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Artist Sam Winston spent a number of weeks living in his studio, drawing in complete darkness. From this experience he has created a new immersive exhibition called Darkness Visible, with the aim of everyone experiencing the creative power of darkness. In this guest blog, he tells us about how the experience affected him.
November 27, 2017
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For every heart-breaking novel or laugh-out-loud comedy, there are stories that scare us silly. They are the ones that stay with us, or that we scare our friends with. No matter how many times we read them, they frighten us over and over again. So why do we like scary stories so much?
October 23, 2017
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Audiobooks about mental health can help everyone understand the affect mental illness has on daily life. Here are 13 of the best.
October 9, 2017
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This year, the UK is celebrating Banned Books Week to highlight the history of censorship. One of the most famous examples is Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence. The book was famously banned in the UK because of its explicit content. In 1960, Penguin Books won a court case to publish it due to the 'Obscene Publications Act'. This act said that any book considered obscene but with "redeeming social merit" could be published. After six days, the jury found the book was not obscene. It sold out across the UK on the first day of publication, with 200,000 copies bought. Almost 60 years on, this is considered a landmark case that represented the end of an era.
September 25, 2017
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The summer holidays might be over, but that doesn't mean you can't find the time to relax with an audiobook! We've got some brilliant new titles that we'll be adding to the library over the next few weeks. Here's a selection of the autumn listening we've got in store...
September 8, 2017
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If you're finding reading difficult, school can be particularly daunting. There always seems to be so many things to read! This is where our Sound Learning service comes in. We record educational audiobooks from ages 7 and up so that at least getting through the reading doesn't have to be difficult. We've collected some of the best back to school audiobooks in our library, so get a head start on listening!
August 23, 2017
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Literature professor Simon John James and physicist Richard Bower were both involved in the curating the exhibition, Time Machines – the past, the future, and how stories take us there. Their conversations quickly revealed to them the many, wildly various, meanings of “time travel”. Here, they discuss how time travelling in literary and scientific terms might, one day, coincide.
July 4, 2017
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Despite the growing technological panic at the cusp of the twenty-first century, my parents only owned one CD player. It was too big to move from the sitting room, so the audiobook was bought for me as six cassette tapes to listen to in my bedroom. At nine years old, I had already amassed an impressive collection of audiobooks on cassette - I've always struggled to fall asleep and need to be tricked into unconsciousness by distraction from overthinking and worrying. I had Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox and The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me memorised, and had been forced to give up my Thomas the Tank Engine cassette to my sister, who was, in fairness, deserving; she's younger than me and suffers from the same problem sleeping.
June 26, 2017
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It sounds like a cliché, but I've always loved to read. My journey into personhood was guided less by those around me and more by the worlds I inhabited and the people I met on my fictional travels. I wanted to be Matilda for ages. I genuinely thought that if I read more books my brain would become so advanced I’d be able to close my curtains without leaving my bed.
June 23, 2017
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When I was thirteen and wishing that Orlando Bloom would read me the phonebook (it was 2003, that’s the only excuse I have), I could never have dreamt that there would be so many books read by celebrities to choose from.
June 20, 2017
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