From the Library With Love
A podcast by Kate Thompson
57 Episodes
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Jean Fullerton, policewoman and district nurse turned novelist on why there is no such thing as an ordinary life.
Published: 18/01/2025 -
Author Louisa Treger investigates the audacious woman who tricked her way into a brutal insane asylum to expose the truth
Published: 11/01/2025 -
British booksellers in the Blitz
Published: 04/12/2024 -
What it's like to be a prison librarian? Neil Barclay invites us into HMP Thameside library in London.
Published: 23/11/2024 -
The mysterious photo that inspired a tale of secrets, loss and betrayal in wartime Cornwall.
Published: 22/11/2024 -
Shattered cities. Donna Jones Alward on uncovering the WW1 explosion which devastated Nova Scotia
Published: 12/10/2024 -
"I wrote 100 letters to my friend with cancer. It transformed our lives."
Published: 21/09/2024 -
What happened after the Nazis left? New York Times bestselling author Jenny Le Coat on why liberation didn't equal freedom for Jersey islanders after WW2.
Published: 14/09/2024 -
Meet the formidable, feisty, factory sisterhood who went on strike and made history.
Published: 13/07/2024 -
“‘Forget that number and you don’t exist,’ the Kapo at Auschwitz told me.” 92-year-old Ivor Perl on surviving the horrors of the Holocaust.
Published: 06/07/2024 -
Meet the fur coat gangsters: Notorious Victorian girl gang who hid stolen jewellery in knickerbockers, carried razors wrapped in lace handkerchiefs and used a hatpin to blind anyone who crossed them
Published: 15/06/2024 -
On the 80th anniversary of D-Day, veteran Mervyn Kersh shares his extraordinary experience of the Normandy landings and his role in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Published: 06/06/2024 -
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe: Reader, Bibliophile and Library Lover
Published: 01/06/2024 -
The Women Who Ruled the East End: Remarkable Tales of Wartime London
Published: 18/05/2024 -
85 years on from the end of the Spanish Civil War, author Maggie Brookes uncovers its hidden heroes. Plus the extraordinary war story she found in a lift!
Published: 11/05/2024 -
99-year-old Holocaust survivor and US Army veteran George Leitmann on the emotional search for his father, the day he discovered a concentration camp and how he kept his cool interrogating Nazi war cr
Published: 04/05/2024 -
Sent away by sea: the forgotten history of WWII’s ‘seaevacuees'. Meet the heroine at the heart of an astonishing survival story.
Published: 27/04/2024 -
Meet the Sugar Girls of Love Lane. New social history book set in Tate & Lyle's Liverpool factory in the sixties offers a glimpse of a long vanished era.
Published: 25/04/2024 -
Meet the wartime librarians of Occupied Paris. Bestselling author of The Paris Library, Janet Skeslien Charles, on how reading gives us a privacy of the mind
Published: 20/04/2024 -
112 years ago today, RMS Titanic struck an iceberg. Historian Claes-Göran Wetterholm reveals some heartbreaking, untold personal stories…
Published: 13/04/2024
Welcome to my library of interviews...Librarians, bestselling authors and our wartime generation sharing their love of books, reading and some extraordinary stories . #Hidden History #Forgotten women #Bibliotherapy #LibrariesINTRODUCTIONWelcome to From the Library With Love. A podcast for anyone whose life has been changed by reading. I’m Kate Thompson. Wonderful, transformative things happen when you set foot in a library. In 2019 I uncovered the true story of a forgotten Underground library, built along the tracks of a Tube tunnel during the Blitz. As stories go, it was irresistible and the result was, The Little Wartime Library, my seventh novel.Bethnal Green Public Library, where the novel is set was 100 years old in October 2022, and to celebrate the centenary of this grand old lady, funded by library philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, I set myself the challenge of interviewing 100 library workers. Speaking with one library worker for every year this library has been serving its community seemed a good way to mark this auspicious occasion. Because who better to explain the worth of a hundred-year-old library, than librarians themselves!I wanted to explore the enduring value of libraries and reading. I quickly realised that librarians have the best stories. My research led me to librarians with over fifty years of experience and MBEs, to the impressive women who manage libraries in prisons and schools, to those in remote Scottish islands. From poetry libraries overlooking the wide sweep of the Thames, to the 16th century Shakespeare’s Library in Stratford, via the small but mighty Leadhills Miners’ Library. This podcast was born out of those eye-opening conversations, because as Denise from Tower Hamlets Library told me: 'If you want to see the world, don't join the Army, become a librarian!'I’ll also be talking to international bestselling authors and some remarkable wartime women about their favourite libraries, stories, the craft of writing and the book that helped them to view the world differently. Come and join me as I delve into the secrets behind the stacks.Podcasts edited by Ben Veasey at media-crews.co.uk Image by Julie Price
