Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchMachiavelli and The Prince: Torture, Exile, and the Birth of Realpolitik
Episode 11736
A high-ranking Florentine diplomat is arrested, tortured with the strappado, stripped of his rank, and banished when the Medici seize power in 1512. …
1 day ago
Lord Byron: Rock Star Poet, Scandal, Exile, and Greek Hero
Episode 11735
A Cambridge student parading a tame bear on a chain because the rules banned dogs but said nothing about bears: that is the key to understanding Geor…
1 day ago
Leo Tolstoy: From Gambling Aristocrat to Christian Anarchist
Episode 11734
Count Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then publicly renounced them as counterfeit art, tried to give away his wealth and copyright…
1 day ago
Kate Chopin: The Awakening, Scandal, and a Buried Masterpiece
Episode 11733
In 1882, a widow in rural Louisiana with six children discovered her late husband had left her the equivalent of $1.4 million in debt. Instead of fad…
1 day ago
Gulliver's Travels: Jonathan Swift's Dangerous Political Satire Explained
Episode 11732
Gulliver's Travels is usually remembered as a whimsical children's adventure, but Jonathan Swift's 1726 masterpiece was a biting, high-risk political…
1 day ago
John Steinbeck: Grapes of Wrath, Book Burnings and a Reluctant Nobel
Episode 11731
When John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, a reporter asked whether he deserved it and he answered no, an opinion the committee's…
1 day ago
James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary's Crowdsourced Origins
Episode 11730
Picture a white-bearded scholar wrapped in blankets inside a freezing corrugated iron shed, sorting millions of paper slips into 1,029 pigeonholes, u…
1 day ago
James Joyce: Exile, Stubbornness and the Dublin He Could Not Leave
Episode 11729
James Joyce spent his adult life fleeing Dublin while turning every piece of his art into a microscopically detailed map of it. This episode follows …
1 day ago
James Frey: The Oprah Scandal and a Transmedia Second Act
Episode 11728
James Frey went from an Oprah Winfrey Book Club hero to being dismantled on her set on live television, and then refused to disappear. This episode l…
1 day ago
James Baldwin: From Harlem Pulpit to Paris and the Civil Rights Era
Episode 11727
In a New Jersey diner in 1942, an exhausted 18-year-old refused service one time too many hurled a ceramic mug that shattered the mirror behind the w…
1 day ago