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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

The Essay Podcast

The Essay

Discussion & Talk

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Forests: The Jungle Book

Forests

The Jungle Book

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Join Mowgli and Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough in the forest of Kipling's imagination

Join Mowgli and Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough in the lush and dangerous Indian forest of Kipling's imagination

Join Mowgli, Shere Khan and Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough in the lush and dangerous Indian forest of Rudyard Kipling's imagination.

Although he was born in India, Kipling had never visited the central Seoni region where he set The Jungle Book.  As Daniel Karlin from Bristol University tells Eleanor, the vivid and detailed descriptions of the forest and its fauna came from books and travellers' tales. Kipling was fascinated by animal behaviour but he wasn't too precious to invert reality when the stories required a dash of cruelty or an expression of nobility.

Today the region contains a renowned tiger reserve.  Shere Khan is protected whilst the friendlier creatures of The Jungle decline in number.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

The Essay: Forests

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough examines the great fictional forests of art and literature.

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