Michael bird british council biography of albert
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This features such culturally diverse places as Turkey, Israel, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Ukraine among a total of 16 countries for which he is responsible.
“The British Council is about connecting people worldwide, and we employ around 7,000 people to do just that. It was satisfying to answer those questions, because we were delivering for Scotland and connecting Scotland and the world.
“It’s funny,” says Michael, “but every time I go back, particularly when I experience the stillness of the Bedales library once again, or Steep church, I feel connected and it still feels like coming home.”
Michael Bird was interviewed by James Fairweather in Autumn 2012.
Michael Bird (author)
Michael Bird (born 12 April 1958) is a British author and art historian.
“The British Council fulfilled a desire to find a job that was more than a job. We’ve taken our share of economic pain in the past few years, but we’re paying our own way more effectively than ever.”
Still only in his early 50s, Michael has plenty of ambitions remaining for his personal and professional lives. His work for radio includes contributions to the BBC arts programmes Kaleidoscope, Night Waves and The Essay, and features for BBC Radio 4, including The Wreck of the Alba (2009), based on a painting by Alfred Wallis, and Lanyon's Last Flight (2011).
Bird is a visiting lecturer at Falmouth University.
“I suppose that I’m one of the last generation to look at a job and imagine that they would be doing the same thing years later,” he reflects. It is by no means only about language, however. The best way to start that process is to speak languages, which gets you beneath the skin of other countries and helps you to understand their people,” Michael begins.
These are values that lately I realise that I’ve taken with me through my professional life.”
A year at Voronezh University in the Soviet Union, another year as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard and two years teaching English in Vienna would ensue before, in 1985, Michael joined the institution that has been his professional home ever since – the British Council.
Afterteaching at SherborneSchool he worked in publishing, including a stint on the editorial team of the MacmillanDictionary of Art. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Bird published poetry, essays and reviews. and lives in Cornwall with his wife, the artist Felicity Mara.
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“When I was the British Council’s country director for Scotland, we were able to raise our profile because it was post-devolution and people were actually asking questions about our purpose. “Yes, only in Britain,” sighs Michael. He was elected to the State’s Supreme Court on 2001 and is up for retention in 2011. Finally, of course, there are the trips back to Bedales to reconnect with the school that has shaped his life.
One of the most important things that Bedales gave me was my love of music; I remember another inspirational teacher, William Agnew, taking us to Winchester Cathedral to perform Britten’s War Requiem, and one of the projects I’ve done for the British Council of which I’m most proud was a performance of the War Requiem in St. Petersburg, where more people died in one city than Britain lost in the whole of World War II.
That was in 1995, 50 years on from the end of the war, and we did it with a Russian soprano, British tenor and German baritone.”
For an institution that receives so much praise abroad, the British Council is sometimes strangely undersold back in the UK, where its role is often misunderstood. “I know better than most what a remarkable linguist and original teacher he is, but my love of German in fact goes back to a teacher who was not at Bedales for long enough, Richard Stokes,” Michael recalls.
Kazakhstan, where they’ve discovered more oil under the Caspian Sea than there is in Alaska, has huge educational needs that we are able to meet. His work for radioincludescontributions to the BBC arts programmes Kaleidoscope, NightWaves and The Essay, and features for BBCRadio 4, including The Wreck of the Alba and Lanyon's Last Flight.
He lives in Cornwall with his wife and their two children.
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- Apr 12, 1958
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on July 23, 2013
Michael Bird
It took Michael Bird quite a while to realise that he was the son of a bona fideBedales legend.