Series eight in Stephen Fry's consistently amusing and interesting series about the English language, with four half-hour programmes originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The first involves John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten, talking about the problems of emotional language in "Words Fail Me" ("A cracker", said the UK newspaper The Guardian). Then what rainy small talk really means in "Talking About the Weather". "Do You Promise Not to Tell" enters the odd world of secret language, and "English Plus One" gets inside the minds of people who are bilingual in English and one more language.
Series seven in Stephen Fry's famously funny and engaging series about the English language. It includes four programmes, originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4. The series starts with illusionist Derren Brown helping Stephen decipher Magical Language; a programme about Capital Punishment (about how complex capital letters can be) as well as a celebration of Reading Aloud and a no-nonsense examination of Plain English, which 'does what it says on the tin' as well as telling the story of that very successful metaphor for plain EnglishGuests.
A fifth series from BBC Radio 4 in which Stephen Fry examines, with the help of experts, the highways and byways of the English language. In these four episodes he tells The Story of X: a letter holy and profane, sexy and chaste; discusses intonation, the "song" of English and how cadence affects meaning; muses on the art and craft of conversation - and whether true conversation can happen on TV and radio - and ponders the meaning of meaning, and the gap between brain and mouth that means language can never truly represent thought. In addition, he tells us why blue as a colour is a newish invention.
Acclaimed author Joseph J. Ellis penned the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers, a fixture on The New York Times best seller list for an entire year, and one of the most popular history books of all time. Now this master historian turns his attention to the most exalted American hero, Founding Father and first President George Washington.
Beowulf: A new verse translation by Seamus Heaney pdf + mp3
Composed toward the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon. The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.
