Tin cans, cutlery and sewing
How sewing machines wrecked sewing. Why people mistrusted tin cans. What the invention of stainless steel had to do with the military. New research into the impact of industrialisation on materials li...
28 Feb 202344min
Ghosts of Caribbean History
Hungry Ghosts is the new novel set in colonial Trinidad by Kevin Jared Hosein. Colin Grant has written a memoir about his Jamaican family. A new art project, Windrush Portraits, is a collaboration bet...
24 Feb 202344min
Climate change and empire building
Haggling with Indian customs officials and presenting a mighty emperor with the distinctly unimpressive gifts of a cheap sword and a broken carriage are two particularly inauspicious moments that feat...
23 Feb 202344min
Phaedra, Cretan palaces and the minotaur
A new exhibition at the Ashmolean looks at the digs conducted by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete. At the National Theatre Janet McTeer stars as the Cretan princess Phaedra in a new play by Simon ...
21 Feb 202344min
Idrissa Ouédraogo
Burkinabé filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo (21 January 1954 – 18 February 2018) was awarded the Grand Prix at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival for his film Tilaï. Much of Ouédraogo's work deals with the tensi...
16 Feb 202344min
Stories of Love
Proust as an agony uncle, Romeo and Juliet rewritten as 21st century Welsh teenagers in a new drama by Gary Owen, the Lesbian coming of age novel by Rita Mae Brown that inspired the lead character in ...
14 Feb 202344min
Donkeys
From Orwell and Shakespeare back to Greek myth, Aesop, and early Christianity: Matthew Sweet and guests look at a cultural history of the donkey. EO, a film out in UK cinemas this month, follows the l...
9 Feb 202344min
The Heir of Redclyffe
Soldiers fighting in the Crimean War lapped up this story and it also influenced the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones who read it at Oxford. The Heir of Redclyffe, published in 1853, reflec...
9 Feb 202314min
