Sep 29, 2026 · 1 hr 7 min · 13 segments
Sebastian Faulks is one of the country’s best loved novelists, known for books such as Birdsong, Human Traces, Engleby and Charlotte Gray. His writing is renowned for its masterful storytelling and…
Sebastian FaulksGuest
Adam RutherfordHost
The, the, the personal connection, the thing that you mentioned about your dad, your father being out there.
That was just a sort of, you know, just something that it just sort of clicked and remembered.
And he wrote a memoir, not for publication, but just for his grandchildren.
And I looked it up, and his, his feeling at the time was very much what I gathered from all the research I then did.
And the research I did was principally with the Imperial War Museum, who have this wonderful sound archive.
When I used to go there, when I was researching Birdsong in the early '90s, uh, it, it involved, you had to go to Lambeth, and you'd go up, and you'd go to this reading room under a dome.
And you'd, uh, had to sign a docket saying, "I want collections re- relating to trench foot on the Western Front in 1917." And then they would bring you literally a card index, a great long wooden box with little cards, and you'd pull them out, and it says, "Smith, Jones, Bloggs," blah.
And then you'd order up half a dozen collections, and they would then come up from the basement of the Imperial War Museum.
And you'd pull a little ribbon, and the stuff would tumble down onto the desk.
And some of it was very interesting, and some of it was frankly not very interesting.
The, the, the personal connection, the thing that you mentioned about your dad, your father being out there.
That was just a sort of, you know, just something that it just sort of clicked and remembered.
And he wrote a memoir, not for publication, but just for his grandchildren.
And I looked it up, and his, his feeling at the time was very much what I gathered from all the research I then did.
And the research I did was principally with the Imperial War Museum, who have this wonderful sound archive.
When I used to go there, when I was researching Birdsong in the early '90s, uh, it, it involved, you had to go to Lambeth, and you'd go up, and you'd go to this reading room under a dome.
And you'd, uh, had to sign a docket saying, "I want collections re- relating to trench foot on the Western Front in 1917." And then they would bring you literally a card index, a great long wooden box with little cards, and you'd pull them out, and it says, "Smith, Jones, Bloggs," blah.
And then you'd order up half a dozen collections, and they would then come up from the basement of the Imperial War Museum.
And you'd pull a little ribbon, and the stuff would tumble down onto the desk.
And some of it was very interesting, and some of it was frankly not very interesting.
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