Myths, ships and history
Asked to picture a nineteenth-century ship, you might think of the HMS Victory or HMS Temeraire, symbolic of empire. Something epitomised by flag-waving and victory - Britannia rules the waves. In thi...
20 Feb 202444min
The Condom and V.D.
The first condoms were made of cloth and intended to be used after sex. Later they were replaced by hand stitched animal gut ones – designed to be washed and reused. We chart the bizzare, fraught and ...
15 Feb 202445min
Chocolate
Chocolate is an indulgent luxury used to mark special points in the calendar like Valentine's Day, Easter and Christmas. But it's also everywhere, from breakfast cereals to protein shakes. Shahidha Ba...
14 Feb 202445min
Chocolate
An indulgent luxury used to mark special points in the calendar like Valentine's Day, Easter and Christmas, but it's also everywhere, from breakfast cereals to protein shakes. Shahidha Bari unravels t...
9 Feb 202445min
The Greenwich Outrage
In February 1894, the French anarchist Martial Bourdin was killed in Greenwich Park when the bomb he was carrying exploded accidentally. The event provided Joseph Conrad with the inspiration for his n...
9 Feb 202445min
Picnics
In 1989 the demilitarized zone between East and West was the venue for a gathering which was titled the Pan-European picnic. Matthew Longo's new book explores the Hungarian, East German and Russian po...
7 Feb 202445min
Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good
Bidisha, Peter Conradi and Lucy Bolton join Matthew Sweet to read the moral philosophy book published by Iris Murdoch in 1970. Murdoch, who died aged 79, 25 years ago on Feb 8th 1999, was a writer of ...
5 Feb 202444min
On The Silver Globe
The "best sci-fi film" never made? That's what Andrzej Zulawski's project has been called. Shut down by the Polish government before production had finished in 1977, the film wasn't completed and rele...
2 Feb 202445min
