Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to see why James I’s Stuart settlement eventually failed under the personal rule of Charles I, leading to a civil war in which London became the financial and military headquarters for the victorious Parliamentarians and James’s grand new banqueting house at Whitehall was used as the backdrop for his son’s execution.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’.
Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 'Braiding Sweetgrass' argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. 'Braiding Sweetgrass' was an enormous success for a small press publication, becoming a bestseller and a touchstone for readers searching for alternatives to extractivist realpolitik.
James Wood is joined by the biographer Miranda Seymour to discuss Jean Rhys’s virtuosity of technique and detachment, her extraordinary ear for dialogue and the places where her mastery of realist method gave way to modernism.
When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see Julius Caesar at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention but the ready availability of refreshments and the high quality of the players’ clothes.
Seamus and Mark discuss the strange hallucinatory power of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Coleridge’s search for a meter that could capture the force of his imagination.
Meehan and Peter assess Robert Macfarlane's quest to imagine a river as a living being,and look at the different kinds of writing he deploys along the way, including adventure story, biography and philosophy.
James Wood explores what Woolf's modernist masterpiece owes to the techniques of 19th-century realism and the influence of Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down these certainties to arrive at the ultimate unknowability of character.
At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to Catholic Europe. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, much of that world had vanished. The Reformation not only changed the religious practices of its inhabitants, it brought a widespread transfer of property that reshaped the character and activity of the city and turned it into a theatre of power, punishment and debate.
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam’s encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and chastisement of Scottish masculinity ever since its publication, but the attitude of its narrator remains elusive throughout.
Meehan and Peter look at the origins of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis in the radical work of Lynn Margulis and the contributions of his academic collaborator Dian Hitchcock, and in the science of cybernetics, and consider the degree to which any formulation of Gaia can explain certain processes, from the impact of the ecological competition between daisies to the carbon-silicate cycle.
James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman to discuss the place of The Death of Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, and consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening.
In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life and consider the many systems that the novel draws on, challenges, reproduces and mutates.
Rosemary is joined again by Matthew Davies to continue the story of England’s capital through its rapid rise in the first half of the 14th century and a long period turmoil thereafter, including the Hundred Years’ War, the revolts of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, and the Wars of the Roses.
William Hazlitt wrote of ‘The Rape of the Lock’ that ‘you hardly know whether to laugh or weep’, and in this episode Seamus and Mark discuss why Alexander Pope's mock epic masterpiece is at once the funniest poem in the English language and an essay on the seriousness of trivial things.