Podcast Episodes
Back to Search
Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen
Season 13 Episode 7
‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passion…
11 months, 3 weeks ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: Gothic Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen
Season 13 Episode 7
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Direct…
11 months, 3 weeks ago
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche
Season 12 Episode 7
For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather…
1 year ago
‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell
Season 15 Episode 6
In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her rela…
1 year ago
Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more
Season 14 Episode 6
Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath i…
1 year ago
Stories by Franz Kafka
Season 13 Episode 6
In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has co…
1 year ago
Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley
Season 12 Episode 6
T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradl…
1 year ago
Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
Season 15 Episode 5
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray…
1 year, 1 month ago
Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop
Season 14 Episode 5
The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining …
1 year, 1 month ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
Season 13 Episode 5
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through th…
1 year, 1 month ago