There are some people, however, whose timbre of voice seems
in no way to be diluted or transmuted by the alchemy of the micro- phone. One of these people is Mr. Jan Masaryk, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Czechoslovak Republic. When he speaks to us in English he manages by some extraordinary feat of voice-production to avoid sounding either oily or drunk. And when he speaks to his own people in the Czech language he succeeds in conveying such divergent and dangerous intonations as satire, invective, sympathy
and sense without losing for one instant the crisp gaiety which is his. And 1 know how easy it is, when confronted by that treacherous little honeycomb, for invective to become bombast, for satire to degenerate into cheap sneering, for sense to become sententious, and for sympathy to choke with maudlin tears. But Jan Masaryk can perform all these feats, and the scale of his voice permits him (with- out becoming a victim to the slightest undertone of insincerity—an undertone which the microphone delights in amplifying) to range over tliese varied human notes while remaining all the time re- sponsible, limpid, intimate and precise. He is in truth a born broadcaster, and 1 am glad that he has allowed translations of his long series of talks to his people to be published in book form. He calls it Speaking to My Own Country ; and the collection is pub- lished by Lincolns-Prager for the sum of los. 6d.
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