Napoleon the gardener and art thief
The day before Napoleon's death on May 5th 1821, the willow tree he liked to sit under on St Helena was felled by tempestuous winds. Ruth Scurr has written Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows. Nat...
5 Touko 202145min
Samuel Johnson's circle
"We suffer from Johnson" - those words come in a poem written by his friend, the diarist Hester Thrale Piozzi (who died May 2nd 1821). Patience Agbabi's new novel time travels back to eighteenth centu...
4 Touko 202145min
Northern Ireland
A Northern Irish writer - what does that label mean? Lucy Caldwell compares notes with Caroline Magennis about the way authors are charting change and setting down experience - from working class memo...
29 Huhti 202145min
Links between Judaism and Christianity
From the Jewishness of the New Testament to attempts by 19th- and early 20th-century British Jews to blend in to Christian England, Giles Fraser shows how the two religions have a vexed history but ar...
28 Huhti 202146min
Epistemic Injustice
Was Marx wrong when he said that philosophers can only interpret the world in various ways, and contrasted that with actually changing it?Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, was once considered ...
27 Huhti 202144min
Bombing and morals, Flooding and the future
Malcolm Gladwell, Satyajit Ray's film Jalsaghar, Jessie Greengrass. Rana Mitter hosts.
22 Huhti 202145min
New Thinking: Shakespeare's Life Lessons
Friendship, domestic violence, power dynamics in the home, and debates about the ethics of war - all topics we can find in the dramas of Shakespeare. Scholars Emma Smith, Patrick Gray, and Emma Whipda...
21 Huhti 202144min
Maryse Condé's writing plus Suzanne O'Sullivan
Shahida Bari reads I Tituba, the story of the West Indian slave accused in Salem.
20 Huhti 202145min
