Omnibus: AL Rowse

4 Extra delves deep in the BBC Archive for another classic interview.

Dr Alfred Leslie Rowse - AL Rowse - is one of Britain's best known, and most controversial, historians – specialising in 16th century England.

His reputation rests on such books as the England of Elizabeth, The Expansion of Elizabethan England and the Elizabethans and America....

Michael Oliver asks him about his life, and some of the people he knew.

These include Bertrand Russell, Clement Attlee, HG Wells and Winston Churchill.

Dr Rowse’s forays from history into fields usually of the preserve to the literary critics have provided some of the controversy - sacrilege to some - modernising the text of William Shakespeare’s plays to make them more accessible to the present-day reader....

But Dr Rowse's interest go far beyond Tudor England.

He’s a poet and has published many books not about the first Elizabethan age. One of the best known is ‘A Cornish Childhood’.

Dr Rowse is Cornishman and very proud of Cornwall. His most recent book ‘Glimpses of the Great’ is a series of pen portraits of famous people he has known in his long life. He’s now in his 80s.

AL Rowse died in 1997, aged 93.

First broadcast on the BBC World Service in April 1985.