D. J. Taylor, "Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader's Guide to George Orwell" (Yale UP, 2024)
An intellectual who hated intellectuals, a socialist who didn't trust the state--our foremost political essayist and author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was a man of stark, puzzling contrad...
17 Apr 202429min
Philip Freeman, "Two Lives of Saint Brigid" (Four Courts Press, 2024)
St. Brigid is the earliest and best-known of the female saints of Ireland. In the generation after St. Patrick, she established a monastery for men and women at Kildare which became one of the most po...
17 Apr 202424min
Jerry Grillo, "Big Cat: The Life of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)
Johnny Mize was one of the greatest hitters in baseball’s golden age of great hitters. Born and raised in tiny Demorest, Georgia, in the northeast Georgia mountains, Mize emerged from the heart of Dix...
17 Apr 20241h 3min
Thor Rydin, "The Works and Times of Johan Huizinga (1872-1945): Writing History in the Age of Collapse" (Amsterdam UP, 2023)
Thor Rydin joins to talk about his new book, The Works and Times of Johan Huizinga (1872- 1945): Writing History in the Age of Collapse (Amsterdam UP, 2023). This book offers a new perspective on the ...
17 Apr 202459min
Kerry Wallach, "Traces of a Jewish Artist: The Lost Life and Work of Rahel Szalit" (Penn State UP, 2024)
Graphic artist, illustrator, painter, and cartoonist Rahel Szalit (1888-1942) was among the best-known Jewish women artists in Weimar Berlin. But after she was arrested by the French police and then m...
16 Apr 20241h
Hume, the Epicureans, and the Origins of Liberalism
Enlightenment philosopher David Hume enjoyed a tremendous influence on intellectual history. What did Hume believe, why was it so controversial at the time, and why to many does it seem so common-sens...
10 Apr 20241h
Traian Sandu, "Ceausescu: The Ambiguous Dictator" (Perrin, 2023)
Today I talked to Traian Sandu about his book Ceausescu: Le dictateur ambigu (Perrin, 2023). Born in January 1918, Nicolae Ceauşescu began his apprenticeship in Bucharest and discovered the social st...
10 Apr 20241h 20min
Sarah Horowitz, "The Red Widow: The Scandal That Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It All" (Sourcebooks, 2022)
Sex. Lies. Murder. Sarah Horowitz's The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind It All (Sourcebooks, 2022) is a book I literally couldn't put down. Drawing on extensive research i...
5 Apr 20241h 3min
