History of Ideas 9: Joan Didion
Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to ...
2 Jan 202452min
History of Ideas 8: Susan Sontag
Episode 8 in our history of the great essays is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art...
1 Jan 202455min
History of Ideas 7: James Baldwin
Episode 7 in our series on the great essays is about James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its...
31 Des 202351min
History of Ideas 6: Simone Weil
Episode 6 in our series on the great essays is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks...
30 Des 202353min
History of Ideas 5: George Orwell
Episode 5 in our series on the great essays is about George Orwell. His wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) is about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English ma...
29 Des 202353min
History of Ideas 4: Virginia Woolf
Episode 4 in our series on the great essays is about Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being a...
28 Des 202352min
History of Ideas 3: Thoreau
Episode three in our series about the great political essays is about Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery an...
27 Des 202356min
History of Ideas 2: Hume
Episode two in our series on the great essays is about David Hume. How can eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt help make sense of American politics today? When does public borrowing b...
26 Des 20231h
