YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Pullman

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54

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2023-04-04

most recent

2023-04-04

sittings or episodes

1

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podcast

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1. “The Greek myths stories of the heroes like Theseus and Perseus and that sort of thing, stories of the gods, and in the second term I told them the story of the Iliad, and in the third term I told them the story of the Odyssey.”

   2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “First of all, it gave me a university education, which was all I could absorb at the time, which wasn't very much. So it gave me kind of an insight into how the college system worked and what a tutorial was and high table and all that sort of scenery, which I use later in his dark materials. But then I came back to Oxford when I was about 25 and became a teacher. I was a school teacher here. And that was when I began to learn what I could do as a storyteller. This was in the days before the national curriculum. And because there was no syllabus, because there was no exams that they had to pass or tests that they had to sit or anything of that sort, we were more or less free to teach them what we liked. provided it wasn't immoral or illegal or anything like that and I thought it would be a good thing if they if the children who left our middle school knew a little bit about Greek mythology so I told them stories from”

   2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “He ran through the desert, he ran through the mountains, he ran through the salt pans, he ran through the reed beds, he ran through the blue gums, he ran through the spinifex, he ran till his front legs ached. He had to still ran dingo, yellow dog dingo, always hungry, grinning like a rat trap, never getting nearer, never getting farther, ran after kangaroo. He had to. This is the thing about poetry. You don't have to understand it. And this is what I think a lot of teachers get wrong. They think that poetry is a fancy way of saying something that's really quite ordinary. And once you've translated into simple English, you've done the poem. But of course you haven't. You killed it. You've tortured it to death.”

   2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “To Intelligence Squad. I'm producer Catherine Hughes. Today on the podcast, we're revisiting a conversation from 2019 with best-selling author Philip Pullman. Over lunch in his house in Oxford, he speaks to Samira Ahmed about the moments of his childhood and youth that shaped and inspired his unique storytelling. This episode is part of our theories how I found my voice, hosted by Samir Ahmed. Like this episode, do go and check out the entire series. And I remember having two books that I learned to read on. One was the first naughty book by Amy Blyton. I must have been five. And the other was Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. The Just So Stories made a particular impression on me because of the language, because of the wonderful way in which she tells a story.”

   2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT