Poetry and the Turning World: Weather
In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between inter...
28 Jun 1h 14min
World Cup Cupidity
‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is th...
24 Jun 51min
Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce
Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material...
21 Jun 1h 18min
On Politics: What went wrong with HS2 (and almost everything else)
HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projecte...
17 Jun 1h 4min
Poetry and the Turning World: Technology
When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar ...
14 Jun 1h 30min
Poetry and the Turning World: Work
Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering t...
10 Jun 1h 4min
On Politics: Myths of Populism
The transformations of European politics over the past twenty years, including Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the rise of post-Soviet strongmen, are often explained as part of a ‘wave’ of populism...
3 Jun 1h 12min
Jane Austen's ‘Emma’ and the art of misreading
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of ‘Tristram Shandy’ in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelisti...
30 Mai 1h 8min
