Of pens and pencils
Listening time: under 3 minutes.
This is a charming account of negotiating communist bureaucracy at the height of...
Podcast review – Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead
Listening time: 8 minutes.
Enjoy this celebration of a favourite book by a favourite author about a favourite...
The mule and the mare
Listening time: under 3 minutes
Grossman writes with great empathy of animals and their experiences. Here an...
Poems for my family 006 – Cavafy
This poem has been in my mental saddlebags for about a quarter of a century. I can't remember how I...
Poems for my family 007 – Carlos Williams
Listening time: under 3 minutes.
The lovely opening line of this poem by William Carlos Williams creates a...
Poems for my family 001 – Yeats
Listening time: under 3 minutes.
The first time I heard this poem was when my mother recited it...
On hearing Beethoven for the first time
Listening time: 4 minutes. A favourite quotation from a favourite novel, Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely...
The happiest time of life
Listening time: 3 minutes. A beautiful description of the sheer, unbounded joy of being alive in a...
On living forever
Listening time: 2 minutes. This long and winding quotation enchanted me to the extent that I wrote it out...
Podcast review – Elizabeth Goudge’s Little White Horse
Listening time: 13 minutes. One of my top two children's books of all time, I first read Elizabeth...
Three in one
Listening time: under 4 minutes. One of the finest pieces of prose I have read in a long...
Survival savvy
Listening time: under 4 minutes.
Inspired by the true story of a dog trained by the Soviets to...
© Beatrice Otto 2021 - design & content unless otherwise stated - all rights reserved