A reader suggested recording longer pieces, allowing busy people to tune in and making it easier to share ‘slow’ quotations which might look daunting in a sweeping stretch of text. Thank you for listening!
Thank you for the podcasts! I only wish they were longer as they are great companions.
Liisa Välikangas
Thank you for these wonderful podcasts Béatrice. Apart from the joy in the writing with its images and sentiments, it’s lively to hear your voice, which is an excellent story-telling voice that is lovely to listen to. You are a natural seanchaà (Irish for story-teller).
As Eva rightly says, time is an issue for me, and to be honest, at the end of a day, concentration span is too. These podcasts enable me to enjoy writing redux as I gaze out the window of the train and watch the landscape go by.
I look forward to the next podcasts.
Wishing you a lovely September.
Tanya Strevens
Poems for my family 012 – Thomas
Listening time: under 4 minutes. A poet describes the driving force of his art, not one of fame, trophies and applause, but rather the 'common...
Podcast review – Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journals
Listening time: 18 minutes. Dorothy, sister to the poet William Wordsworth, kept journals for a few years around the turn of the 19th century. They...
Poems for my family 011 – Stanton
Listening time: under 4 minutes. This delightful poem was written by a great uncle on our mother's side and reached me in a home-printed collection...
Oh, for dog’s sake!
Listening time: 5 minutes. A touching account of mutual support and succour between labour camp prisoners and some of the camp dogs. In this and...
Podcast review – Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus
Listening time: 18 minutes. Â Enjoy our celebration of another 'bestellar', Lawrence Durrell's sun-washed memoir of two joyous years spent on the...
How to hide a poem (II)
Listening time: under 5 minutes.  This disturbing quotation is striking on several levels.  By the Hungarian poet György Faludy concerning his...
A bulwark against brain-washing
Listening time: under 9 minutes.  Sadly, some things in the state of the world are driving me to spend more time thinking about how simple citizens...
Highly suspicious
Listening time: under 3 minutes. A journalist in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, read out this description of the host country. It's several...
Intimations of radiance
Listening time: 3 minutes.An intricate description of the effect an ancient temple can work on the spirit - a falling away of complication and...
And I shall teach the boy
Listening time: under 4 minutes.The Countess of Gormenghast ponders her personal curriculum for her newborn son Titus, soon after despatching him to...
Learning by heart
Listening time: 10 minutes. It's been playing on my mind, the fact that recently I haven't learned any new poems by heart. This led me to revisit a...
Meet the Barone
Listening time: under 4 minutes. Casting back across the sweep of history, there is only a handful of creatures, human and otherwise, whom I regret...
Playfulness across the divide
Listening time: under 5 minutes.We play with dogs and cats and some other creatures. I used to play with a fox in our garden in London: he made a...
Poems for my family 010 – Gumilyov
Listening time: under 4 minutes. I discovered this poem in my early twenties, possibly while first living and studying in China where I also got to...
Poems for my family 009 – Milton
Listening time: 3 minutes. Surely one of the sweetest love poems of all time (alongside this one), in which Adam and Eve enjoy each other's company...
Poems for my family 008 – Drayton
Listening time: under 5 minutes. One of the greatest love poems in English, this was written by Michael Drayton (1563-1631) the night before he...
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 poet. Nicolson's homage to...
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 surprising contrast between...
What is peace?
Listening time: under 4 minutes. This is Saint-Exupéry's definition of peace, in which everything is in its place and friends can be reached,...
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 Goudge's Little White Horse as a...
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 came across it but after a few readings it...
It will do what it is supposed to do
Listening time: 7 minutes. This marvelous prose-poem comes from a travel book by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who toured a number of...
And this is my epic…
Listening time: under 4 minutes.A marvelous account of a butcher bursting in to Lawrence Durrell's office during the short period after the war when...
Poems for my family 004 – Durrell
Listening time: under 5 minutes. Durrell has long been a favourite writer and poet. When I first read his Alexandria Quartet in my twenties, I went...
Poems for my family 003 – Donne
Listening time: under 3 minutes. This is the third poem I chose to share with my family, copied out by hand and sent by post. Â Written as part of a...
Poems for my family 002 – Frost
Listening time: under 4 minutes. This is the second poem I chose to share with my family, in what will be a series to be sent approximately once 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 to my step-father in the kitchen. She had tears in...
The mule and the mare
Listening time: under 3 minutes Grossman writes with great empathy of animals and their experiences. Here an Italian mule, requisitioned to the war...
Of pens and pencils
Listening time: under 3 minutes.  This is a charming account of negotiating communist bureaucracy at the height of the Cold War. John Steinbeck...
War wounds
Listening time: 4 minutes.Among the warm-hearted and even funny accounts of people they met in the Soviet Union, this searing...
My publisher, falsely so called…
Listening time: under 3 minutes. I loved this drawn out account of Thoreau's dealings with a publisher wanting to clear out his cellar of Thoreau's...
The happiest time of life
Listening time: 3 minutes. A beautiful description of the sheer, unbounded joy of being alive in a small mongrel dog who finds herself on the...
Podcast review – Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams
Listening time: 15 minutes. It’s about a quarter of a century since I first read this moving and enlightening book. Having recently re-read it, I...
Podcast review – Molly Peacock’s Paper Garden
Listening time: 12 minutes. This is a biography of an artist written by a poet. It's also a meditation on creativity in life and art. Mary Granville...
A Greek showed up
Listening time: under 5 minutes. From Steinbeck's masterful and lively account of travelling in the Soviet Union with Robert Capa. Chmarsky is...
Cocktails in Kiev
Listening time: 2 minutes. On their travels to the Soviet Union in 1946, John Steinbeck and Robert Capa were surprised to encounter something as...
Survival savvy
Listening time: under 4 minutes. Inspired by the true story of a dog trained by the Soviets to go into space, Vasily Grossman imagines her life in...
Podcast review – Adam Nicolson’s Sea Room
Listening time: 19 minutes. Having inherited, at the age of 21, the Shiants, three small islands east of the Outer Hebrides, Nicolson wrote Sea...
Three in one
Listening time: under 4 minutes. One of the finest pieces of prose I have read in a long time is by the photographer Robert Capa, presenting his...
On living forever
Listening time: 2 minutes. This long and winding quotation enchanted me to the extent that I wrote it out by hand some 20-30 times and sent...
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 Hunter, reviewed here (soon also...
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