Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchCardenio: The Lost Shakespeare Play Based on Don Quixote
Episode 11786
Court records from 1613 show the King's Men were paid to perform a play called Cardenio, and a 1653 Stationers' Register entry credits it to Mr. Flet…
11 hours ago
William Chester Minor: The Asylum Surgeon Behind the Oxford Dictionary
Episode 11785
One of the most prolific contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary worked not from a university office but from a cell in the Broadmoor Criminal …
11 hours ago
The Hitler Diaries Hoax: Konrad Kujau, Stern and the Wrong Initials
Episode 11784
When Stern magazine unveiled the secret diaries of Adolf Hitler in April 1983, the cheap plastic initials glued to the covers read FH instead of AH, …
11 hours ago
The Globe Theatre: Stolen Timber, a Swamp and Shakespeare's Wooden O
Episode 11783
On June 29, 1613, a theatrical cannon fired during Henry VIII set the Globe's thatched roof ablaze and burned the greatest venue in the world to the …
11 hours ago
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Rest Cure and The Yellow Wallpaper
Episode 11782
Imagine a doctor prescribing months of bed rest with no reading, no writing and no intellectual stimulation of any kind. That was the rest cure Dr. S…
11 hours ago
Colette: The Claudine Novels, Willy's Locked Room and a State Funeral
Episode 11781
In August 1954 the French state gave Colette a full state funeral, the first ever granted to a woman of letters, while the Catholic Church refused he…
11 hours ago
Pablo Neruda: Poet, Diplomat, Fugitive and the Mystery of His Death
Episode 11780
Pablo Neruda is remembered as the world's greatest romantic poet, yet the same man fled Chile on horseback through a snowy Andes pass as a hunted pol…
11 hours ago
Cao Xueqin and Dream of the Red Chamber: From Aristocracy to Ruin
Episode 11779
A man dies in obscurity on the fringes of 18th-century Beijing, selling paintings to buy wine, leaving behind only an unfinished hand-copied manuscri…
11 hours ago
H.G. Wells: The Draper's Apprentice Who Predicted the Atomic Bomb
Episode 11778
In October 1940, an aging H.G. Wells sat across from a 25-year-old Orson Welles in a San Antonio radio station, the author of The War of the Worlds m…
11 hours ago
Joseph Heller: How Catch-22 Was Born From Office Bureaucracy
Episode 11777
Joseph Heller took eight years to deliver his debut novel, missed his deadline by roughly half a decade, and was greeted by reviews calling it disorg…
11 hours ago