Saturday

Stephen Fry Alphabet - Hay Festival


Stephen Fry Alphabet - Hay Festival playlist.


Stephen Fry using letters of the alphabet covers it seems every subject under the sun. There's just something very appealing about Fry's intelligence and down to earth, non pretentious attitude. 






A great hour and a half of Stephen Fry's ideas and opinions on subjects as diverse as love to Hitler. His theoretical ideas on Hitler are certainly unusual, and explain the thinking behind his book Making History.  A book which he explains was savaged by the New York Times critics for satirising Hitler and the holocaust.

Towards the end he explains why the author's identity is important to any given subject and with his explaining he's Jewish, later received an apologetic review which described his book as grossly misunderstood. It's maybe unfair highlighting this rather bleaker aspect which is only under H, but I found it striking as I found his thoughts on Genome and the exponential family tree and identity.  Both the Hitler section and Genome have been included as separate clips below.

There are by far more amusing and tender, intimate insights during this talk which further highlight how unpretentious Stephen Fry is and his outlook quite beautiful as a non judgemental man. With his series around America I loved hearing how genuinely interested he was in every person he saw as a result of the series and this instantly warms people to him and engages them. He may have one of the greatest commands of the English language, this doesn't make him intimidating and patronising, in fact quite the opposite.











RESPECT!



Clip on The |Genome and an interesting question to antisemites.




Stephen Fry on everything for a further half hour. The video the trolling clip was harvested from.

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