Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMax Haiven, "Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire" (Pluto Press, 2022)
Episode 335
Palm oil is a commodity like no other. Found in half of supermarket products, from food to cosmetics to plastics, it has shaped the world in which we…
3 years, 5 months ago
Gabriel Polley, "Palestine in the Victorian Age: Colonial Encounters in the Holy Land" (I. B. Tauris, 2022)
Episode 204
In this episode I have interviewed Gabriel Polley, winner of the Ibrahim Dakkak Award for the best essay published in 2021 by the Jerusalem Quarterly…
3 years, 6 months ago
Jeremy Black, "A Brief History of the British Monarchy: From the Iron Age to King Charles III" (Robinson, 2022)
Episode 71
The British monarchy is at a turning point. Concise and engaging, Jeremy Black's A Brief History of the British Monarchy: From the Iron Age to King C…
3 years, 6 months ago
On Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"
Episode 89
The Victorian era is known for its class rigidity and moral strictness. In her 1847 novel Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë gave us a robust, layered chara…
3 years, 6 months ago
Huw J. Davies, "The Wandering Army: The Campaigns That Transformed the British Way of War" (Yale UP, 2022)
Episode 130
In The Wandering Army: The Campaigns that Transformed the British Way of War (Yale University Press, 2022), Dr. Huw J. Davies presents a compelling h…
3 years, 6 months ago
Joseph Sassoon, "The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire" (Pantheon Books, 2022)
Episode 111
The Sassoons were one of the great merchant families of the nineteenth century, alongside such names as the Jardines, the Mathesons, and the Swires. …
3 years, 6 months ago
Jonathan R. Hunt, "The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam" (Stanford UP, 2022)
Episode 16
The Nuclear Club: How America and the World Policed the Atom from Hiroshima to Vietnam (Stanford UP, 2022) reveals how a coalition of powerful and de…
3 years, 6 months ago
Trevor Jackson, "Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of European Financial Crises, 1690-1830" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Episode 52
Whose fault are financial crises, and who is responsible for stopping them, or repairing the damage? Impunity and Capitalism: The Afterlives of Europ…
3 years, 6 months ago
Paul Watt, "Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London" (Policy Press, 2021)
Episode 260
It is widely accepted that London is in the midst of a serious housing crisis, manifested most obviously in city's soaring rents. While the causes of…
3 years, 6 months ago
On George Orwell's "1984"
Episode 85
In 1948, English author George Orwell wrote what would become one of the defining novels of the 20th century, 1984. He was writing in the years follo…
3 years, 6 months ago