Home EP,Noisetrade)Luke Tuchscherer: One of Us (You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense,The Little Red Recording Company)The New Students: Calvary Hill (When The West Wind Blows,self-released)Jesse Macht: Nothing Wrong With A Little Rain (Suitcase Heart,self-released)Ian Sherwood: Everywhere To Go (Everywhere To Go,self-released)Anna Mitchell: Lets Run (Fall Like That EP,self-released)Run Boy Run: The Lord Taketh Away (Something To Someone,Sky Island Records)Fort Atlantic: This Is Not The Answer (Noisetrade Sampler,Noisetrade)Charles Esten: I Know How To Love You Now (Nashville Series 3 Download,self-released)Seth Wood: Lonelier With You Around (San Francisco EP,Noisetrade)Spencer Burton: Grey Kingdom (Don t Let The World See Your Love,Dine Alone Records)Cale Tyson: Not Missin' You (High On Lonesome,self-released)Christine Albert: Old New Mexico (feat. Jerry Jeff Walker and Eliza Gilkyson) (Everything s Beautiful Now,Moon House Records)

Janet Street Porter and crime writer Martina Cole discuss their good reads with Harriett Gilbert. The guests talk - and vociferously disagree - over American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld's fictionalised biography of Laura Bush, The Iron King, the first novel of Maurice Druon's 1950s series which has been hailed as 'the original Game of Thrones', and Muriel Spark's classic novel The Ballad of Peckham Rye

Nicola and Danny are back hosting together and presenting tout de suite! They have Kerri French at Delamere parkrun, Danny is Lon-Done again after going to Peckham Rye parkrun and they keep it all brief!

In this week's show it's the take-over of the stand-ins. Stand-in Danny, Dennis is joined by stand-in Nicola - Kerri French. Dennis was Run Directing at Ashford parkrun whilst Kerri was waxing lyrical about inaugurals at Northala Fields. They are joined by Craigie-Lee Patterson who was at Peckham Rye parkrun's inaugural event and the Ant & Dec of parkrunworld bring us tales from Carlisle parkrun. There's parkrun picks galore and twitter been making Dennis sing again.

In celebration of St. Patrick's day we sat down with our pals Stephen and Isobel to talk about the experience of being Irish in South London. We discussed the different experiences Irish immigrants face in the 20th and 21st Centuries, growing up in an Irish family having been born in London and the various places that have served and entertained the Irish in South London over the years including Catholic Social Clubs, The Irish Festival in Peckham Rye and the South London Irish Association Centre in Wimbledon.

For the first meeting of the South London Book Club we've read The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark and non-fiction Do You Remember Olive Morris? (available from Lambeth Libraries).

23 Apr 2012 Shimell, Ricketts. Our best show ever. The Voice of Americans with Lewis Schaffer of Nunhead and co-host Lisa Moyle. Join our guest Liberal Democrat Rosie Shimell from Nunhead Heights. She grew up here and alternated between calling it Nunhead and Peckham Rye! Now she represents East Dulwich and knows it's now Nunhead Heights. And she is only 23 years old. I have been a disappointment more years than she has been alive. Also, my good friend and Afro-Caribbean Bedfordshire-Englishman Paul Ricketts came on in. He subsitituted ably for expected guest Nick McNeill, formerly of Ihe Ivy House Pub Download NAR_23nd_April_2012.mp3 who couldn't make it, and I understand why. He lost his job and his home in the pending sale of the pub. I know what it is like to lose a job and a home - I have lost a few. He's rearranged to be on the show Monday, 30th April 2012. Paul is doing a big gig at the Leicester Square Theatre for my old friend Martin Witts. Martin, call me! Chris Dixon is on the soundboard and with the beautiful voice. Enjoy this, our best show, ever! @lewisschaffer - twitter feed  Listen to Lewis Schaffer on the Radio Nunhead American Radio with Lewis Schaffer every Monday evening at 10:30PM on www.resonancefm.com and 104.4fm London. Or listen to the show’s podcasts at bit.ly/NunheadAmericanRadio See Lewis Schaffer test  the news items at the Hungry Miller Comedy Club at The Miller by Borough High Street this Monday at 8PM. Fantastic night of comedy with Britain's top comics and me, briefly. Only £6!  See Lewis Schaffer live every Tuesday and Wednesday: Lewis Schaffer is Free until Famous, The Source Below, 11 Lower John Street, London W1F 9TY. Come on down. Free admission. Or reserve at bit.ly/londonfreeshow    

12 Mar 2012 Soan, Klein, Jassy  Our best show ever for the Voice of Americans with Lewis Schaffer of Nunhead! The only radio program for Nunhead and the most marginalized immigrants in England, Americans. Nunhead artiste and entertainment promoter Vivienne Soan makes a return engagement and reveals she isn't English but Welsh. She is so devoted to her Nunhead she will be producing three Pull the Other One shows a year at the Tenants Hall on Peckham Rye even as her regular shows move to Herne Hill. Jassy Davis is new to the show - she is a Nunhead foodie and a blogger and her site www.ginandcrumpets.com looks so delicious you'll want to eat it. Brooklynite Randy Klein, my successful older brother in arms and Nunhead's famous artist, talks of his new installation at the Nunhead train station.  With funny Lisa Moyle, American and funny Englishman Chris Dixon. Enjoy! Download Nunhead_American_radio_12_03_12-1.mp3 ptoocomedy.com, www.ginandcrumpets.com, and www.randyklein.co.uk Listen to Nunhead American Radio every Monday on Resonance FM London.10:30pm live on 104.4fm and streaming on www.resonancefm.com. iTunes downloads at Nunhead American Radio or www.bit.ly.com/NunheadAmericanRadio See Lewis Schaffer live at the Source Below every Tuesday and Wednesday. For information and to reserve go to www.bit.ly/londonfreeshow

Regular listeners to this podcast will know that our name is partly taken from poet William Blake's Vision of Angels in Peckham Rye. Apparently these angels were in an oak treee which isn't there any more ... so the Blake Society came down to the Rye to plant a new one, and Richard Leeming went along too ...