Speechification

Some more Radio 3, and quite music-heavy this one, but justified by the voices:

Musician and writer Banning Eyre heads to the American state of Georgia, gateway to the Deep South, and southern end of the Appalachian Mountains, to record some of the unique vocal music that has been preserved in the area, and meet the personalities who have kept the traditions alive. [MP3]

Thanks to, um, someone, for the tip. Sorry. Remind me. Andy! It was Andy! Andy gave me the tip! Thanks/sorry Andy.

Radio 3's Sunday Feature is a lovely slot, full of odd things, and generalist interests. Here, Ken Hollings explores the development of military games, culminating in the most high-tech of modern developments. [MP3]

We've been a bit quiet, haven't we? Sorry. I'm just setting up a few to trickle through over the next couple of weeks. Enjoy!

A really lovely Sunday Feature in which poets Paul Farley and Kate Royal retrace the journey taken in Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings and an equally lovely Archive Hour (also presented by Paul Farley) about the discovery of a box of lost tapes of Larkin reading his own verse. Adding up to a slice of melancholy beauty the like of which you will not hear anywhere else this week. True.

An excellent and engrossing discussion between Night Waves presenter Philip Dodd and historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash, ranging across Communist Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Orwell, Greene, the soixante-retards, the USA and the Bush administration, and England's place in Europe.

I feel sort of blessed that this level of intellectual discussion is available free to air, just coming out of my radio when I switch it on... [MP3]

We're posting a lot of Radio 3 at the moment aren't we? Well, how could we resist this? Extraordinarily atmospheric radio; evoking the vanishing towns of the American South West with music, stories and just plain sound. MP3 here.

I particularly like the complaints about the noise of motorcycles.

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.

Something from Radio 3 in mid-2007: Mark Kermode in the Charlie Chaplin archives, uncovering the filmmaker's connections to celebrity (he invented the whole thing) and modernism (he inspired pretty much everybody, especially the Dadaists). MP3.

Like I said, Night Waves, with economists. Matthew Sweet rounded up a handful of clever and slightly unorthodox economists to talk about, you know, the economy. Very entertaining and just the kind of clever, spontaneous (and only slightly po-faced) thing you can do quite late in the evening on Radio 3 (MP3).

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]