Giants

Available for 21 days

From the biggest African elephant ever recorded, which weighed the same amount as a rubbish truck carrying a vending machine and a grand piano, described in Katherine Rundell's essays about endangered animals; to a diamond as 'big as the Ritz' in F Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story: in this edition of Words and Music, we’re thinking big. We’re contemplating the vastness of the sea with John Keats and looking up to the huge expanse of sky above with Virginia Woolf – but we’re not stopping there as we try to comprehend the stars with Holst’s Jupiter and poetry from Sarah Howe and Robert Frost. We’re also joined by an earth-shaking selection of fictional giants and trolls, including Benjamin Britten’s Paul Bunyan and Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant. The readers are John Leader and Saskia Reeves. Producer in Salford: Jessica Treen Readings: The Iron Man - Ted Hughes On The Sea - John Keats The Selfish Giant - Oscar Wilde The Diamond as big as the Ritz - F. Scott Fitzgerald The Giant O'Brien - Hilary Mantel The Elephant - Hilare Belloc The Golden Mole - Katherine Rundell The Miniature Woman - Nazim Hikmet The Brave Tailor - The Brothers Grimm O Sun of Real Peace - Walt Whitman The Perfect Wagnerite - George Bernard Shaw Life, Death and Giants - Emily Dickinson The Four Big Trolls and Little Peter Pastureman - Cyrus Graner But Outer Space - Robert Frost On Being Ill - Virginia Woolf Relativity - Sarah Howe