Showing results by narrator "James Naughtie" in All Categories

In this major BBC Radio 4 series, James Naughtie uncovers the roots of our music and reveals the soundtrack to our own history. The history of classical music is inextricably linked with the places it was written, its purpose and its patrons as well as with politics, war and social change. From the earliest music of the monasteries to the court and church music of the Renaissance and Reformation and beyond, composers have always changed with the times.

James Naughtie, the acclaimed author and BBC broadcaster, now brings his unique and inquisitive eye to the country that has fascinated him and drawn him across the Atlantic for half a century. In looking at America, from Presidents Nixon through to Trump, he’ll tell the story of a country that is grappling with a dream. What has it come to mean in the new century and who do Americans now think they are?

2011 will be the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. The significance of this version of the Bible is not only in religious and cultural dimensions it also paved the way for important consequences in English social and political history, freeing them from a spiritual serfdom to the Church and enabling them to read Scripture for themselves and form their own opinions.

Paris in 1968 - seething with revolutionaries and spies - sees Will Flemyng's world turned upside down after a mysterious encounter on the metro and a chance revelation from a rival operative. In a city alive with talk of revolution, Will finds himself in the thick of the action. But now he gets news that threatens the closest and most complicated relationship in his life - the one with his younger brother.

Will Flemyng, originally trained as a spy, is now British ambassador to Washington. Meanwhile, his older brother Mungo is recuperating from a heart attack in their beloved Scottish highland family home, and Abel, the youngest of the three, has died mysteriously in America. Abel's unexplained death sets in motion an unstoppable chain of events, beginning with an unexpected glimpse of a face at his funeral. Soon Will finds himself on a dangerous journey into his clandestine past, from conflict in Ireland to the long shadows of the Cold War.

As the longest-lived and longest-reigning monarch of the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II has presided over an era of tremendous social, political and cultural change. In 2012, to mark her Diamond Jubilee, Radio 4 looked back on the long span of her reign, and asked the public to choose high-profile public figures who have helped to define this New Elizabethan Age. Almost a thousand nominations poured in, and the final selection was decided by a panel of leading writers and historians, including Dominic Sandbrook, Bamber Gascoigne and Max Hastings.