Fry’s English Delight, Series 3 by Stephen Fry (BBC Radio 4, 2010) The English language has few champions like Stephen Fry – not merely one who uses with relish, but one who advocates. Fry’s English Delight Series 3 puts Qwerty on trial, explores gender differences, fails to naysay the negative, and ponders evolutions to come.
Tag: Stephen Fry
A Bear Called Paddington
A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond (Houghton Mifflin, 1958) audiobook read by Stephen Fry (Harper, 2005) Paddington Bear seems destined to remain a perennial children’s favourite, his surroundings now dated somewhat but his mishap-inducing unfamiliarity with them never growing old. Stephen Fry, who was conceived at much the same time as Paddington, gives perfect voice to the stories.
Absolute Power, Series Two
Absolute Power, Series Two (BBC, 2005) Stephen Fry continues to wreak merry havoc as Charles Prentiss, the blithely amoral anti-hero of public relations spin-doctoring, embracing in this series such unbecoming PR challenges as making the British people love America, and selling British Airways to Osama bin Laden’s cousin.
42 Word Review: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Macmillan Digital Audio, 2007) [first published by Pan, 1979] {Read by Stephen Fry} In embellishing the riotous and extemporised cerebral peregrinations of the Hitchhiker’s radio series, Douglas Adams crafted one of the funniest (and most-quoted-from) novels of any genre. Stephen Fry’s range of narrative inflections subsequently affords the audiobook status as…
42 Word Review: Wagner & Me by Stephen Fry
Wagner & Me by Stephen Fry (BBC, 2010) Truthfully titled, this documentary is perhaps too much about Fry’s passion for Wagner’s music, too little about the more historically significant equating of Wagner with Nazi Germany, and the extent to which Wagner’s powerfully operatic Gesamtkunstwerks may have informed Hitler’s nightmarish fantasy.
42 Word Review: Fry’s Planet Word by Stephen Fry
Fry’s Planet Word by Stephen Fry (BBC, 2011) Across five one-hour episodes and with the prowling inquisitiveness of a deep-seated, rapacious word-lust unleashed, Stephen Fry — elegant, eloquent, ebullient — serves gallantly to inspire us with the origins and spread, the significance, the myriad uses, and above all the beauty, of language.
42 Word Review: More Fool Me by Stephen Fry
More Fool Me: A Memoir by Stephen Fry (Penguin, 2014) Stephen Fry, an engaging memoirist across two previous volumes, here becomes somewhat unfocussed in confronting his cocaine years. Of the ‘new’ material, almost half comprises diary entries from 1993, such ruderal perspective suggesting that present-day Stephen may have had his mind elsewhere.