Feature: The Arts - Historian and broadcaster Sarah Dunant's talk at Burgh House

Published: 16 September 2010
by MATTHEW LEWIN

THERE are too many middle-aged men like Melvyn Bragg and Alan Yentob telling us what is good for us in culture, according to the bestselling novelist, historian and broadcaster Sarah Dunant.

She told an audience at Burgh House last week that the quality of radio and television had deteriorated in recent years, and explained to interviewer Piers Plowright – a former BBC producer – that “the art of radio, [...] has largely been eroded because of budget cuts.”

The writer, who studied history at Cambridge after attending Godolphin and Latymer school, went to work at the BBC in the 1970s and moved to presenting after several years as a producer.

“Presenting was the real intimacy of radio, and I loved the fact that you were talking to someone, and the fact that those conversations were not interrupted by [...] anything to do with their visual or physical form,” she recalled.

“It was about lack of distraction in a world that is so image dominated that sometimes it’s very hard to get to the centre of people. I think radio does that, and therefore I have always liked it.”

Mr Plowright pointed out Ms Dunant ultimately made the move to television. But, she explained, this was “because there was a great show to work on – The Late Show on BBC2.

“It was a live nightly show about culture, which was always competing with Newsnight for stories. The fact that it was live showed for once that people believed that culture was important. It was that sense of living on the knife edge of current affairs, and that culture was current affairs. I haven’t seen its like since it ended.

“Forgive me for saying this but now you get middle-aged men like Melvyn Bragg and Alan Yentob telling you what is good for you in culture, and it’s very different from the tone that the The Late Show had – the tone and the irreverence and the wit of it.”

Ms Dunant’s career as a writer started after she and a friend wrote two thrillers together, but she went on to write her own thrillers, including three that famously created the first female British private eye, Hannah Wolfe. The second of these, Fatlands, won the Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Silver Dagger in 1993.

Hannah Wolfe came about through Sarah’s love of “the myth of the private detective, the knight on the mean streets; incredibly attractive but world weary [...] It was perfect – but so male and so American.

“I began to think about whether it was possible to create a similarly mythic female British private eye, in the knowledge that I had to conjure this up out of nowhere, because there wasn’t any British tradition of this sort.”

Other books were to follow, but her most famous is her trilogy of novels set in 15th century Italy – The Birth of Venus, In the Company of the Courtesan, and Sacred Hearts.

She explained: “I decided to spend some time in Florence, and I bought a tiny flat in the city to use it to write in. It’s a city that gets its claws into you and you quickly start to wonder what the hell happened here 500 years ago; what was it about this city that saw a cultural revolution the like of which probably has never seen before or after.

“I wanted to write a novel which somehow expressed that as the shock of the new. Not as history, but as things happening now.

“But everything was about what men did, and I began to think, where were the women? Did women have a Renaissance? What was it like to be half the population during this incredible time? And what would it have been like to be a young woman at the time who could really draw very well. That became The Birth of Venus.”

But, Ms Dunant said, while she would continue to write historical novels, she is “squaring up for a new battle: instead of making up characters to write about, I want to write about real people from that extraordinary period.

“Everyone knows the renaissance for its beauty and for its art, but it was also actually one of the cruellest and most violent periods in European history.”