The School of English’s Vybarr Cregan-Reid was on national radio last week discussing his forthcoming book Footnotes: How Running Makes us Human. Peter White of Radio 4’s You and Yours talked to him about why we might want to run, how to get started, and how to get a runner’s high. The estimated audience figure for the programme is over 3 million. Footnotes is published 26th May.
Catherine Richardson took part in a programme on Radio 3 entitled First Folio Road Trip which followed the first copies of Shakespeare’s first folio. As the programme makers say, we take it for granted now that Shakespeare is our national poet, and his First Folio almost a religious relic, but it wasn’t always so. The programme follows the story of seven of the 750 original copies of the First Folio to learn how Shakespeare’s work spread across Britain and Europe, and how his reputation expanded in the hundred odd years between its publication in 1623 and the erection of his statue in Poets Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1741. With Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford, Catherine talked about Sir Edward Dering, a shopaholic young nobleman from Kent and the first documented purchaser of a First Folio, which he bought along with a scarlet suits, a pot of marmalade and a present for his baby son.