Listening brief

The new radio critic of The Times is to be James Marriott, currently deputy books editor, and judge of the biography section of the Costa Prize 2019. James started work in 2017, after completing an MA at UCL. He's from Whitley Bay, went to King's School and won a first in English Language and Literature from Lincoln College in 2014.

At both, he bemoaned a lack of T S Eliot, but liked Lincoln's care: "I was lucky to study at Oxford where a sense of community persists. “Is everything all right?” my teachers might inquire if I looked moody in a seminar on Keats. One noticed that the stress of finals was getting to me and gave me his framed portrait of the novelist Iris Murdoch to cheer me up. That sort of understanding should be a foundation of our universities, not a luxury extra."