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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus
Season 12 Episode 12
Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French l…
7 months, 2 weeks ago
Novel Approaches: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
Season 15 Episode 11
In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Arch…
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Love and Death: 'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller
Season 14 Episode 11
Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to …
7 months, 4 weeks ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington
Season 13 Episode 11
Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, …
8 months ago
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir
Season 12 Episode 11
At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at th…
8 months, 1 week ago
Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope
Season 15 Episode 10
Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowe…
8 months, 2 weeks ago
Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy
Season 14 Episode 10
Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a wr…
8 months, 3 weeks ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
Season 13 Episode 10
Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer w…
9 months ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
Season 13 Episode 7
Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer w…
9 months ago
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre
Season 12 Episode 10
What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written ab…
9 months, 1 week ago