My first client as a speechwriter was Peter Sutherland, when he was Chairman of BP. I was summoned to his office for a 15 minute interview. During that interview he rummaged in his desk drawer and got out his commonplace book.
How the urge to collect can become a powerful creative tool
ENGAGE BRAIN
– How to record, retrieve and remember what inspires you
(rather than settling for digital oblivion)
Date of Publication: 3 May 2022
Pages: 24
Publisher: UK Speechwriters’ Guild
ISBN: 9780956322654
40 Years On: Social Change in a Wiltshire Village
In the summer of 2021, I went back to the village I left in September 1980. We went on a family holiday in a cottage next to the school I used to go to. I remembered Hilmarton in the pre-Thatcherite era. This was a chance to see how 40 years of history had changed where I grew up.
Eulogy for Les King delivered 1/12/2021 at Mortlake Crematorium
A Christmas Commonplace Selection from a Speechwriter
A Christmas Stocking 2021
– a commonplace selection by A Speechwriter
Date of Publication: 15 November 2021
Pages: 24
Publisher: UK Speechwriters’ Guild
ISBN: 9780956322647
Back to Normality
These are weird historical times. I like to keep snapshots of how we’re managing transitions back to more ‘conventional’ reality.
On Sunday 19 September 2021, I spent the first night away from my family for over two years.
Speech for Axel
There is a Jewish custom of writing an ethical will in which we convey our hopes and concerns to our children. I wrote a speech when my son, Leo, was born, expressing my hopes for his life. I’m doing the same for my second son, Axel, on his first day of school.
Axel, you’re going to school today. A big moment for your mum and dad, and for you.
Solve all your Christmas present headaches
A Christmas Stocking 2020
– a commonplace selection by Brian Jenner
What it’s like giving a keynote on Zoom. And how might we do it better?
The Challenge
This week I gave a 20 minute keynote presentation to a speechwriting conference in Vilnius in Lithuania via Zoom from a studio in Southampton, England.
And introduction to The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
Radio 4 is running a series of programmes about The Anatomy of Melancholy in the coming days. Here is a speech I wrote in the late 1990s about the book.
Robert Burton was a man who knew a thing or two about depression. He wrote three volumes, nearly 1500 pages, about its causes, symptoms and cures. His book is called The Anatomy of Melancholy, and he devoted almost his whole life to writing it. He was born in 1577, making him a contemporary of Shakespeare. He went to Oxford University in 1593, and never ventured much further than the library, until his death forty-seven years later.