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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Maggie Steed

Jill Waters

Barbara Taylor

Book of the Week: Barbara Taylor - The Last Asylum: Episode 3

The Last Asylum

Episode 3

Barbara Taylor - The Last Asylum

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Barbara Taylor - The Last Asylum, Episode 3

Moving story of a historian's four years of madness and recovery in England's last asylum.

Barbara Taylor documents her own breakdown and the support she received after her hospital admission. Read by Maggie Steed.

The Last Asylum begins with Barbara Taylor's visit to the innocuously named Princess Park Manor in Friern Barnet, North London - a place of luxury flats and careful landscaping. But this is the former site of one of England's most infamous lunatic asylums, the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Aslyum at Colney Hatch. At its peak, this asylum housed nearly 3,000 patients - including, in the late 1980s, Barbara Taylor herself.

Writing about The Last Asylum, Booker prize winner and memoirist, Hilary Mantel said, ''We believe our response to mental illness is more enlightened, kinder and effective than that of the Victorians who built the asylums. Can we be sure? Barbara Taylor challenges complacency, exposes shallow thinking, and points out the flaws and dangers of treatment on the cheap. It is a wise, considered and timely book'.

Darian Leader has described it as 'Superb, Riveting, insightful and relentlessly honest'.
 

Episode 3:
At severe risk of suicide and with her nightmares invading her waking world, the author was finally admitted to Friern Hospital, 'Colney Hatch'. Her analyst continues to challenge and support, her friends still visit, fellow patients are an unexpected source of warmth and humour.

 
Reader: Maggie Steed
 
Abridged and produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4

Book of the Week: Barbara Taylor - The Last Asylum

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Barbara Taylor's story of her own breakdown and her recovery in England's last asylum.

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