24/10/2013 Meet the Author


24/10/2013

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longer at the castle but back at the zoo. Great images. Man wrestles

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monkey. Now it is time for this week's Meet The Author with Nick

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Higham. Simon Garfield writes what he calls books about small things

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that mean a lot. He has written about the history of wrestling,

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about a radio one. His last two books were about typefaces and the

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history of maths. Now he has written a book about the journey through a

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vanishing world. It is a history of letters and letter writing from the

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earliest days right down to the present.

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Simon Garfield, you start this book by saying that letter writing is

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dying. Why? Obvious reasons, I'm afraid. The answer is e`mail. I was

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keen with the book not to sort of right and anti`e`mail book. I use it

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all the time. It has transformed our world. What we don't do is write in

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any depth. We don't express our emotions as Woodward in a letter. ``

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as we would in a letter. The idea of writing a letter for my kids, why

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would they do that? You have to write neatly, get the post, and it

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would cost you. That is the reason it is dying, unfortunately. We are

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used to the technology now. Your contention is it has change

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qualitatively the way people right. It is a simple thing, really.

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Letters make you think more. There is a slower, Serena wearing of the

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brain. You amass information over time. `` cerebrally. The physical

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thing is important as well. My big concern, my reason for writing the

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book, was how are we going to catalogue our past? How are we going

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to tell our history through e`mail? That is the crucial question. Of

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course, e`mails will be there. But will they be there when we destroy

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our computers? Will our relatives find anything. They will not find

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printed e`mails in the attic. How will historians access our disk

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drive is an computers? There is lots in here. Quotations from famous

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letter writers. Napoleon, letters from Napoleon, Jane Austin. Why are

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Jane Austin's letters so dull? That is a chapter title. Not everybody

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would agree with this, it is opinionated, the book. She wrote her

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letters in her books, very much. Her books have a great grounding in our

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correspondence. One or two actually began as letters. One reason is

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because she clearly didn't... She was in close contact with all the

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people she wrote to. Another reason is when she died, a lot of the more

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interesting letters were burnt. That is the other thing. You could argue

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that actually, that is one great thing about e`mails. They are harder

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to burn. There are more copies out there. Some of the most moving

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letters you quote letters of condolence or letters around death.

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You talk about the suicides of two great 20th`century authors, Virginia

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Woolf and Sylvia Plath, both of which were still at Madras in a

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side. They were striking in many ways. ` microbrews of which were

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suicides. Ted Hughes doesn't get a bad press

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from me. I make the point that had a lot of those letters come out early,

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his reputation wouldn't be so harsh. My parents died when I was young.

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Those condolence letters were the first ones I remember coming through

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en masse. You get letters every day. But the idea of a big bulk

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coming through, almost jamming the letterbox, I remember those. I

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thought OK, this is interesting, there's a condolence letter from

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Argentina or wherever. They had a personal resonance with me.

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Condolence letters are one of the few that have survived. We still

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like condolence letters. We would have to be very hard part two writer

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condolence e`mail. Although, how long? How long before that becomes

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the norm? Love letters. You quote a lot of love letters. The thing that

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holds the book together is a sequence of love letters written by

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a man called Chris Barker, who was serving in the Second World War. The

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letters he wrote back to the woman who eventually became his life. They

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are the ordinary correspondence of a passionate people, people who become

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passionate. It was only by chance that they ended up in the book.

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Yes, I was about three quarters of the way through the book, through

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writing the book. I realised that what I really wanted was a

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correspondence between two people who are unknown. I had asked around.

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I wanted something that was unpublished, unknown people. I am a

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trustee of the mass of sedation Association. `` mathematics

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observation association. I asked and the woman I spoke to said, funnily

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enough, two weeks ago we received this fantastic archive. Do you want

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to have a look? It is a remarkable thing. I was in tears when I read

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the letters. It was an extraordinary thing. I thought, this is what I

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need to really demonstrate what we are going to lose. I threaded them

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through the book as an example. Hopefully, you learn as you go

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along, as if you were learning, rather than be telling the whole

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story at the beginning. For me, it holds the whole book together. We

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know the outcome. It has a... We know the story has a happy outcome

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for some they got married, happily married, had kids. Thank you very

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much indeed. This is BBC News. Coming up in the

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next few minutes: We will have the latest from Grangemouth as it looks

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as though hundreds of subcontractors are likely to lose their jobs as the

:07:44.:07:44.

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