West, Nigel (ed.), The Guy Liddell Diaries, Vol. 1: 1939–1942 (Routledge, 2005)
Lambert, Sam (ed.), London Night and Day (Old House, 2014; originally published 1951 by the Architectural Press)
Panter-Downes, Mollie (ed. William Shawn), London War Notes, 1939–1945 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971)
Sweet, Matthew, The West End Front (Faber and Faber, 2011)
Bathgate, Gordon, Voices from the Ether: The History of Radio (Girdleness Publishing, 2012)
Briggs, Asa, The Golden Age of Wireless: The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Vol. 1 (OUP, 1995)
Compton, Nic, The Shipping Forecast (BBC Books, 2016)
Higgins, Charlotte, The New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (Guardian Books, 2015)
Hines, Mark, The Story of Broadcasting House (Merrell, 2008)
Murphy, Kate, Behind the Wireless: A History of Early Women at the BBC (Palgrave, 2016)
Palmer, Richard, School Broadcasting in Britain (BBC, 1947)
Fitzgerald, Penelope, Human Voices (Flamingo, 1997; originally published 1980)
Gorham, Maurice, Sound and Fury: Twenty-One Years in the BBC (Percival Marshall, 1948)
Horstmann, Rosemary, Half a Life-Story: 1920–1960 (Country Books, 2000)
Shapley, Olive, Broadcasting a Life (Scarlet Press, 1996)
Beardmore, George, Civilians at War (OUP, 1986)
de Courcy, Anne, Debs at War (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005)
From the National Archives
KV-2-3874 (The transcriptions of Jack King’s conversations with his fifth-columnist informers)
KV-4-227-1 (History of the MS, the Jack King operation)
WO-208-3457, 001-040 (Inventory of the recording equipment used in the M Room)
KV-2-3800 (The Marita Perigoe case)
KV-2-84, 1-4 (The Anna Wolkoff case)
DVDs
Death at Broadcasting House (Studiocanal)
BBC: The Voice of Britain, Addressing the Nation (GPO Film Unit Collection Vol. 1, BFI, 2008)
Acknowledgements
Lt Col M. Keech, BEM, Royal Signals (retd)
David Mattock – for some Home Counties geography
Sam Hallas and the ‘cognoscenti’ of the Telecoms Heritage Group – for their help with telephone area codes of the 1940s
Simon Rook, Archive Manager, BBC
And my agent Peter Straus, my editor Marianne Velmans, Alison Barrow, and everyone at Transworld who makes my pages into a book.
About the Author
Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs. Her 2013 novel Life After Life won the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, and voted Book of the Year for the independent booksellers associations on both sides of the Atlantic. It also won the Costa Novel Award, as did her subsequent novel A God in Ruins (2015). Transcription is her latest novel.
Also by Kate Atkinson
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Human Croquet
Emotionally Weird
Not the End of the World
Case Histories
One Good Turn
When Will There Be Good News?
Started Early, Took My Dog
Life After Life
A God in Ruins
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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday
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Copyright © Kate Costello Ltd, 2018
Cover design by Richard Ogle/TW
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