17 February 2006
Friday 17 February 2006 21:30-22:15 (Radio 3)
Paul Allen digs into the murky world of politics and archaeology by considering Heather Pringle's book The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust, which tells the story of the Nazi research institute set up to try and prove that all the great accomplishments of the past were the work of the Aryan race.
Programme Details
In 1935 Heinrich Himmler created a research institute called the Ahnenerbe. Its job was to scour the globe for evidence of the mythical Aryan race and thereby prove the Nazi version of history. Heather Pringle and Neal Ascherson talk to Paul Allen about Himmler's obsessions and whether the discipline of archaeology has ever recovered from its misuse.
'What ever happened to the London Night'? Sukhdev Sandhu's new project Night Haunts records a series of walks through the darkened London Streets in the footsteps of the 1920's writer H.V. Morton. Paul Allen asks Sukhdev about the tradition of such writers, or flaneurs, how the London night was among the finest of Victorian inventions and why he thinks Morton betrayed the city he so assiduously chronicled.
Fifty years ago this week the Soviet leader, Nikita Kruschev, publicly denounced Joseph Stalin in such severe terms that the soviet authorities denied it for years afterwards. The political journalist Anthony Howard takes a tour of famous denunciations from Mark Anthony on Brutus to Geoffrey Howe on Margaret Thatcher and shows us all how it should be done.
Night Waves will also review Bryn Terfel in the title role in Wagner's The Flying Dutchman at the Cardiff Millennium Hall.
Additional information:
Heather Pringle's The Masterplan is published on Feb 20 by Harper Collins
Sukdhev Sandhu's Night Haunts - a nocturnal Journey through 2006 - can be found at www.nighthaunts.org.uk
The Flying Dutchman premiers on Friday 17 Feb and will subsequently tour the country. See www.wno.org.uk/index.cfm
