This Cultural Life Folgen

The author of the multi-million-selling Languedoc trilogy, set amidst religious wars in south-west France and beginning with the bestselling Labyrinth, Kate Mosse has written nine novels and short story collections, and four plays. She is also one of the co-founders of the Women’s Prize For Fiction. Kate Mosse tells John Wilson about first visiting the Festival Theatre in her hometown of Chichester at the age of six and seeing the 19th-century French farce The Italian Straw Hat, an experience that opened her mind to the power of drama. She remembers being among the million and a half visitors to the blockbuster Tutankhamen exhibition at the British Museum in 1972, and explains how her interest in historical narratives can be traced back to the treasures of the boy king. Kate Mosse also chooses two literary influences for This Cultural Life. Having read Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights as a teenager, she says the way that Bronte describes the Yorkshire moors as like a character in their own right influenced her own novels in which the Languedoc landscape plays a similar narrative role. Her last big cultural moment is the 1991 Booker Prize for Fiction when an all-male shortlist prompted Kate and other literary figures to create the Women’s Prize for Fiction as a way of shining the spotlight on novels written by women anywhere in the world.Producer: Edwina Pitman

Born Clifford Joseph Price, Goldie was brought up in care homes and with foster families in the west Midlands. After establishing himself as a graffiti artist, he began to make dance music and, with his 1995 debut album Timeless, was a pioneer of the drum’n’bass sounds that dominated club culture throughout the decade. Alongside work as a DJ around the world, Goldie has also taken on various acting roles, including in the James Bond film the World Is Not Enough and, on television, playing a gangster in Eastenders. He was also runner-up in the 2008 reality show Maestro, in which contestants learned to conduct a symphony orchestra. The following year, he was the subject of a television documentary in which he composed a piece of contemporary classical music that was performed at the BBC Proms. Goldie’s choices for This Cultural Life include hearing David Bowie’s 1969 Space Oddity when he was in care, and relating to its theme of isolation and abandonment. He also talks about the huge influence of seeing the 1983 documentary Style Wars, about the emerging hip hop scene in New York in the early 1980s, and the role of graffiti artists in reclaiming the subway trains and the walls of railway yards as their unofficial galleries. Goldie also reveals that the American jazz guitarist and composer Pat Metheny is one of his biggest influences, despite working in a very different musical field.Producer: Edwina Pitman

With a career spanning eight decades, Dame Eileen Atkins is one of the most acclaimed British actors. She is a three-time Olivier Award-winner and has won Emmy and BAFTA Awards for her role in the television series Cranford. A familiar face on screen since making her television debut in 1959, she has starred in shows ranging from Doc Martin to The Crown, and her film roles have included The Dresser, Gosford Park, Cold Mountain and Paddington 2. She also co-created the long-running television series Upstairs Downstairs and The House of Elliot, and wrote the screenplay for the 1997 film of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.Dame Eileen talks to John Wilson about her upbringing on a Tottenham council estate and how, under the tutelage of a woman she knew as Madame Yandie, she became Baby Eileen, a child stage performer, singing and dancing in working men’s clubs. She chooses as one of her greatest influences one of her teachers at Latymer School, EJ Burton, who introduced her to literature and theatre. She recalls the impact of joining the company at the Shakespeare Theatre, now the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1957, after a long struggle to secure stage roles. Dame Eileen also explains how her fascination with Virginia Woolf led to one of her most celebrated stage performances, that of the writer herself, in a one woman show adaptation of A Room Of One’s Own.Producer: Edwina Pitman