Armed with the diary, Tam Dalyell goes on the attack – but the cover-up continues. A second whistle-blower from within the Ministry of Defence is arrested for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
Armed with the diary, Tam Dalyell goes on the attack – but the cover-up continues. A second whistle-blower from within the Ministry of Defence is arrested for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
Lieutenant Sethia quits the navy and moves to the Caribbean. He thinks the Falklands War is behind him, but back in the UK, an eccentric, anti-war MP notices a discrepancy in the government’s account...
HMS Conqueror stalks the Belgrano, but Britain’s Rules of Engagement prohibit an attack. Margaret Thatcher makes a decision and Lieutenant Sethia and the Conqueror crew get ready to fire.
When Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher sends a huge flotilla on an 8000-mile rescue mission – to save a forgotten remnant of the empire, and her premiership. Onboard one of its...
In her recent LRB Winter Lecture, Hazel V. Carby considered the ways that contemporary Indigenous artists are making the ordinarily invisible repercussions of ecocide and genocide visible. She joins...
Since the 2010 earthquake, ordinary life in Haiti has become increasingly untenable: in January this year, armed gangs controlled around 80 per cent of the capital. Pooja Bhatia joins Tom to discuss Haitian...
Modern English speakers struggle to find sexual terms that aren’t either obscene or scientific, but that wasn’t always the case. Mary Wellesley joins Tom to discuss the changing language of women’s...
Rosemary Hill celebrates architecture as a social, collaborative endeavour, where human need (and human greed) stymies starchitectural vision. Rosemary takes Tom on a tour of British and Irish architecture,...
Fabliaux were short, witty tales originating in northern France between the 12th and 14th centuries, often featuring crafty characters in rustic settings and overwhelmingly concerned with money and sex....
In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, the last of the series with Judith Butler, we fittingly turn to The Human Condition (1956). Judith and Adam discuss Hannah Arendt’s continued relevance and...
According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost...
Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats’s career.
Melodrama, biography, cold war thriller, drug memoir, essay in fragments, mystery – Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is cult critic Ian Penman’s long awaited first original book, a kaleidoscopic...
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...
This week’s Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict.
This week’s Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen...
This week’s episode on the great political fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above...
In the first episode of our new series on the great political fictions, David talks about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608-9), the last of his tragedies and perhaps his most politically contentious play.
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