Morning:
14°c
One thousand hours of archive recordings of leading figures from Salman Rushdie to Quentin Crisp are going online for the first time.
The British Library is making available more than 880 tapes of conversations collected at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in the Eighties on subjects including Aids, literature and the joy of drawing penguins.
Rushdie can be heard speaking to Tariq Ali, swapping improbable anecdotes from Pakistan.
Crisp spoke to writer Adam Mars-Jones about Manners from Heaven — his “divine guide to good
behaviour” — and described the differences between London and New York etiquette.
It was cartoonist Steve Bell who told of his fondness for drawing penguins.
Other speakers include Enoch Powell, Harold Pinter, Terry Pratchett and Ken Livingstone.
Kristian Jensen, head of the library's British collections, said: “Anyone interested in cultural, artistic and political change in Britain will want to listen.”
