Speechification

Terrific one-hour feature from Radio 3’s Sunday Feature slot about the history of religious tolerance, its roots in Holland and in John Locke’s luminous ‘Letters Concerning Toleration‘ (well worth a read, by the way). There’s a large minibus- or a small coach-load of grade-A scholarship on show here: very topical too. And, while we’re talking about Locke, here’s an In Our Time from February about John Locke and the Social Contract. (/programmes, MP3).

I should really save some of this for the archive but I just can’t. It’s too good. In this entry and the subsequent two you’ll hear a sequence of three factual programmes, all from one evening on Radio 4 (last night, in fact), that I guarantee will leave you speechless. A classier, more interesting and provocative factual line-up you’ll not find anywhere in the English speaking world. So, to start with, here’s Will Hutton’s revisionist view of nationalisation in post-war Europe, complete with a cast of contributors you’d normally only find in one place at, say, Davos. Fascinating (MP3).

Always poking around for interesting English-language speech radio I came across Network Europe, which is described as ‘a partnership of the continent’s international broadcasters’ (not including the BBC, as far as I can tell). This show, which went out in January, is about Islam in European cities and, in particular, about the building of Mosques (MP3).

You won’t believe this: in 1981 I was sent to West Berlin to write (and photograph!) a feature about the City’s music and fashion scene for then very new and underground iD Magazine (I don’t get asked to write about fashion so much these days). I had a most amazing time in what was then still a City in a sort of dream, suspended like a decadent bubble above the miserable East.

Tourists had privileges not extended to residents in those awful days so I flitted back-and-forth East-to-West, visited an artist who worked in a huge steel drum in no-man’s land, all the trendiest record and clothes shops, terrifying punk clubs in snowy Kreutzberg and workers’ cafeterias in the East. I remember a band called Deutsch-Polnische Aggression (named in parody of DAF: Deutsch-Americanische Freundschaft). I can still feel the chilly thrill of crossing the border on the U-Bahn and the bleak glamour of Friedrichstrasse Station. Anyway, that’s enough Cold War nostalgia for now…

You’ll have to suspend your prejudices about a) Ann Leslie and b) The Daily Mail (assuming you own some) to listen to this very moving half hour in which Leslie returns to Berlin to meet the people she knew when she was writing a series of articles about the fall of Honecker’s regime eight years after my (obviously pivotal) visit. This is really good radio, part of a series about reporters returning to the scene of historic stories MP3.