"The Spoken Word: British Writers"

I saw an magazine ad for a CD set that included Virginia Woolf's voice, and was surprised and excited that her voice had been preserved....I had to have it! So I ordered the British Library's 3-CD set, "The Spoken Word: British Writers" (2008) containing excerpts from speeches and interviews from BBC radio shows. The earliest of these date back to the mid-1930s. The 30 authors on the CDs include (in chronological order of their birth dates, as they are arranged on the CDs) Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley, Noel Coward, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Nancy Mitford, William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, and Harold Pinter. As I knew I would be, I was thrilled to hear Virginia Woolf speaking. I also thoroughly enjoyed hearing many of the other writers. They speak about their writing, their lives, their reputations, and more. One of the most inspiring was, to my surprise, Rudyard Kipling, who spoke eloquently about how "the word" is the one way that human experience is carried from one generation to another. Also inspiring was E.M. Forster, who gave a timeless message: laissez faire is a bad concept for the economy and a good concept for "morality" (meaning, for example, that it prevents censorship and laws restricting individual freedom). I highly recommend this fascinating and literarily significant CD set. It is available from the British Library Online at http://shop.bl.uk/.