I’m happy to let you know that after a successful trial earlier this year the Library now has access to The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991 from Gale Cengage. This gives you complete access to the archive of this landmark BBC publication.

You can access The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991 via the Databases A-Z list and Newspapers & Magazines database list. You can also access the title through DiscoverEd.

The Listener was a weekly magazine established by the BBC under its Director-General Lord Reith. Its aim was to be the intellectual counterpart to Radio Times, then the BBC listings magazine, and featured commentaries on the intellectual broadcasts of the week as well as previews of major literary and musical programmes. What makes the archive even more interesting is that The Listener was original developed as the medium for reproducing broadcast talks (radio and TV) so is one of the few records of the content of many early broadcasts.

Articles were diverse, with features on the death of King George V, a series of essays accompanying Sir Kenneth Clark’s landmark art history programme Civilisation, interviews with authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, and the historian Geoffrey Elton writing on the decline of British universities in the 1960s. The Listener also attracted contributions from writers such as E.M. Forster, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Wolf, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin. What united all the articles and features was the BBC’s cultural mission of educating the masses.

You can access The Listener Historical Archive, 1929-1991 via the Databases A-Z list and Newspapers & Magazines database list. You can also access the title through DiscoverEd.

You can also cross-search The Listener Historical Archive along with the other newspaper archives we have access to from Gale, via Gale’s NewsVault. You can also cross-search with other primary source archives from Gale via Gale Primary Sources.

You can access all the online newspaper archives already available at the Library via the Newspapers & Magazines database list.

Access is only available to current students and staff at University of Edinburgh.

Caroline Stirling – Academic Support Librarian for History, Classics and Archaeology