3 March 2006
Friday 3 March 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood talks to Matthew Sweet about her new book of short stories, The Tent.
Programme Details
Margaret Atwood is one of the biggest names in contemporary fiction and this evening she's Matthew Sweet's guest in Night Waves. He'll be talking to her about her latest book - The Tent - a teasing collection of so-called fictional essays and drawings which offer a kind of refracted view of the writer's creative life.
Matthew will also be exploring two of the most potent cultural icons of the twentieth century - the Iron Curtain and the Star Spangled Banner - both have anniversaries which fall this week. The first came into most people's consciousness sixty years ago when Sir Winston Churchill coined the term in a speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri and the second entered the popular imagination in 1931. The historians Patrick Wright and John Ramsden will be joining Matthew to consider Churchill's resonant phrase and how its meaning has changed over the years and the writer, Garrison Keiller, the musicologist, Rainer Hersch and another historian, Adam Smith will be devoting their attention to the Stars and Stripes.
Music of a very different sort will be the subject of the critic, Roderick Swanston's review - he'll be examining Sir John in Love - Vaughan Williams' rarely performed version of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor which is being staged by the English National Opera. That's all in Night Waves with Matthew Sweet, here on BBC Radio 3 this evening at the usual time of nine thirty.
Additional information:
1) 'The Tent' by Margaret Atwood is published by Bloomsbury
2) Performances of 'Sir John in Love' by Vaughan Williams run at English National Opera until Saturday 1 April.
3) Patrick Wright is the author of 'Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine.'4) John Ramsden is the author of 'Man of the Century: Winston Churchill and his Legend Since 1945.'
5) Adam Smith's book on the American Civil War is due to be published by Oxford University Press later this year.
6) Garrison Keillor's last book was Love Me.
