Podcasts

George Orwell wasn’t afraid to speak against totalitarianism – but what was he for? Colin Burrow joins Tom to unpick the cultural conservatism and crackling violence underpinning Orwell’s writing,...

In the 1970s and ’80s, thousands of haemophiliacs were infected with HIV and hepatitis C through blood products known to be contaminated. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Tom Crewe join Malin to discuss...

When Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of fraud last week, the only surprise was how quickly the jury reached their verdict. John Lanchester joins Tom to discuss how the former crypto billionaire ended...

The eleventh episode of the Long and Short brings us to the present day and the distant past, as we turn to two multivocal, monumental poems by Alice Oswald.

Ovid was perhaps the most prolific poet of Ancient Rome, certainly in the amount of his poetry which has survived (around 30,000 lines). This episode focuses on his 15-book epic, the Metamorphoses, a...

For sheer scale and spectacle, surely few plays of any period can match The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene. Boasting at least fifty speaking parts, with multiple locations, scaffolds and pyrotechnics, including...

In The Plague, Jacqueline Rose uses the recent experience of the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the writings of Simone Weil to investigate how we might learn to live with death when it intrudes...

Maureen McLane reads from her work and talks to Will Harris, who also reads from his new collection Brother Poem (Granta).

In Revolutionary Spring, a series of brilliant set-pieces, pre-eminent European historian Christopher Clark brings back to our attention the extraordinary events of the Spring of 1848. From Paris to Vienna...

What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art, criticism and the avant-garde can be applied to contemporary politics and can even explain the monstrous...

This week David discusses James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics.

This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising...