Good, bad and loud feminist writing
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – "For every competent feminist book”, Camille Paglia wrote in 1995, “there are twenty others shot through with inaccuracies, distortions, and propaganda.” Charlott...
27 Sep 201733min
Free Speech vs Safe Space: the Great Campus Divide
A bonus episode: Stig Abell hosts a debate at the Brooklyn Literary Festival in which the New Yorker's Jelani Cobb, the New York Times' Michelle Goldberg and Pen America's Suzanne Nossel consider what...
27 Sep 201748min
Samuel Beckett's turtle-neck, etc
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Would you take fashion advice from Beckett? Was John Updike an early advocate of "norm-core"? We're joined in the studio by Laura Freeman to discuss a new book,...
20 Sep 201751min
Matters poetical
With Stig Abell and Lucy Dallas - we are in the studio with Ian Thomson discussing the unlikely collaboration between a Neo Dadaist and Dante; we talk to Mark Ford about Weldon Kees, the American poet...
13 Sep 201742min
Peter Brook at work
In this bonus episode, visionary director Peter Brook talks about his life in the theatre – and explains why Shakespeare is like a skyscraper Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informatio...
13 Sep 201722min
The world's most mysterious manuscript
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – The meaning of the 15th-century Voynich manuscript – a strange compendium of undecipherable signs, astrological symbols and pictures of nude bathing women – has...
5 Sep 201742min
Pop science and Punjabi epics
With Thea Lenarduzzi and Lucy Dallas – Alexander van Tulleken on what makes popular science books – including Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry – so popular, and is there a hidd...
30 Aug 201744min
Peak bullshit
With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – We're joined in the studio by Sam Leith, Literary editor of the Spectator and self-professed rhetoric geek, discusses the problem of fake news in a post-truth wo...
16 Aug 201743min
