Forthcoming Radio

I’m writing and presenting a 12 part series on European languages called Lingua Franca for Radio 3. It’ll be in three sections of four, the first being on the origins of European languages, the second four being on borderlands and extinctions and the third four being on the future. I’ve started doing the interviewing and it’s absolutely fascinating. Incredible stuff. Do you know why Romania ended up speaking a romance language? Because south Italian farmers and peasants migrated there. It wasn’t because of Roman conquest.

I’ll be making a Radio 4 programme about the two hundred year anniversary of Jack and the Beanstalk. We recorded some interviews at the production in Richmond.

I’ll be making a Radio 4 programme about Wilfred Scawen Blunt an upper class eccentric poet, adventurer and lover, who wrote love poetry and anti-British Empire tracts including one that was a ‘secret’ diary of the British occupation of Egypt – exactly one hundred years ago.

And lovely Word of Mouth will be back in April and again in August.