I first heard Alistair Cooke’s radio broadcasts very late in life, on the BBC over short-wave radio while working on an organic goat farm in the Netherlands. Late at night there was not much to do except watch football, smoke and drink whiskey – none of which were really of much interest. But Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America was something different. Cooke, originally from Manchester, England broadcast his insightful, biting and human, funny and solemn cultural feature from America on the BBC for 58 years until his death in 2004. His style is reminiscent of Garrison Keillor and other great radio story-tellers in that he starts of at some seemingly harmless and unimportant news headline and takes you through a journey of association to bring you back around again to your starting point very much the richer for the journey through culture, history, politics, sociology and anything else that might have caught his fancy along the way. More importantly, even if you were unaware of the point, you always got there in the end with eyes more wide open and your heart just a little more in your throat than 15 minutes before. His voice was such that one could turn off the lights and pretend they were listening to old time radio with our parents in front of the big radio console as the Lone Ranger or the Green Hornet or Nero Wolfe saved the day.

Following his death, Penguin published a rich selection of his broadcasts in written form. Some of the highlights include his insights on Joe Louis, friendship with Charlie Chaplin, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and Fall in New England.