A beautiful speaking voice is a window to the soul

Recent text from a female friend. ‘I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ To which I reply, ‘But of course! Up there with the Dean of Westminster and Frank Gardner.’ The same day, walking in Kensington Gardens, another friend admits, ‘I think I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ We mourn the fact that MacGregor’s Wikipedia entry tells us he’s ‘listed in the Independent’s 2007 list of most influential gay people’, so the director of the British Museum is, sadly, out of reach to womankind. It’s his beautiful speaking voice that does the trick.

I like the way, in his Radio 4 series Germany: Memories of a Nation, MacGregor pronounces ‘Germany’, with a sounded ‘r’. I relish the erudition and the intimacy in his voice when he says, ‘If I could choose one object to sum up the Bauhaus, it would be this cradle.’ You can tell, from the way he pronounces ‘Jedem das Seine’ (the words on the gates of Buchenwald) that he speaks fluent German — ‘Gerrrman’ — and my Wiki researches confirm that after being educated at the Glasgow Academy (the son of two doctors), he read Modern Languages at New College, Oxford, so is probably multilingual as well as a polymath. The precise way he speaks seems to me a mirror of his clear thinking.

Tastes differ. Two friends I subsequently asked said that they couldn’t stand MacGregor’s voice. One said, ‘I have to turn the radio off. He’s so camp.’ The other said, ‘I agree that the construction of his sentences is perfect. But his articulation is strangulated. You can’t tell exactly what accent he’s got. And he says “rin-oceros” rather than “rye-nocerous”. That’s plain wrong.’ I checked. It’s true: in minute 11 of the porcelain episode, MacGregor does indeed say ‘rin-oceros’, not once but twice.