Ta-Nehisi Coates says race is the daughter of racism.
B. COATES : And I'm B. Coates .
B. COATES : We know it's a really noisy conversation, this conversation about women right now, but we want to take the stories one step further
B. COATES : And Grainne O'Malley who is our pirate is on work life balance.
B. COATES : So Elizabeth I is somebody that I channel daily, and particularly at this exact moment in time, because we're talking about her in relation to public speaking.
B. COATES : Well, most of us approach public speaking with a rising sense of dread.
B. COATES : But nevertheless she became queen in 1558 after her sister died.
B. COATES : Bloody Mary is what she was called.
B. COATES : Yeah.
B. COATES : Yeah.
B. COATES : Alcohol in small doses does no harm.
B. COATES : Exactly.
B. COATES : Because we all know women are rubbish at science, as well as fighting, parking, and barbecues.
B. COATES : She had something really interesting to say about that career path, where she defined it as, she said, the ladder of success in Hollywood
B. COATES : She was really good, I think, like Elizabeth I at using storytelling and building a narrative to make you stand out, exactly.
B. COATES : Yeah, it was a film-- so Groucho Marx said about it, I'm not interested in a film where the man's tits are bigger
B. COATES : So essentially whenever the Third Reich came to dinner, she was there just having a good old listen to what they
B. COATES : So next up we have Odette.
B. COATES : So she was born in 1912 in France, and her father had been a decorated hero in World War I. He was killed in World War I, and every Sunday
B. COATES : She was.
B. COATES : Yes, absolutely.
B. COATES : Exactly.
B. COATES : So Odette did agonize, but eventually her sort of horror of what was going on in her beloved home country won out,
B. COATES : Yes.
B. COATES : And so amazingly Peter Churchill also survived the war, and when they came back to London, Odette divorced her husband and married Peter.
B. COATES : So she's Norfolk's best known queen.
B. COATES : There's that brilliant fact, isn't there, that apparently she literally left her mark.
B. COATES : Yeah.
B. COATES : As well as construction, aqueducts, the legal system.
B. COATES : That's right.
B. COATES : Absolutely.
B. COATES : But by the Middle Ages, almost everything of hers had disappeared.
B. COATES : Exactly.
B. COATES : I always think that's funny, the Corps of Discovery.
B. COATES : And there's that famous story, isn't there, where she had to jump in, and her husband capsized the canoe at one point, she had to jump in and rescue their supplies.
B. COATES : Absolutely.
B. COATES : So this is a bit difficult to say, but she was basically the daughter of King Sargon of Akkhad, who appointed
B. COATES : Yeah, which I am still staggered by, as a fact.
B. COATES : Yeah.
B. COATES : But most astonishing is her sort of sense of authorship and ownership.
B. COATES : But then there was a slightly ruder moment, wasn't there, when he called her a bold, merry slut.
B. COATES : But I think there's evidence that they liked hanging out together, as well.
B. COATES : Yeah, absolutely.
B. COATES : But actually, she was this really young, forward thinking entrepreneur.
B. COATES : The other thing about her is that she actually stole most of her recipes.
I also want to thank my producers-- Townes Coates and Henry Chalfant and our story consultant, Chris Bram-- who gave me so much support
given pioneer awards from the Electronic Frontier Foundation B. COATES : And she said brilliantly, well it's about time.
B. COATES : In the last two decades, fragments of her poems have been rediscovered, and they revealed whole sections
B. COATES : So all aspects of her life have been the subject of feverish speculation over the years.
Yeah, I've just done an event with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Bryan Stevenson, whose work I hope you know, and I hope you read their books.