Norman George Painting was an English actor, broadcaster and writer. He played Phil Archer in the BBC Radio 4 soap opera The Archers from the pilot episodes aired on the BBC Midlands Home Service in summer 1950, after the series went national on the Light Programme on 1 January 1951, until his death in 2009, when he was the longest-serving member of the cast. His last episode, recorded two days before he died, was broadcast on 22 November 2009. The character lived on until Phil was "found dead" in his armchair in February 2010. According to Guinness World Records, Painting held the world record for an actor playing a continuous role, a total of 59 years, which has now been surpassed by co-actor Lesley Saweard and co-star Patricia Greene.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda is a 1998 non-fiction book by The New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutus were killed.
Disgrace is a novel by J. M. Coetzee, published in 1999. It won the Booker Prize. The writer was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years after its publication.
Michael Frayn, FRSL is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy.
What The Papers Say is a British radio and television series. It consists of quotations from headlines and comment pages in the previous week's newspapers, read in a variety of voices and accents by actors. The quotes are linked by a script read by a studio presenter, usually a prominent journalist. The show did not have a regular host, and was intended as a wry look at how British broadsheets and tabloids covered the week's news stories. The programme was most recently broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Birthday Letters is a 1998 poetry collection by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes' death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 1999. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized, and "explosive" marriage. Prior to Birthday Letters, Hughes had only explicitly mentioned Plath once before, in a poem titled 'Heptonstall Cemetery' from his 1979 collection Remains of Elmet.
Jake Arnott is a British novelist and dramatist, author of The Long Firm (1999) and six other novels.
Death in Holy Orders is a 2001 detective novel in the Adam Dalgliesh series by English writer P. D. James.
The Murder Room is a 2003 detective novel by English writer P. D. James, the 12th in the Adam Dalgliesh series. It takes place in London, particularly the Dupayne Museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath in the London Borough of Camden.
Being Dead is a novel by the English writer Jim Crace, published in 1999.
Charlotte Gray is a 1998 novel by Sebastian Faulks. Faulks completes his loose trilogy of books about France with this story of the adventures of a young Scotswoman, Charlotte Gray, who becomes an agent of Britain's Special Operations Executive (SOE) assigned to work with the French Resistance in Vichy France, during World War II. Although denied by the author, the story and title character have been compared to the exploits of SOE agents Nancy Wake and Pearl Witherington.
Serendipities: Language and Lunacy is a 1998 collection of essays by Umberto Eco. Dealing with the history of linguistics and Early Modern concepts of a perfect language, the material in the book overlaps with La ricerca della lingua perfetta. As Eco explains it in his preface, serendipity is the positive outcome of some ill-conceived idea.
Master Georgie is a 1998 historical novel by English novelist Beryl Bainbridge. It deals with the British experience of the Crimean War through the adventures of the eponymous central character George Hardy, who volunteers to work on the battlefields.
Andrew Harries is chief executive and co-founder of Left Bank Pictures, a UK based production company formed in 2007. In a career spanning four decades he has produced television dramas including The Royle Family,Cold Feet, the revivals of Prime Suspect and Cracker, as well as the BAFTA-winning television play The Deal.
All Quiet on the Orient Express is the second novel by Booker shortlisted author Magnus Mills, published in 1999. As with his first novel it is a tragicomedy with an unnamed narrator dealing with apparently simple but increasingly sinister situations.
Our Fathers (1999) is the debut novel by Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1999). It was also nominated for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the International Dublin Literary Award.
David Attenborough's Life Stories is a series of monologues written and spoken by British broadcaster David Attenborough on the subject of natural history. They were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2009 as part of the station's "Point of View" strand, in the weekly timeslot formerly occupied by Alistair Cooke's Letter from America. In each of the 20 programmes, Attenborough discusses a particular subject of personal resonance, drawing on his experience of six decades filming the natural world. The series was produced by Julian Hector, head of radio at the BBC Natural History Unit.
Fasting, Feasting is a novel by Indian writer Anita Desai, first published in 1999 in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1999.
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium. The novel was awarded the National Book Award in 2001 and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2002.
Dickensian is a British drama television series that premiered on BBC One from 26 December 2015 to 21 February 2016. The 20-part series, created and co-written by Tony Jordan, brings characters from many Charles Dickens novels together in one Victorian London neighbourhood, as Inspector Bucket investigates the murder of Ebenezer Scrooge's partner Jacob Marley.
