The House of the Spirits and Tracey Emin's unmade bed
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Hello and welcome to the History Hour from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson. This week's people and events as featured on Witness History, the past brought to life by those who were there. Coming up, it's 110 years since the horrors of the Battle of Gallipoli. I was on the beach the first time I was really under fire and it was just like a shower of rain coming into the sea.
Also, we remember the disaster at the Hillsborough Football Stadium.
It seemed to be the fans who were acting as rescuers. They were carrying them out and laying them on the pitch. I could see people trying to resuscitate people. Plus the artist Dame Tracey Emin on her famous bed, and from Japan, the origins of the world's longest-running animated TV show. I never imagined it would run this long.
Mr. Matsumoto, the first producer, was the only person who was fired up about it.
It has gone on not only for 10 years, but 55 years. That's all coming up later, but first, a moment from the past which cemented in the global consciousness a very particular style of Latin American literature. In 1982, Isabel Allende published her debut novel, The House of the Spirits. It made her name, and she's now one of the most widely read Spanish language authors in history. Ben Henderson has the story, starting in Chile's capital, Santiago, in the 1940s. My grandmother and three other women, they would sit around this very heavy oak table and call the spirits.
Isabel was born into a well-connected Chilean family in 1942, but her father abandoned them when she was young, so she was forced to move in with her unusual grandparents.
They were experimenting also with telepathy and trying to move objects without touching them. Telepathy was funny because the Morla sisters lived in the other end of the city and they would send each other kitchen recipes telepathically. They never worked. Not because telepathy doesn't work, but because they were horrible cooks. But the legend is that my grandmother was magical. She instilled that in me, that there are many dimensions of reality, that the dead and the living walk side by side. My grandmother died very soon, and it became a house of mourning. My grandfather dressed in black from head to toe. He painted some of the furniture black. And there were no flowers, no music, no radio, no parties, no desserts.
It was a sad place. But he was a very good storyteller. Spooky anecdotes about ghosts, that kind of stuff.
In her 20s, Isabel balanced motherhood with journalism. She presented a TV show and wrote for a feminist women's magazine, causing rows with her conservative grandfather. Her family was deeply political, and her father's cousin, the socialist Salvador Allende, was elected president in 1970.
I was young. I was in love with my husband. I had two little children. That was such a fantastic time in my life. The best, I would say.
But the country was hugely divided. Then, on the 11th of September, 1973, everything changed.
I got to my office, it was closed, and the janitor that was at the door said, go home, go home, it's a military coup.
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