Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchCervantes: Lepanto, Pirate Captivity and the Birth of Don Quixote
Episode 11756
No authenticated portrait of Miguel de Cervantes exists, so this episode reconstructs his face from the historical record instead. Born in 1547 near …
19 hours ago
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Opium, Kubla Khan and the Ancient Mariner
Episode 11755
In 1793 a clumsy recruit who kept falling off his horse enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons under the name Silas Tomkyn Comberbache. He was Samuel Ta…
19 hours ago
John Milton: Blind, Hunted and Dictating Paradise Lost
Episode 11754
Picture the most wanted man in England, his books burned in the streets, his allies executed, completely blind and hiding from a king's agents. That …
19 hours ago
Jorge Luis Borges: Blindness, Infinite Libraries and the Internet
Episode 11753
In 1955 Jorge Luis Borges was named director of Argentina's National Library, custodian of nearly a million books, at the exact moment his hereditary…
19 hours ago
Naked Came the Stranger: Mike McGrady's Deliberately Terrible Bestseller
Episode 11752
In 1966, Newsday columnist Mike McGrady looked at bestseller lists dominated by Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann and formed a cynical hypothesis:…
19 hours ago
Stieg Larsson: The Anti-Fascist Journalist Behind the Millennium Trilogy
Episode 11751
Stieg Larsson wrote a trilogy that sold 80 million copies, made him the first author to sell a million ebooks on Amazon, and spawned blockbuster film…
19 hours ago
T.S. Eliot: From The Waste Land to Cats, a Life of Reinvention
Episode 11750
How does the poet who defined post-war despair end up writing whimsical verses about magical felines that became a Broadway juggernaut? This episode …
19 hours ago
The Grapes of Wrath: Handbills, Book Burnings and Sanora Babb
Episode 11749
In 1939 John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was burned in the streets of Salinas, California, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the Soviet Uni…
19 hours ago
Voltaire's Candide: The Lisbon Earthquake, Optimism and the Garden
Episode 11748
In January 1759, printing presses in Geneva, Amsterdam, London and Paris secretly released a small, explosive book attributed to a mysterious German …
19 hours ago
Robert Louis Stevenson: Sickbed Dreamer, Rebel, and Pacific Activist
Episode 11747
In 1894, on the island of Samoa, a 44-year-old man making mayonnaise in his kitchen asked his wife whether his face looked strange, collapsed, and di…
19 hours ago