William Hazlitt AND John Clare AND G. M. Trevelyan AND Wilkie Collins AND Virginia Woolf

Location: BBC Radio 4
I researched and presented Holden Caulfield OAP (Broadcast Radio 4, 5/7/01), a half-hour programme on the relevance of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye half a century on; I wrote and read a 20-minute essay entitled Sewall: The First American Tourist (Radio 3; 23/5/03); I was researcher and presenter responsible for a Radio 4 series called Footprints, five 15-minute talks on major writers inspired by walking: 'William Hazlitt' (18/11/02); John Clare (19/11/02); G.M. Trevelyan (20/11/02); Wilkie Collins (21/11/02); Virginia Woolf (22/11/02). The originality of these broadcasts lay in the way complex and challenging information and insights were transmitted in an accessible form - the assessment of the lasting relevance of an important literary text, cultural similarities and differences in respect of England and her North American colony, the use of an aural medium to convey the impact of landscape on sensibility. Their significance lay in the adjustment of format and tone to provide immediacy while allowing exploration of cultural turning-points. Their rigour derived from the reconciliation of breadth and focus within a short compass and the way in which a conversational format was used to convey insights into important cultural achievements, and in doing so developed a structure of its own.