The BBC has started to make available on its Web site material from its sound archives, which are–to put it mildly–voluminous. What’s there is fairly random, but there are some stunners, including excerpts from a famous 1960 TV interview with Evelyn Waugh. I’d read about this interview (which figures prominently in all of Waugh’s biographies), but never seen or heard it. If you have a RealAudio player, you can listen by going here.
From this page, you can easily find your way to other BBC recordings of such noted figures as Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Vladimir Nabokov, George Bernard Shaw, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats (along with some rather more ephemeral types). I hope more such material will be posted on the BBC Web site in due course–most especially Max Beerbohm’s broadcasts from the Thirties and Forties, which I’ve never heard.
(I am, by the way, a great fan of spoken-word recordings by famous people whose voices you’d never guess were recorded, and will be glad to tell the readers of “About Last Night” about any especially choice Web-based tidbits whose URLs you care to pass on.)