Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
In this excerpt from the BBC documentary Yesterday’s Witness: Two Victorian Girls (1970), a pair of women in their 90s recount coming of age in London in the late-Victorian era. Berta Ruck, who relocated from Wales and went on to become a successful romance novelist, and Frances ‘Effy’ Jones, one of the first women to be trained to work as a typist, prove charismatic storytellers as they recount the clothes, manners and mounds of mud that defined London at the time. What emerges is a portrait of the city as a place of widespread poverty and conservative values, but also excitement and new opportunities for women.
via Open Culture
Video by BBC Archive
video
Dance and theatre
How a Noh mask-maker summons a lifelike face from a single block of wood
16 minutes
video
The ancient world
What wine vessels reveal about politics and luxury in ancient Athens and Persia
16 minutes
video
Art
David Goldblatt captured the contradictions of apartheid in stark black and white
15 minutes
video
Thinkers and theories
Is simulation theory a way to shirk responsibility for the world we’ve created?
13 minutes
video
Family life
In Rwanda, Sébastien finds traces of personal history in the wake of national tragedy
21 minutes
video
Dance and theatre
Leaf through Shakespeare’s First Folio for a riveting journey into theatre history
13 minutes
video
Architecture
Modern architecture should embrace – not ignore or repel – the nonhuman world
8 minutes
video
Nations and empires
The strange tale of how mangoes became hallowed objects in Maoist China
6 minutes
video
Ecology and environmental sciences
In an ancient English rainforest, John creates charcoal and cultivates growth
12 minutes