Speechification

In which Michael Goldfarb encounters the ghosts of Ludwig Boerne and Heinrich Heine in Frankfurt - doubly punished, for being Jews, and for writing in German, and thus condemned by their own culture, and ignored as the rest of the world turned against it. A grand intellectual history, excellently told. [MP3]

"From Falstaff at The Boar's Head to John Self at The Shakespeare in Martin Amis's Money, English literature and the pub are intertwined. It started in a pub - Chaucer's pilgrims setting out from The Tabard in Southwark - and has been waiting to be chucked out ever since. Robert Hanks presents an elegy for pubs in literature and an exploration of what the smoking ban, the gastro pub and the five quid pint are going to do to writing." Yes. [MP3]

Radio 3's The Essay is such a strong strand we seem to find ourselves posting a lot of it, but this tale is so fascinating and so entertainingly told, it demands inclusion. Stuart Clark recalls The Great Solar Storm of 1859, its effects on its observers, and on the nascent Scientists of the day, illuminating the heavens, and our understanding of them. [MP3]

Clark, in case you didn't know (I didn't) is an astronomy journalist, and the essay is based on his book The Sun Kings

If you're interested in work or life or mixing the two in the way most are obliged to these days, you'll like this. One of Radio 3's almost-always excellent five-part series of The Essay, this one presented by Professor Hugh Cunningham. It's about the 'work-life balance' but Cunningham doesn't waste any time explaining how contingent the phrase is and how recently it is that we were concerned more with 'leisure' than wih 'life'. This is episode one of five.

If Radio 3's The Essay had a podcast, I wouldn't need to keep adding them here. But they're so good. This week's theme is "New Generation Thinkers", a series focussing on new work by young academics, and you should listen to all of them really. Here's the first one, from Monday: Amira Bennison of Cambridge University discusses Islamic history and globalisation. [MP3]

On Radio 3 they're having a sort of Summer season of short essays from 100 clever and/or important people. It's all part of a real festival called Free Thinking that takes place in Liverpool at the end of October. In her contribution Marina Warner talks about the commodification of art and concludes (in two minutes flat) that the visual arts are less commodified than writing. Clever and persuasive. The other essays are all here. Contributors include: Phil Redmond, Stuart Maconie, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Germaine Greer and quite a lot of very interesting people I've never heard of (MP3).

Worth noting too that Radio 3 will most likely chuck the whole lot away once the festival is finished since that seems to be standard practice with the station's speech output: especially scandalous behaviour when you consider that this cerebral stuff must have a residual value of close to zero. Write to your MP or something.

Here's some proper learning from the grown-ups over at Radio 3. Tom Paulin, a public intellectual on an almost Eighteenth Century model and a William Blake expert, has written a four-part essay about Blake's language for the Beeb's aforementioned Blake-a-thon.

I'm going to grab all four of these because Radio 3's archiving policy is patchy at best. So as not to swamp the podcast with the old fruitcake (sorry), I'll add parts two, three and four to this entry. So, remember to come back here if you'd like to hear them all (MP3s: part one, part two, part three, part four). From the  British Library's collection, here's a really lovely Shockwave facsimile of one of his notebooks and here's a page about The Tyger.