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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill
Season 12 Episode 5
Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoc…
1 year, 1 month ago
Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
Season 15 Episode 4
When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depr…
1 year, 2 months ago
Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray
Season 14 Episode 4
Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written…
1 year, 2 months ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
Season 13 Episode 4
Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible p…
1 year, 2 months ago
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Season 12 Episode 4
Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely wh…
1 year, 2 months ago
Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock
Season 15 Episode 3
Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he…
1 year, 3 months ago
Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop
Season 14 Episode 3
This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle betw…
1 year, 3 months ago
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift
Season 13 Episode 3
Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and a…
1 year, 3 months ago
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach
Season 12 Episode 3
In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-centu…
1 year, 3 months ago
Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen
Season 15 Episode 2
On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness…
1 year, 3 months ago