Deborah Cohen, former Cullman fellow and author of the newly-published Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain, in conversation with Andrew Solomon, author of the bestselling book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, awarded the 2012 National Book Critics Circle award in non-fiction. http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2013/04/29/family-secrets-shame-and-privacy-modern-britain

Audio here: http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/shame-and-love-secrets-and-families?nref=90283

Night Waves, 30 January 2013

Deborah Cohen opens the archives of the Scottish Marriage Guidance Council, founded in 1946, and finds that couples in the postwar years were more than happy to air their dirty linen.

Family history: the shifting secrets of our genealogies – in pictures

Each family history is woven with hidden threads, unspoken secrets which run through genealogies from generation to generation. The historian Deborah Cohen has been delving into unseen archives to examine how attitudes to privacy have changed over the last 200 years, to explore what families have tried to hide and why. Here she charts the shifting continents of shame with portraits of lives shaped by untold stories.

Contrary to the stuffy stereotype, our ancestors were in many ways more enlightened than we are today.

Downton's family secrets, Oxford University Press blog

On Start the Week Andrew Marr begins the new year talking about lies and secrets, and the increasing blurring of public and private.  Deborah Cohen charts family secrets and shame from the Victorian times to the present day, while Sarah Dunant and the TV producer Alex Graham discuss how confession became entertainment, and the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz listens to the hidden feelings of his patients.  Producer:  Katy Hickman

In her eight-year long audition to play the role of princess, Kate Middleton barely had a speaking part. Until the announcement of her engagement to Prince William, neither she nor her oft-derided, upwardly mobile middle-class parents had made a public statement. Only those who encountered the Middletons face-to-face could know what their voices sounded like. Hardly a normal start…

Life is seldom how designers or architects plan it to be, and author and lecturer at Brown University in the USA, Deborah Cohen, shows how design and architecture, mixed with morality, are a heady mix when it comes to decorating our houses. Find out why ... next on By Design

As the generation of the first world war loses its last members, another conflict threatens. But comparisons between now and 1914 are not (yet) applicable, writes Deborah Cohen.