Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of two poets, Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic poetry, hedonistic and free of the puritan American tradition, and attentive to their personal differences from mainstream experience.
In the final episode in our series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Neil MacGregor joins Rosemary Hill to discuss the circulation of artefacts throughout Europe in the years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and the growth of public collections.
In the third episode of her series looking at how history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill talks to Roey Sweet about the antiquarians, a new breed of multi-disciplinary investigators, who, in the years after the French Revolution, studied everything from woollen threads to tombstones in their efforts to imagine the past.
In the 1740s the Scots were invading England and the wearing of tartan was banned. By the 1850s, Queen Victoria had built her Gothic fantasy in Aberdeenshire and tartan was everywhere. What happened in between?
In the first episode of a new four-part series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill is joined by Tom Stammers to consider how an argument over the ‘improvement’ of Salisbury Cathedral in 1789 launched a new attitude to the past and its artefacts.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Charlotte Mew, who brought the Victorian art of dramatic monologue into the 20th century, and whose difficult experiences are often refracted through her damaged and marginalised characters.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of W.B. Yeats in the latest episode in their ongoing Close Readings series.
In this sample episode from their forthcoming Close Readings series, starting next year, Emily Wilson talks to Thomas Jones about the comedies of Aristophanes, in particular Clouds and Lysistrata.
In the fourth and final episode in their miniseries, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the life and work of pilgrim, entrepreneur and visionary mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated what is thought to be the first autobiography in English.
In the third episode in their series, Irina and Mary discuss Chaucer's sexually voracious professional widow, the Wife of Bath.
In the second episode in their series on medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the work of the mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the first work in English that we can be sure was authored by a woman.
In the first episode of their new podcast miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries, and led a wild and licentious youth before serving penitence in the desert, and going on to teach the value of living an imperfect life.
Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O‘Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson, her dashes, death instinct and obliquity.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian poet, playwright and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness.