In the Soviet Archives: a conversation with Sheila Fitzpatrick
When Sheila Fitzpatrick first went to Moscow in the 1960s as a young academic, the prevailing understanding of the Soviet Union in the West was governed by the ‘totalitarian hypothesis’, of a system r...
14 Maj 20251h 9min
How They Built the Pyramids
In 2013, a group of French and Egyptian archaeologists discovered of cache of papyri as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Some of the texts were written by people who had worked on the pyramids: a tal...
7 Maj 202548min
Cold War Pen-Pals
The Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in 1941 to foster connections with Allied countries and encourage British and US women to ‘invest personally’ in the war effort. Two years later, t...
30 Apr 202541min
Close Readings: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair', is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout ...
23 Apr 202534min
Conceiving Pregnancy
It's now possible to take a home pregnancy test eight days after ovulation, yet in the 16th century, women sometimes turned to astrologers for confirmation. And in the 1950s and 1960s, one might send ...
16 Apr 202542min
Trump’s War by Executive Order
Judith Butler and Aziz Rana join Adam Shatz to discuss Donald Trump’s use of executive orders to target birthright citizenship, protest, support of Palestinian rights, academic freedom, constitutional...
9 Apr 20251h 2min
On Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant is best known for her short stories, 116 of which were first published in the New Yorker. Extraordinarily varied and prolific, she arranged her life around the solitary pleasure of writi...
2 Apr 202539min
Close Readings: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this extended extr...
26 Mars 202533min
