Audiobooks by Fintan O'toole

Minds at War: How great artists and their work were shaped by the First World War

The complete BBC Radio 3 series exploring how great creative minds responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship World War I saw an unprecedented loss of life in Western Europe, and destruction on a scale no one alive had ever seen. All those who experienced it were irrevocably changed, including many writers and artists upon whose oeuvre it left an indelible mark. This captivating series examines the impact of the war on artists and thinkers through the prism of their great works. In each episode, a leading figure from the worlds of science, culture and the arts reflects on a single iconic piece, and discusses how the events of 1914-18 shaped its creation. The 29 artworks in this collection comprise paintings, plays, books, films, sculptures and cartoons. Ian Christie appraises Eisenstein's seminal Soviet drama Battleship Potemkin; Dame Gillian Beer considers Virginia Woolf's masterpiece Mrs Dalloway; Fintan O'Toole decodes James Joyce's epic modernist novel, Ulysses; and Dr Heather Jones looks at the controversy and war connections around Marcel Duchamp's notorious 'Fountain'. Key texts such as Sigmund Freud's twin essays Thoughts for the Time on War and Death; Rabindranath Tagore's Nobel Lectures; and Siegfried Sassoon's celebrated 1917 protest letter to The Times are analysed by Dr Michael Shapira, Santanu Das and Joanna Bourke; and a panoply of other pieces, among them Kathe Kollwitz's 'The Grieving Parents', Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie and Rudyard Kipling's Epitaphs are discussed by experts including Ruth Padel, Elizabeth Kuti and Janet Montefiore. Powerful, moving, thought-provoking and often shocking, these landmark works are all, in their very different ways, a response to the horrors of World War I and its aftermath - one that vividly demonstrates the transformative effects the conflict had on the collective artistic psyche. Production credits Presented by Allan Little, Sara LeFanu, Martin Rowson, Prof David Edgerton, Michal Shapira, Dr Heather Jones, Ian Christie, Lyse Doucet, Santanu Das, Ruth Padel, Arthur Smith, Prof Gillian Beer, Richard Cork, Sasha Dugdale, Fintan O'Toole, Gerald Dawe, John D McHugh, Elizabeth Kuti, Tarek Osman, Joanna Bourke, Elif Shafak, Dr Imaobong Umoren, Janet Montefiore, Jane Potter and Alex Walton Produced by Beaty Rubens, Benedict Warren, Emma Kingsley, Simon Elmes and Sarah Bowen Episode list: 1. Paths of Glory 2. Non-Combatants and Others 3. Der Krieg 4. The Memorandum on the Neglect of Science 5. Thoughts for the Times on War and Death 6. Le Feu 7. Battleship Potemkin 8. Fighting France, from Dunkerque to Belfort 9. The Broken Wing 10. The Grieving Parents 11. Tagore's Nobel Lectures 12. Tzara's Dada Manifesto 13. Woolf's Mrs Dalloway 14. Parade 15. Akhmatova's July 1914 16. James Joyce's Ulysses 17. Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September 18. Francis Ledwidge's poem O'Connell Street 19. Father Browne's Photograph of a Wounded Soldier 20. Sean O'Casey's The Silver Tassie 21. Marcel Duchamp 22. Gertrude Bell 23. Siegfried Sassoon's Letter to The Times 24. Mata Hari's Final Performance 25. Isaac Rosenberg's Dead Man's Dump 26. WEB Dubois' Returning Soldiers 27. Rudyard Kipling's Epitaphs 28. Mary Borden's The Forbidden Zone 29. Isobel Rae © 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P) 2022 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

David Edgerton, Elif Shafak, Fintan O'toole, Heather Jones, Ruth Padel, Sara Lefanu (Author), Various (Narrator)

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We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland

In We Don't Know Ourselves, Fintan O'Toole weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary 'backwater' to an almost totally open society—perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis.

Fintan O'toole (Author), Aidan Kelly (Narrator)

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We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958

Fintan O'Toole Ireland's leading public intellectual and author of Heroic Failure tells a history of Ireland in his own time a brilliant interweaving of memoir and historical narrative. Fintan O'Toole was born in 1958, and so his life covers Ireland's journey out of underdevelopment and domination by the Church and the country's transformation into the relatively prosperous and tolerant society that it is today. But along the way there was a sectarian civil war in the North, which cast a dark shadow over the whole island, and bitter struggles for intellectual, civil and sexual freedoms. The Church fought a long rearguard action to defend its entrenched positions in education, healthcare and childcare. The truth about child abuse and institutional cruelty emerged only slowly, and women still had to die to make possible the liberalisation of Irish laws on contraception and divorce. This is a very personal history by a writer who is considered by many to be the country's leading public intellectual. He was a participant in many of the controversies and and arguments of the past 35 years, and knew the leading literary, musical and political figures of those decades. 2021 Head of Zeus

Fintan O'toole (Author), Aidan Kelly (Narrator)

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Three Years In Hell

Three years in the troubled British Isles from the bestselling author of Heroic Failure. Three Years in Hell is a mordantly funny and perceptive account of three years in our troubled islands, leading up to the aftermath of Brexit (or not, as it may prove). It includes scathing portraits of the leading characters, including Johnson, and of the strange twists and turns that British politics has taken and the effects on our friends and neighbours.

Fintan O'toole (Author), Patrick Moy (Narrator)

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Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book, from the author of Ship of Fools, about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. In exploring the answers to the question: 'why did Britain vote leave?', Fintan O'Toole finds himself discovering how trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact has come to define the style of an entire political elite; how a country that once had colonies is redefining itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the strange gastronomic and political significance of prawn-flavoured crisps, and their role in the rise of Boris Johnson; the dreams of revolutionary deregulation and privatisation that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism, the force that dare not speak its name. 'There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style' THE TIMES.

Fintan O'toole (Author), Sam Devereaux (Narrator)

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