The B.B.C. may seem to live in the public eye,
but a glance at its annual report (that for 1947-8 is just issued) reveals an astonish- ing amount of little-known activity. When the Far Eastern service alone broadcasts regularly in Japanese, Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Burmese, Malay, Siamese, English, French and Dutch the promise that " nation shall speak unto nation" seems amply fulfilled. In another continent a really rather remarkable achievement has been the production in Latin America of a dramatised version of " Don Quixote " in twenty-seven half-hour episodes, actors from Spain (is even so much contact with Franco permissible?) and eight Latin American countries taking part. The undertaking, it is claimed, was an unqualified success. I am sure it was ; but I am not quite clear all the same why a British broadcasting corporation should set out to educate Spanish-speaking peoples in their own literature ; it seems a little, so to speak, quixotic.
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