Podcast Episodes
Back to Search
Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf
Season 17 Episode 6
In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind h…
7 hours ago
London Revisited: The Protestant Capital
Season 20 Episode 5
At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply t…
1 week, 2 days ago
What do you think of Close Readings?
Have you got four minutes to share your feedback on Close Readings? It will help shape how we develop the podcast over the coming year.
We’ve set up…
1 week, 4 days ago
Narrative Poems: ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns and ‘Peter Grimes’ by George Crabbe
Season 19 Episode 5
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include…
2 weeks ago
Nature in Crisis: 'Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth' by James Lovelock
Season 18 Episode 5
In ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’ (1979), James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is something like a single living organism, capable of manipula…
3 weeks, 2 days ago
Who’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy
Season 17 Episode 5
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his shor…
1 month ago
The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
Season 16 Episode 2
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode o…
1 month ago
London Revisited: Plague, Rebellion and Guilds
Season 20 Episode 4
If historians of medieval London had a patron saint, it might well be Edward I. While many English monarchs chose to leave London to its own devices,…
1 month, 1 week ago
Narrative Poems: ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope
Season 19 Episode 4
Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrate…
1 month, 2 weeks ago
Nature in Crisis: ‘The Burning Earth’ by Sunil Amrith
Season 18 Episode 4
The ‘great acceleration’ is a term used to describe the dramatic surge in the 1950s of both human and earth systems indicators that marked a shift fr…
1 month, 3 weeks ago