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Episode details

Radio 3,10 Mar 2020,14 mins

SeriesHome Sweet Home

Episode 2

The Essay

Available for over a year

In her series reflecting on different dimensions of home, the writer and journalist Madeleine Bunting turns her attention to homesickness. In the American Civil War, soldiers were believed to have died of it. 17th-century Swiss mercenaries were prone to it, particularly when they heard the Swiss horn played; and generations of British children were expected to toughen it out in boarding schools, where learning to endure homesickness almost became part of a national strategy.

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