Podcasts about Bleak House

Gillian Anderson's breakthrough television role in the sci-fi series The X Files made her a global star in 1993, and she played cool-headed Agent Dana Scully for nearly a decade. She also starred in period dramas, including an acclaimed film adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel The House Of Mirth and, on television, in Bleak House, Great Expectations and War and Peace. Her theatre credits include A Doll's House, A Streetcar Named Desire and All About Eve, all of which saw her nominated for Olivier Awards. Gillian Anderson has won Golden Globe and Emmy Awards for the X Files, and also for The Crown in which she played Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. More recently, she found a new generation of fans for role as a sex therapist in the series Sex Education. Her latest film is The Salt Path, adapted from the bestselling memoir by Raynor Wynn.Gillian Anderson tells John Wilson how, after being born in Chicago, she moved with her parents to Crouch End, London, when she was five, and then to Michigan at the age of 11. After what she describes as ‘rebellious' teenage years, she studied at Chicago's DePaul University with drama teacher Ric Murphy, whom she cites as a major influence on her early acting ambitions. After a series of minor stage roles in New York, she auditioned for The X Files and the role of Agent Scully changed her life. She also chooses the actor Meryl Streep as a major inspiration after seeing her with Robert Redford in the 1985 romantic drama film Out Of Africa. Gillian also reveals how the work of the Serbian-born conceptual performance artist Marina Abramović has also been an influential cultural figure for her.Producer: Edwina Pitman

End of the rainbow: Pride's fallWhat ‘started half a century ago as an afternoon's little march for lesbians and gay men', argues Gareth Roberts, became ‘a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality' but ‘anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional'. Yet now Reform-led councils are taking down Pride flags, Pride events are being cancelled due to lack of funds, and corporate sponsors are ‘withdrawing their cold tootsies from the rainbow sock'. Has Pride suffered from conflation with ‘genderism'? Gareth joined the podcast to discuss, alongside diversity consultant Simon Fanshawe, one of the six original co-founders of Stonewall. (0:59)Next: people are forgetting how to readPhilip Womack ‘can hear the rumblings of disaster, as if the foundations of western culture, eroded for decades, are teetering into collapse'. The reason? We are forgetting how to read. Today's children ‘hardly read; their tech-blinded parents don't care; their teachers don't have the resources'. American students participating in a study requiring them to parse the first paragraph of Bleak House ‘were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense' from Charles Dickens's prose. What or who is to blame? Philip joined the podcast to discuss. (23:29)And finally: the social minefield of swimming pool seasonArabella Byrne writes in the magazine this week that while she has ‘always loved English swimming pools', the arrival of the summer season always presents her ‘with an annual etiquette conundrum'. If you're lucky enough to know one of the 200,000 Brits who have a private swimming pool, she asks: how acceptable is it - really - to ask to use a friend's pool? Arabella joined the podcast, alongside the Spectator's very own Dear Mary, Mary Killen. (32:46)Hosted by William Moore and Gus Carter.Produced by Patrick Gibbons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

End of the rainbow: Pride's fallWhat ‘started half a century ago as an afternoon's little march for lesbians and gay men', argues Gareth Roberts, became ‘a jamboree not only of boring homosexuality' but ‘anything else that its purveyors consider unconventional'. Yet now Reform-led councils are taking down Pride flags, Pride events are being cancelled due to lack of funds, and corporate sponsors are ‘withdrawing their cold tootsies from the rainbow sock'. Has Pride suffered from conflation with ‘genderism'? Gareth joined the podcast to discuss, alongside diversity consultant Simon Fanshawe, one of the six original co-founders of Stonewall. (0:59)Next: people are forgetting how to readPhilip Womack ‘can hear the rumblings of disaster, as if the foundations of western culture, eroded for decades, are teetering into collapse'. The reason? We are forgetting how to read. Today's children ‘hardly read; their tech-blinded parents don't care; their teachers don't have the resources'. American students participating in a study requiring them to parse the first paragraph of Bleak House ‘were unable to elicit a scintilla of sense' from Charles Dickens's prose. What or who is to blame? Philip joined the podcast to discuss. (23:29)And finally: the social minefield of swimming pool seasonArabella Byrne writes in the magazine this week that while she has ‘always loved English swimming pools', the arrival of the summer season always presents her ‘with an annual etiquette conundrum'. If you're lucky enough to know one of the 200,000 Brits who have a private swimming pool, she asks: how acceptable is it - really - to ask to use a friend's pool? Arabella joined the podcast, alongside the Spectator's very own Dear Mary, Mary Killen. (32:46)Hosted by William Moore and Gus Carter.Produced by Patrick Gibbons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I was delighted to talk to the historian Helen Castor (who writes The H Files by Helen Castor) about her new book The Eagle and the Hart. I found that book compulsive, and this is one of my favourite interviews so far. We covered so much: Dickens, Melville, Diana Wynne Jones, Hilary Mantel, whether Edward III is to blame for the Wars of the Roses, why Bolingbroke did the right thing, the Paston Letters, whether we should dig up old tombs for research, leaving academia, Elizabeth I, and, of course, lots of Shakespeare. There is a full transcript below.Henry: Is there anything that we fundamentally know about this episode in history that Shakespeare didn't know?Helen: That's an extremely good question, and I'm tempted now to say no.Helen told me what is hardest to imagine about life in the fourteenth century.I think it's relatively easy to imagine a small community or even a city, because we can imagine lots of human beings together, but how relationships between human beings happen at a distance, not just in terms of writing a letter to someone you know, but how a very effective power structure happens across hundreds of miles in the absence of those things is the thing that has always absolutely fascinated me about the late Middle Ages. I think that's because it's hard, for me at least, to imagine.Good news to any publishers reading this. Helen is ready and willing to produce a complete edition of the Paston Letters. They were a bestseller when they were published a hundred years ago, but we are crying out for a complete edition in modern English.Henry: If someone wants to read the Paston Letters, but they don't want to read Middle English, weird spelling, et cetera, is there a good edition that they can use?Helen: Yes, there is an Oxford World's Classic. They're all selected. There isn't a complete edition in modern spelling. If any publishers are listening, I would love to do one. Henry: Yes, let's have it.Helen: Let's have it. I would really, really love to do that.Full TranscriptHenry: Today I am talking to the historian, Helen Castor. Helen is a former fellow of Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge. She has written several books of history. She is now a public historian, and of course, she has a Substack. The H Files by Helen CastorWe are going to talk mostly about her book, The Eagle and the Hart, which is all about Richard II and Henry IV. I found this book compulsive, so I hope you will read it too. Helen, welcome.Helen: Thank you very much for having me, Henry.Henry: You recently read Bleak House.Helen: I did.Henry: What did you think?Helen: I absolutely loved it. It was a long time since I'd read any Dickens. I read quite a lot when I was young. I read quite a lot of everything when I was young and have fallen off that reader's perch, much to my shame. The first page, that description of the London fog, the London courts, and I thought, "Why have I not been doing it for all these years?"Then I remembered, as so often with Dickens, the bits I love and the bits I'm less fond of, the sentimentality, the grotesquerie I'm less fond of, but the humour and the writing. There was one bit that I have not been able to read then or any of the times I've tried since without physically sobbing. It's a long time since a book has done that to me. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't read it, but--Henry: I'm sure I know what you mean. That's quite a sentimental passage.Helen: It is, but not sentimental in the way that I find myself objecting to. I think I really respond viscerally to this sentimentalising of some of his young women characters. I find that really off-putting, but I think now I'm a parent, and particularly I'm a parent of a boy [laughter]. I think it's that sense of a child being completely alone with no one to look after them, and then finding some people, but too late for a happy ending.Henry: Too late.Helen: Yes.Henry: You've been reading other classic novels, I think, Moby Dick?Helen: I'm in the middle of Moby Dick as we speak. I'm going very slowly, partly because I'm trying to savour every sentence. I love the sentence so much as a form. Melville is just astonishing, and also very, very funny in a way I hadn't expected to keep laughing out loud, sometimes because there is such humour in a sentence.Sometimes I'm just laughing because the sentence itself seems to have such audacity and that willingness to go places with sentences that sometimes I feel we've lost in the sort of sense of rules-based sentences instead of just sticking a semicolon and keep going. Why not, because it's so gorgeous and full of the joy of language at that point? Anyway, I'm ranting now, but--Henry: No, I think a lot of rules were instituted in the early 20th century that said you can and cannot do all these things, and writers before that point had not often followed those rules. I think what it has led to is that writers now, they can't really control a long sentence, in the sense that Melville and Dickens will do a long sentence, and it is a syntactically coherent thing, even though it's 60, 70 longer words. It's not just lots of stuff, and then, and then. The whole thing has got a beautiful structure that makes sense as a unit. That's just not obvious in a lot of writing now.Helen: I think that's exactly right. Partly, I've been reading some of the Melville out loud, and having just got onto the classification of whales, you can see I'm going very slowly. Those sentences, which are so long, but it's exactly that. If you read them out loud, and you follow the sense, and the punctuation, however irregular it might be in modern terms, gives you the breathing, you just flow on it, and the excitement of that, even or perhaps especially when one is talking about the classification of whales. Just joyful.Henry: Will we be seeing more very long sentences in your next book?Helen: I think I have to get a bit better at it. The habit that I was conscious of anyway, but became acutely so when I had to read my own audiobook for the first time is that I think I write in a very visual way. That is how I read because mostly it's silent.I discovered or rediscovered that often what I do when I want to write a very long sentence is I start the sentence and then I put a diversion or extra information within em dashes in the middle of the sentence. That works on the page because you can see spatially. I love that way of reading, I love seeing words in space.A lot of different kinds of text, both prose and poetry, I read in space like that. If you're reading to be heard, then the difficulty of breaking into a sentence with, whether it's brackets or em dashes or whatever, and then rejoining the sentence further down has its own challenges. Perhaps I ought to try and do less of that and experiment more with a Melvillian Dickensian onward flow. I don't know what my editor will think.Henry: What has brought you back to reading novels like this?Helen: I was wondering that this morning, actually, because I'm very aware having joined Substack, and of course, your Substack is one of the ones that is leading me further in this direction, very inspiringly, is discovering that lots of other people are reading and reading long novels now too. It reminded me of that thing that anyone with children will know that you have a baby and you call it something that you think only you have thought of, and then four years later, you call and you discover half the class is called that name. You wonder what was in the water that led everybody in that direction.I've just seen someone tweet this morning about how inspired they are by the builder next door who, on the scaffolding, is blasting the audiobook Middlemarch to the whole neighborhood.Henry: Oh my god. Amazing.Helen: It's really happening. Insofar as I can work out what led me as opposed to following a group, which clearly I am in some sense, I think the world at the moment is so disquieting, and depressing, and unnerving, that I think for me, there was a wish to escape into another world and another world that would be very immersive, not removed from this world completely. One that is very recognizably human.I think when I was younger, when I was in my teens and 20s, I loved reading science fiction and fantasy before it was such a genre as it is now. I'm a huge fan of Diana Wynne Jones and people like that.Henry: Oh, my god, same. Which one is your favorite?Helen: Oh, that is an impossible question to answer, partly because I want to go back and read a lot of them. Actually, I've got something next to me, just to get some obscurity points. I want to go back to Everard's Ride because there is a story in here that is based on the King's square. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but early 15th century, the story of the imprisoned King of Scotland when he was in prison in England. That one's in my head.The Dalemark Quartet I love because of the sort of medieval, but then I love the ones that are pure, more science fantasy. Which is your favorite? Which should I go back to first?Henry: I haven't read them all because I only started a couple of years ago. I just read Deep Secret, and I thought that was really excellent. I was in Bristol when I read it quite unwittingly. That was wonderful.Helen: Surrounded by Diana Wynne Jones' land. I only discovered many years into an obsession that just meant that I would read every new one while there were still new ones coming out. I sat next to Colin Burrow at a dinner in--Henry: Oh my god.Helen: I did sort of know that he was her son, but monstered him for the whole time, the whole course of sitting together, because I couldn't quite imagine her in a domestic setting, if you like, because she came up with all these extraordinary worlds. I think in days gone by, I went into more obviously imaginary worlds. I think coming back to it now, I wanted something big and something that I really could disappear into. I've been told to read Bleak House for so many decades and felt so ashamed I hadn't. Having done that, I thought, "Well, the whale."Henry: Have you read Diana Wynne Jones' husband's books, John Burrow? Because that's more in your field.Helen: It is, although I'm ashamed to say how badly read I am in medieval literary scholarship. It's weird how these academic silos can operate, shouldn't, probably don't for many, many people. I always feel I'm on horribly thin ground, thin ice when I start talking about medieval literature because I know how much scholarship is out there, and I know how much I haven't read. I must put John Burrow on my list as well.Henry: He's very readable. He's excellent.Helen: I think I can imagine, but I must go into it.Henry: Also, his books are refreshingly short. Your husband is a poet, so there's a lot of literature in your life at the moment.Helen: There is. When we met, which was 10 years ago-- Again, I don't think of myself as knowledgeable about poetry in general, but what was wonderful was discovering how much we had in common in the writing process and how much I could learn from him. To me, one of the things that has always been extremely important in my writing is the sentence, the sound of a sentence, the rhythm of a sentence folded into a paragraph.I find it extremely hard to move on from a paragraph if it's not sitting right yet. The sitting right is as much to do with sound and rhythm as it is to do with content. The content has to be right. It means I'm a nightmare to edit because once I do move on from a paragraph, I think it's finished. Obviously, my editor might beg to differ.I'm very grateful to Thomas Penn, who's also a wonderful historian, who's my editor on this last book, for being so patient with my recalcitrance as an editee. Talking to my husband about words in space on the page, about the rhythm, about the sound, about how he goes about writing has been so valuable and illuminating.I hope that the reading I've been doing, the other thing I should say about going back to big 19th-century novels is that, of course, I had the enormous privilege and learning curve of being part of a Booker jury panel three years ago. That too was an enormous kick in terms of reading and thinking about reading because my co-judges were such phenomenal reading company, and I learned such a lot that year.I feel not only I hope growing as a historian, but I am really, really focusing on writing, reading, being forced out of my bunker where writing is all on the page, starting to think about sound more, think about hearing more, because I think more and more, we are reading that way as a culture, it seems to me, the growth of audiobooks. My mother is adjusting to audiobooks now, and it's so interesting to listen to her as a lifelong, voracious reader, adjusting to what it is to experience a book through sound rather than on the page. I just think it's all fascinating, and I'm trying to learn as I write.Henry: I've been experimenting with audiobooks, because I felt like I had to, and I sort of typically hate audio anything. Jonathan Swift is very good, and so is Diana Wynne Jones.Helen: Interesting. Those two specifically. Is there something that connects the two of them, or are they separately good?Henry: I think they both wrote in a plain, colloquial style. It was very capable of being quite intellectual and had capacity for ideas. Diana Wynne Jones certainly took care about the way it sounded because she read so much to her own children, and that was really when she first read all the children's classics. She had developed for many years an understanding of what would sound good when it was read to a child, I think.Helen: And so that's the voice in her head.Henry: Indeed. As you read her essays, she talks about living with her Welsh grandfather for a year. He was intoning in the chapel, and she sort of comes out of this culture as well.Helen: Then Swift, a much more oral culture.Henry: Swift, of course, is in a very print-heavy culture because he's in London in 1710. We've got coffee houses and all the examiner, and the spectator, and all these people scribbling about each other. I think he was very insistent on what he called proper words in proper places. He became famous for that plain style. It's very carefully done, and you can't go wrong reading that out loud. He's very considerate of the reader that you won't suddenly go, "Oh, I'm in the middle of this huge parenthesis. I don't know how--" As you were saying, Swift-- he would be very deliberate about the placement of everything.Helen: A lot of that has to do with rhythm.Henry: Yes.Helen: Doesn't it? I suppose what I'm wondering, being very ignorant about the 18th century is, in a print-saturated culture, but still one where literacy was less universal than now, are we to assume that that print-saturated culture also incorporated reading out loud —Henry: Yes, exactly so. Exactly so. If you are at home, letters are read out loud. This obviously gives the novelists great opportunities to write letters that have to sort of work both ways. Novels are read out loud. This goes on into the 19th century. Dickens had many illiterate fans who knew his work through it being read to them. Charles Darwin's wife read him novels. When he says, "I love novels," what he means is, "I love it when my wife reads me a novel." [laughs]You're absolutely right. A good part of your audience would come from those listening as well as those reading it.Helen: Maybe we're getting back towards a new version of that with audiobooks expanding in their reach.Henry: I don't know. I saw some interesting stuff. I can't remember who was saying this. Someone was saying, "It's not an oral culture if you're watching short videos. That's a different sort of culture." I think, for us, we can say, "Oh yes, we're like Jonathan Swift," but for the culture at large, I don't know. It is an interesting mixed picture at the moment.Helen: Yes, history never repeats, but we should be wary of writing off any part of culture to do with words.Henry: I think so. If people are reporting builders irritating the neighbourhood with George Eliot, then it's a very mixed picture, right?Helen: It is.Henry: Last literary question. Hilary Mantel has been a big influence on you. What have you taken from her?Helen: That's quite a hard question to answer because I feel I just sit at her feet in awe. If I could point to anything in my writing that could live up to her, I would be very happy. The word that's coming into my head when you phrase the question in that way, I suppose, might be an absolute commitment to precision. Precision in language matters to me so much. Her thought and her writing of whatever kind seems to me to be so precise.Listening to interviews with her is such an outrageous experience because these beautifully, entirely formed sentences come out of her mouth as though that's how thought and language work. They don't for me. [chuckles] I'm talking about her in the present tense because I didn't know her, but I find it hard to imagine that she's not out there somewhere.Henry: She liked ghosts. She might be with us.Helen: She might. I would like to think that. Her writing of whatever genre always seems to me to have that precision, and it's precision of language that mirrors precision of thought, including the ability to imagine herself into somebody else's mind. That's, I suppose, my project as a historian. I'm always trying to experience a lost world through the eyes of a lost person or people, which, of course, when you put it like that, is an impossible task, but she makes it seem possible for her anyway and that's the road I'm attempting to travel one way or another.Henry: What is it about the 14th and 15th centuries that is hardest for us to imagine?Helen: I think this speaks to something else that Hilary Mantel does so extraordinarily well, which is to show us entire human beings who live and breathe and think and feel just as we do in as complex and contradictory and three-dimensional a way as we do, and yet who live in a world that is stripped of so many of the things that we take so much for granted that we find it, I think, hard to imagine how one could function without them.What I've always loved about the late Middle Ages, as a political historian, which is what I think of myself as, is that it has in England such a complex and sophisticated system of government, but one that operates so overwhelmingly through human beings, rather than impersonal, institutionalized, technological structures.You have a king who is the fount of all authority, exercising an extraordinary degree of control over a whole country, but without telephones, without motorized transport, without a professional police service, without a standing army. If we strip away from our understanding of government, all those things, then how on earth does society happen, does rule happen, does government happen?I think it's relatively easy to imagine a small community or even a city, because we can imagine lots of human beings together, but how relationships between human beings happen at a distance, not just in terms of writing a letter to someone you know, but how a very effective power structure happens across hundreds of miles in the absence of those things is the thing that has always absolutely fascinated me about the late Middle Ages. I think that's because it's hard, for me at least, to imagine.Henry: Good. You went to the RSC to watch The Henriad in 2013.Helen: I did.Henry: Is Shakespeare a big influence on this book? How did that affect you?Helen: I suppose this is a long story because Richard II and The Henriad have been-- there is Richard II. Richard II is part of The Henriad, isn't it?Henry: Yes.Helen: Richard II. Henry, see, this is-Henry: The two Henry IVs.Helen: -I'm not Shakespearean. I am. [laughs]Henry: No, it's Richard II, the two Henry IVs, and Henry V. Because, of course, Henry Bolingbroke is in Richard II, and it--Helen: Yes, although I never think of him as really the same person as Henry IV in the Henry IV plays, because he changes so dramatically between the two.Henry: Very often, they have a young actor and an old actor, and of course, in real life, that's insane, right?Helen: It's absolutely insane. I always separate Henry IV, parts I and II, and Henry V off from Richard II because it feels to me as though they operate in rather different worlds, which they do in lots of ways. My story with the Henry ad, now that we've established that I actually know what we're talking about, goes back to when I was in my teens and Kenneth Branagh was playing Henry V in Stratford. I grew up very near Stratford.At 15, 16, watching the young Branagh play Henry V was mind-blowing. I went a whole number of times because, in those days, I don't know how it is now, but you could go and get standing tickets for a fiver on the day. More often than not, if there were spare seats, you would get moved into some extraordinary stall seats at-- I was about to say halftime, I'm a football fan, at the interval.Henry V was the play I knew best for a long time, but at the same time, I'd studied Richard II at school. The Henry IV plays are the ones I know least well. I'm interested now to reflect on the fact that they are the ones that depart most from history. I wonder whether that's why I find them hardest to love, because I'm always coming to the plays from the history. Richard II and Henry V actually have a lot to show us about those kings. They bear very close relationships with a lot of the contemporary chronicles, whereas the Henry IV ones is Shakespeare doing his own thing much more.Particularly, as you've just said, making Henry IV way too old, and/or depending which angle we're looking at it from, making Hotspur way too young, the real Hotspur was three years older than Henry IV. If you want to make Hotspur and how-- your young Turks, you have to make Henry IV old and grey and weary with Northumberland.Back in 2013, the really intense experience I had was being asked to go for a day to join the RSC company on a school trip to Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey at the beginning of their rehearsal process, so when David Tennant was playing Richard II and Greg Doran was directing. That was absolutely fascinating. I'd been thinking about Richard and Henry for a very long time. Obviously, I was a long way away from writing the book I've just written.Talking to actors is an extraordinary thing for a historian because, of course, to them, these are living characters. They want to know what's in their character's mind. They want to know, quite rightly, the chronological progression of their character's thought. That is something that's become more and more and more and more important to me.The longer I go on writing history, the more intensely attached I am to the need for chronology because if it hasn't happened to your protagonist yet, what are you doing with it? Your protagonist doesn't yet know. We don't know. It's very dramatically clear to us at the moment that we don't know what's happening tomorrow. Any number of outrageous and unpredictable things might happen tomorrow.The same certainly was true in Richard II's reign, goes on being true in Henry IV's reign. That experience, in the wake of which I then went to see Henry IV, parts 1 and 2 in Stratford, was really thought-provoking. The extent to which, even though I'd been working on this period for a long time, and had taught this period, I still was struggling to answer some of those questions.Then I'd just had the similarly amazing experience of having a meeting with the Richard II cast and director at the Bridge Theatre before the Nicholas Heitner production with Jonathan Bailey as Richard went on stage. That was actually towards the end of their rehearsal process. I was so struck that the actor playing Bolingbroke in this production and the actor playing Bolingbroke in the production back in 2013 both asked the same excellent first question, which is so hard for a historian to answer, which is at what point does Bolingbroke decide that he's coming back to claim the crown, not just the Duchy of Lancaster?That is a key question for Bolingbroke in Richard II. Does he already know when he decides he's going to break his exile and come back? Is he challenging for the crown straight away, or is he just coming back for his rightful inheritance with the Duchy of Lancaster? That is the million-dollar question when you're writing about Bolingbroke in 1399.It's not possible to answer with a smoking gun. We don't have a letter or a diary entry from Henry Bolingbroke as he's about to step on board ship in Boulogne saying, "I'm saying I'm coming back for the Duchy of Lancaster." The unfolding logic of his situation is that if he's going to come back at all, he's going to have to claim the crown. When he admits that to himself, and when he admits that to anybody else, are questions we can argue about.It was so interesting to me that that's the question that Shakespeare's Richard II throws up for his Bolingbroke just as much as it does for the historical one.Henry: Is there anything that we fundamentally know about this episode in history that Shakespeare didn't know?Helen: That's an extremely good question, and I'm tempted now to say no.Henry: When I left your book, the one thing I thought was that in Shakespeare, the nobles turn against Richard because of his excesses. Obviously, he really dramatizes that around the death of Gaunt. From your book, you may disagree with this, I came away thinking, well, the nobles wanted more power all the time. They may not have wanted the king's power, but there was this constant thing of the nobles feeling like they were owed more authority.Helen: I think the nobles always want more power because they are ambitious, competitive men within a political structure that rewards ambition and competition. The crucial thing for them is that they can only safely pursue ambition and competition if they know that the structure they're competing within will hold.The thing that keeps that structure rooted and solidly in place is the crown and the things that the crown is there to uphold, namely, particularly, the rule of law because if the rule of law starts to crumble, then the risk is that the whole structure collapses into anarchy. Within anarchy, then a powerful man cannot safely compete for more power because an even more powerful man might be about to roll into his estates and take them over. There have to be rules. There has to be fair competition. The referee is there on a football pitch for a reason.The king, in some senses, whether you want to see him as the keystone in an arch that supports a building or whether he's a referee on a football pitch, there are reasons why powerful men need rules because rules uphold their power. What goes wrong with Richard is that instead of seeing that he and the nobles have a common interest in keeping this structure standing, and that actually he can become more powerful if he works with and through the nobles, he sees them as a threat to him.He's attempting to establish a power structure that will not be beholden to them. In so doing, he becomes a threat to them. This structure that is supposed to stand as one mutually supportive thing is beginning to tear itself apart. That is why Richard's treatment of Bolingbroke becomes such a crucial catalyst, because what Richard does to Bolingbroke is unlawful in a very real and very technical sense. Bolingbroke has not been convicted of any crime. He's not been properly tried. There's been this trial by combat, the duel with Mowbray, but it hasn't stopped arbitrarily, and an arbitrary punishment visited upon both of them. They're both being exiled without having been found guilty, without the judgment of God speaking through this duel.Richard then promises that Bolingbroke can have his inheritance, even though he's in exile. As soon as Gaunt dies, Richard says, "No, I'm having it." Now, all of that is unlawful treatment of Bolingbroke, but because Bolingbroke is the most powerful nobleman in the country, it is also a warning and a threat to every other member of the political classes that if the king takes against you, then his arbitrary will can override the law.That diagnosis is there in Shakespeare. It's the Duke of York, who in reality was just a completely hopeless, wet figure, but he says, and I've got it written down, keep it beside me.Henry: Very nice.Helen: Kind of ridiculous, but here it is. York says to Richard, "Take Herford's rights away and take from time his charters and his customary rights. Let not tomorrow then ensue today. Be not thyself, for how art thou a king, but by fair sequence and succession?" In other words, if you interfere with, and I know you've written about time in these plays, it's absolutely crucial.Part of the process of time in these plays is that the rules play out over time. Any one individual king must not break those rules so that the expected process of succession over time can take place. York's warning comes true, that Richard is unseating himself by seeking to unseat Bolingbroke from his inheritance.Henry: We give Shakespeare good marks as a historian.Helen: In this play, yes, absolutely. The things he tinkers with in Richard II are minor plot points. He compresses time in order to get it all on stage in a plausible sequence of events. He compresses two queens into one, given that Richard was married to, by the time he fell, a nine-year-old who he'd married when he was six. It's harder to have a six-year-old making speeches on stage, so he puts the two queens into one.Henry: You don't want to pay another actor.Helen: Exactly.Henry: It's expensive.Helen: You don't want children and animals on stage. Although there is a wonderful account of a production of Richard II on stage in the West End in 1901, with the Australian actor Oscar Asche in it, playing Bolingbroke. The duel scene, he had full armour and a horse, opening night. It was a different horse from the one he rehearsed with. He gives an account in his autobiography of this horse rearing and him somersaulting heroically off the horse.Henry: Oh my god.Helen: The curtain having to come down and then it going back up again to tumultuous applause. You think, "Oscar, I'm wondering whether you're over-egging this pudding." Anyway, I give Shakespeare very good marks in Richard II, not really in the Henry IV plays, but gets back on track.Henry: The Henry IV plays are so good, we're forgiven. Was Richard II a prototype Henry VIII?Helen: Yes. Although, of course, history doesn't work forwards like that. I always worry about being a historian, talking about prototypes, if you see what I mean, but--Henry: No, this is just some podcast, so we don't have to be too strict. He's over-mighty, his sense of his relationship to God. There are issues in parliament about, "How much can the Pope tell us what to do?" There are certain things that seem to be inherent in the way the British state conceives of itself at this point that become problematic in another way.Helen: Is this pushing it too far to say Richard is a second son who ends up being the lone precious heir to the throne who must be wrapped in cotton wool to ensure that his unique God-given authority is protected? Also describes Henry VIII.Henry: They both like fancy clothes.Helen: Both like fancy clothes. Charles I is also a second son who has to step up.Henry: With wonderful cuffs and collars. He's another big dresser.Helen: And great patrons of art. I think we're developing new historical--Henry: No, I think there's a whole thing here.Helen: I think there is. What Henry does, of course, in rather different, because a lot has changed thanks to the Wars of the Roses, the power of the nobility to stand up independently of the crown is significantly lessened by the political effects of the Wars of the Roses, not at least that a lot of them have had their heads cut off, or died in battle, and the Tudors are busy making sure that they remain in the newly subjected place that they find themselves in.Henry then finds to go back to Hilary Mantel, a very, very able political servant who works out how to use parliament for him in rejecting those extra English powers that might restrain him. I do always wonder what Richard thought he was going to do if he'd succeeded in becoming Holy Roman Emperor, which I take very seriously as a proposition from Richard.Most other historians, because it's so patently ridiculous, if you look at it from a European perspective, have just said, "Oh, he got this idea that he wanted to become Holy Roman Emperor," but, of course, it was never going to happen. In Richard's mind, I think it was extremely real. Whether he really would have tried to give the English crown to Rutland, his favorite by the end of the reign, while he went off in glory to be crowned by the Pope, I don't know what was in his head. The difference with Henry is that the ambitions he eventually conceives are very England-focused, and so he can make them happen.Henry: Is there some sort of argument that, if the king hadn't won the Wars of the Roses, and the nobility had flourished, and their sons hadn't been killed, the reformation would have just been much harder to pull off here?[silence]Helen: I wonder what that would have looked like, because in a sense, the king was always going to win the Wars of the Roses, in the sense that you have to have a king. The minute you had someone left standing after that mess, that protracted mess, if he knew what he was doing, and there are arguments about the extent to which Henry VII knew what he was doing, or was doing something very different, whether or not he knew it was different, but there was always going to be an opportunity for a king to assert himself after that.Particularly, the extent to which the lesser landowners, the gentry had realized they couldn't just rely on the nobility to protect them anymore. They couldn't just follow their lord into battle and abdicate responsibility.Henry: Okay.Helen: That's an interesting--Henry: How much should we blame Edward III for all of this?Helen: For living too long and having too many sons?Henry: My argument against Edward is the Hundred Years' War, it doesn't actually go that well by the end of his reign, and it's cost too much money. Too many dukes with too much power. It's not that he had too many sons, he elevates them all and creates this insane situation. The war itself starts to tip the balance between the king and parliament, and so now you've got it from the dukes, and from the other side, and he just didn't manage the succession at all.Even though his son has died, and it really needs some kind of-- He allowed. He should have known that he was allowing a vacuum to open up where there's competition from the nobles, and from parliament, and the finances are a mess, and this war isn't there. It's just… he just leaves a disaster, doesn't he?Helen: I think I'd want to reframe that a little bit. Perhaps, I'm too much the king's friend. I think the political, and in some senses, existential dilemma for a medieval king is that the best of all possible worlds is what Edward achieves in the 1340s and the 1350s, which is, fight a war for reasons that your subjects recognize as in the common interest, in the national interest. Fight it over there so that the lands that are being devastated and the villages and towns that are being burned are not yours. Bring back lots of plunder. Everybody's getting richer and feeling very victorious.You can harness parliament. When things are going well, a medieval king and a parliament are not rivals for power. An English king working with parliament is more powerful than an English king trying to work without parliament. If things are going well, he gets more money, he can pass laws, he can enforce his will more effectively. It's win-win-win if you're ticking all those boxes.As you're pointing out, the worst of all possible worlds is to be fighting a war that's going badly. To fight a war is a big risk because either you're going to end up winning and everything's great, or if it's going badly, then you'd rather be at peace. Of course, you're not necessarily in a position to negotiate peace, depending on the terms of the war you've established.Similarly, with sons, you want heirs. You want to know the succession is safe. I think Edward's younger sons would argue with you about setting up very powerful dukes because the younger ones really-- York and Gloucester, Edmund of Langley and Thomas of Woodstock, really didn't have much in the way of an estate given to them at all, and always felt very hard done by about that. John of Gaunt is set up very well because he's married off to the heir of the Duke of Lancaster who's handily died, leaving only daughters.Henry: That's the problem, isn't it, creating that sort of impact? John of Gaunt is far too rich and powerful.Helen: You say that, except he's unfeasibly loyal. Without Gaunt, disaster happens much, much, much earlier. Gaunt is putting all those resources into the project of propping up the English state and the English crown for way longer than Richard deserves, given that Richard's trying to murder him half the time in the 1380s.Henry: [laughs] For sure. No, I agree with you there, but from Edward III's point of view, it's a mistake to make one very powerful son another quite powerful son next to-- We still see this playing out in royal family dynamics.Helen: This is the problem. What is the perfect scenario in a hereditary system where you need an heir and a spare, but even there, the spare, if he doesn't get to be the heir, is often very disgruntled. [laughs] If he does get to be the heir, as we've just said, turns out to be overconvinced of his own-Henry: Oh, indeed, yes.Helen: -specialness. Then, if you have too many spares, you run into a different kind of problem. Equally, if you don't have a hereditary system, then you have an almighty battle, as the Anglo-Saxons often did, about who's actually going to get the crown in the next generation. It's a very tricky--Henry: Is England just inherently unstable? We've got the Black Death, France is going to be a problem, whatever happens. Who is really going to come to a good fiscal position in this situation? It's no one's fault. It's just there wasn't another way out.Helen: You could say that England's remarkably-- See, I'm just playing devil's advocate the whole time.Henry: No, good.Helen: You could say England is remarkably stable in the sense that England is very unusually centralized for a medieval state at this point. It's centralized in a way that works because it's small enough to govern. It's, broadly speaking, an island. You've got to deal with the Scotts border, but it's a relatively short border. Yes, you have powerful nobles, but they are powerful nobles who, by this stage, are locked into the state. They're locked into a unified system of law. The common law rules everyone. Everyone looks to Westminster.It's very different from what the King of France has been having to face, which has been having to push his authority outward from the Île-de-France, reconquer bits of France that the English have had for a long time, impose his authority over other princes of the realm in a context where there are different laws, there are different customs, there are different languages. You could say that France is in a much more difficult and unstable situation.Of course, what we see as the tide of the war turns again in the early 15th century is precisely that France collapses into civil war, and the English can make hay again in that situation. If Henry V had not died too young with not enough sons in 1423, and particularly, if he'd left a son who grew up to be any use at all, as opposed to absolutely none-- what am I saying? I'm saying that the structure of government in England could work astonishingly well given the luck of the right man at the helm. The right man at the helm had to understand his responsibilities at home, and he had to be capable of prosecuting a successful war abroad because that is how this state works best.As you've just pointed out, prosecuting a successful war abroad is an inherently unstable scenario because no war is ever going to go in your direction the entire time. That's what Richard, who has no interest in war at all is discovering, because once the tide of war is lapping at your own shores, instead of all happening over there, it's a very, very different prospect in terms of persuading parliament to pay for it, quite understandably.You talk about the Black Death. One of the extraordinary things is looking at England in 1348, 1349, when the Black Death hits. Probably, something approaching half the population dies in 18 months. If you're looking at the progress of the war, you barely notice it happened at all. What does the government do? It snaps into action and implements a maximum wage immediately, in case [chuckles] these uppity laborers start noticing there are fewer of them, and they can ask for more money.The amount of control, at that stage at least, that the government has over a country going through an extraordinary set of challenges is quite remarkable, really.Henry: Did Bolingbroke do the right thing?Helen: I think Bolingbroke did the only possible thing, which, in some senses, equates to the right thing. If he had not come back, he would not only have been abandoning his own family, his dynasty, his inheritance, everything he'd been brought up to believe was his responsibility, but also abandoning England to what was pretty much by that stage, clearly, a situation of tyranny.The big argument is always, well, we can identify a tyrant, we have a definition of tyranny. That is, if a legitimate king rules in the common interest and according to the law, then a tyrant rules not in the common interest, and not according to the law. But then the thing that the political theorists argue about is whether or not you can actively resist a tyrant, or whether you have to wait for God to act.Then, the question is, "Might God be acting through me if I'm Bolingbroke?" That's what Bolingbroke has to hope, because if he doesn't do what he does in 1399, he is abandoning everything his whole life has been devoted to maintaining and taking responsibility for. It's quite hard to see where England would then end up, other than with somebody else trying to challenge Richard in the way that Henry does.Henry: Why was he anointed with Thomas Becket's oil?Helen: Because Richard had found it in the tower, [chuckles] and was making great play of the claims that were made for Thomas. This is one of the interesting things about Richard. He is simultaneously very interested in history, and interested in his place in history, his place in the lineage of English kings, going all the way back, particularly to the confessor to whom he looks as not only a patron saint, but as in some sense, a point of identification.He's also seeking to stop time at himself. He doesn't like to think about the future beyond himself. He doesn't show any interest in fathering an heir. His will is all about how to make permanent the judgments that he's made on his nobles. It's not about realistically what's going to happen after his death.In the course of his interest in history, he has found this vial of oil in the tower somewhere in a locked drawer with a note that says, "The Virgin gave this to Thomas Becket, and whoever is anointed with this oil shall win all his battles and shall lead England to greatness," et cetera. Richard has tried to have himself re-anointed, and even his patsy Archbishop of Canterbury that he's put in place after exiling the original one who'd stood up to him a bit.Even the new Archbishop of Canterbury says, "Sire, anointing doesn't really work like that. I'm afraid we can't do it twice." Richard has been wearing this vial round his neck in an attempt to claim that he is not only the successor to the confessor, but he is now the inheritor of this holy oil. The French king has had a holy oil for a very long time in the Cathedral of Reims, which was supposedly given to Clovis, the first king of France, by an angel, et cetera.Richard, who is always very keen on emulating, or paralleling the crown of France, is very, very keen on this. If you were Henry coming in 1399 saying, "No, God has spoken through me. The country has rallied to me. I am now the rightful king of England. We won't look too closely at my justifications for that," and you are appropriating the ceremonial of the crown, you are having yourself crowned in Westminster Abbey on the 13th of October, which is the feast day of the confessor, you are handed that opportunity to use the symbolism of this oil that Richard has just unearthed, and was trying to claim for himself. You can then say, "No, I am the first king crowned with this oil," and you're showing it to the French ambassadors and so on.If we are to believe the chroniclers, it starts making his hair fall out, which might be a contrary sign from God. It's a situation where you are usurping the throne, and what is questionable is your right to be there. Then, any symbolic prop you can get, you're going to lean on as hard as you can.Henry: A few general questions to close. Should we be more willing to open up old tombs?Helen: Yes. [laughs]Henry: Good. [laughs]Helen: I'm afraid, for me, historical curiosity is-- Our forebears in the 18th and 19th century had very few qualms at all. One of the things I love about the endless series of scholarly antiquarian articles that are-- or not so scholarly, in some cases, that are written about all the various tomb openings that went on in the 18th and 19th century, I do love the moments, where just occasionally, they end up saying, "Do you know what, lads? Maybe we shouldn't do this bit." [chuckles]They get right to the brink with a couple of tombs and say, "Oh, do you know what? This one hasn't been disturbed since 1260, whatever. Maybe we won't. We'll put it back." Mostly, they just crowbar the lid off and see what they can find, which one might regret in terms of what we might now find with greater scientific know-how, and et cetera. Equally, we don't do that kind of thing anymore unless we're digging up a car park. We're not finding things out anyway. I just love the information that comes out, so yes, for me.Henry: Dig up more tombs.Helen: Yes.Henry: What is it that you love about the Paston Letters?Helen: More or less everything. I love the language. I love the way that, even though most of them are dictated to scribes, but you can hear the dictation. You can hear individual voices. Everything we were saying about sentences. You can hear the rhythm. You can hear the speech patterns. I'm no linguistic expert, but I love seeing the different forms of spelling and how that plays out on the page.I love how recognizable they are as a family. I love the fact that we hear women's voices in a way that we very rarely do in the public records. The government which is mainly what we have to work with. I love Margaret Paston, who arrives at 18 as a new bride, and becomes the matriarch of the family. I love her relationship with her two eldest boys, John and John, and their father, John.I do wish they hadn't done that because it doesn't help those of us who are trying to write about them. I love the view you get of late medieval of 15th-century politics from the point of view of a family trying to survive it. The fact that you get tiny drops in letters that are also about shopping, or also about your sisters fall in love with someone unsuitable. Unsuitable only, I hasten to add, because he's the family bailiff, not because he isn't a wonderful and extremely able man. They all know those two things. It's just that he's a family bailiff, and therefore, not socially acceptable.I love that experience of being immersed in the world of a 15th-century gentry family, so politically involved, but not powerful enough to protect themselves, who can protect themselves in the Wars of the Roses in any case.Henry: If someone wants to read the Paston Letters, but they don't want to read Middle English, weird spelling, et cetera, is there a good edition that they can use?Helen: Yes, there is an Oxford World's Classic. They're all selected. There isn't a complete edition in modern spelling. If any publishers are listening, I would love to do one. [chuckles]Henry: Yes, let's have it.Helen: Let's have it. I would really, really love to do that. There are some very good selections. Richard Barber did one many years ago, and, of course, self-advertising. There is also my book, now more than 20 years old, about the Paston family, where I was trying to put in as much of the letters as I could. I wanted to weave the voices through. Yes, please go and read the Paston Letters in selections, in whatever form you can get them, and let's start lobbying for a complete modernized Paston.Henry: That's right. Why did you leave academia? Because you did it before it was cool.Helen: [laughs] That's very kind of you to say. My academic life was, and is very important to me, and I hate saying this now, because the academic world is so difficult now. I ended up in it almost by accident, which is a terrible thing to say now, people having to-- I never intended to be an academic. My parents were academics, and I felt I'd seen enough and wasn't sure I wanted to do that.I couldn't bear to give up history, and put in a PhD application to work with Christine Carpenter, who'd been the most inspiring supervisor when I was an undergraduate, got the place, thought, "Right, I'm just going to do a PhD." Of course, once you're doing a PhD, and everyone you know is starting to apply for early career jobs, which weren't even called early career jobs in those days, because it was a million years ago.I applied for a research fellowship, was lucky enough to get it, and then applied for a teaching job, utterly convinced, and being told by the people around me that I stood no chance of getting it, because I was way too junior, and breezed through the whole process, because I knew I wasn't going to get it, and then turned up looking for someone very junior.I got this wonderful teaching job at Sidney Sussex in Cambridge and spent eight years there, learned so much, loved working with the students. I was working very closely with the students in various ways, but I wasn't-- I'm such a slow writer, and a writer that needs to be immersed in what I was doing, and I just wasn't managing to write, and also not managing to write in the way I wanted to write, because I was becoming clearer and clearer about the fact that I wanted to write narrative history.Certainly, at that point, it felt as though writing narrative history for a general audience and being an early career academic didn't go so easily together. I think lots of people are now showing how possible it is, but I wasn't convinced I could do it. Then, sorry, this is a very long answer to what's [crosstalk] your question.Henry: That's good.Helen: I also had my son, and my then partner was teaching at a very different university, I mean, geographically different, and we were living in a third place, and trying to put a baby into that geographical [chuckles] setup was not going to work. I thought, "Well, now or never, I'll write a proposal for a book, a narrative, a book for a general readership, a narrative book about the Paxton family, because that's what I really want to write, and I'll see if I can find an agent, and I'll see if I," and I did.I found the most wonderful agent, with whose help I wrote a huge proposal, and got a deal for it two weeks before my son was due. At that point, I thought, "Okay, if I don't jump now, now or never, the stars are aligned." I've been a freelance medieval historian ever since then, touching every wood I can find as it continues to be possible. I am very grateful for those years in Cambridge. They were the making of me in terms of training and in terms of teaching.I certainly think without teaching for those years, I wouldn't be anywhere near as good a writer, because you learn such a lot from talking to, and reading what students produce.Henry: How do you choose your subjects now? How do you choose what to write about?Helen: I follow my nose, really. It's not very scientific.Henry: Why should it be?Helen: Thank you. The book, bizarrely, the book that felt most contingent, was the one I wrote after the Paston book, because I knew I'd written about the Pastons in my PhD, and then again more of it in the monograph that was based on my PhD. I knew having written about the Pastons in a very academic, analytical way, contributing to my analysis of 15th-century politics. I knew I wanted to put them at the center and write about them. That was my beginning point.The big question was what to do next, and I was a bit bamboozled for a while. The next book I ended up writing was She-Wolves, which is probably, until now, my best-known book. It was the one that felt most uncertain to me, while I was putting it together, and that really started from having one scene in my head, and it's the scene with which the book opens. It's the scene of the young Edward VI in 1553, Henry VIII's only son, dying at the age of 15.Suddenly, me suddenly realizing that wherever you looked on the Tudor family tree at that point, there were only women left. The whole question of whether a woman could rule was going to have to be answered in some way at that point, and because I'm a medievalist, that made me start thinking backwards, and so I ended up choosing some medieval queens to write about, because they've got their hands on power one way or another.Until very close to finishing it, I was worried that it wouldn't hang together as a book, and the irony is that it's the one that people seem to have taken to most. The next book after that grew out of that one, because I found myself going around talking about She-Wolves, and saying repeatedly, "The problem these queens faced was that they couldn't lead an army on the battlefield."Women couldn't do that. The only medieval woman who did that was Joan of Arc, and look what happened to her. Gradually, I realized that I didn't really know what had happened to her. I mean, I did know what--Henry: Yes, indeed.Helen: I decided that I really wanted to write about her, so I did that. Then, having done that, and having then written a very short book about Elizabeth I, that I was asked to write for Penguin Monarchs, I realized I'd been haunted all this time by Richard and Henry, who I'd been thinking about and working on since the very beginning of my PhD, but I finally felt, perhaps, ready to have a go at them properly.It's all been pretty organic apart from She-Wolves, which was the big, "What am I writing about next?" That took shape slowly and gradually. Now, I'm going to write about Elizabeth I properly in a-Henry: Oh, exciting.Helen: -full-scale book, and I decided that, anyway, before I wrote this last one, but I-- It feels even righter now, because I Am Richard II, Know Ye Not That, feels even more intensely relevant having now written about Richard and Henry, and I'm quite intimidated because Elizabeth is quite intimidating, but I think it's good, related by your subjects.[laughter]Henry: Have you read the Elizabeth Jenkins biography?Helen: Many, many years ago. It's on my shelf here.Henry: Oh, good.Helen: In fact, so it's one of the things I will be going back to. Why do you ask particularly? I need--Henry: I'm a big Elizabeth Jenkins fan, and I like that book particularly.Helen: Wonderful. Well, I will be redoubled in my enthusiasm.Henry: I look forward to seeing what you say about it. What did you learn from Christine Carpenter?Helen: Ooh. Just as precision was the word that came into my head when you asked me about Hilary Mantel, the word that comes into my head when you ask about Christine is rigor. I think she is the most rigorous historical thinker that I have ever had the privilege of working with and talking to. I am never not on my toes when I am writing for, talking to, reading Christine. That was an experience that started from the first day I walked into her room for my first supervision in 1987.It was really that rigor that started opening up the medieval world to me, asking questions that at that stage I couldn't answer at all, but suddenly, made everything go into technicolor. Really, from the perspective that I had been failing to ask the most basic questions. I would sometimes have students say to me, "Oh, I didn't say that, because I thought it was too basic."I have always said, "No, there is no question that is too basic." Because what Christine started opening up for me was how does medieval government work? What are you talking about? There is the king at Westminster. There is that family there in Northumberland. What relates the two of them? How does this work? Think about it structurally. Think about it in human terms, but also in political structural terms, and then convince me that you understand how this all goes together. I try never to lose that.Henry: Helen Castor, thank you very much.Helen: Thank you so much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

In this episode of High Theory Nasser Mufti talks with us about Brutalism. A twentieth century architectural style featuring imposing structures made of a lot of concrete, brutalist structures tend to provoke strong reactions. People either love it or they hate it – you never get a middling conversation about brutalism. Often used for government buildings, university libraries, and hospitals, Nasser suggests it represents the architecture of the state itself, massive bureaucratic structures in which we get lost, but also perhaps, nostalgia for a state that actually takes care of its citizens. Before we recorded the episode, Nasser sent me this article about the Brutalist campus at the University of Illinois where he works, which is full of beautiful black and white images. In the episode he refers to a line in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), which describes Chesney Wold as “seamed by time.” And he reminds us that verb form “decolonizing” is quite new, even Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) only uses the gerund in the title. The neologism “decolonizing” is distinct from the world historical project of decolonization and the historiographic method of decolonial analysis that comes from Latin American studies. Nasser Mufti is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where his research and teaching focuses on nineteenth century British and postcolonial literature and theory. He is especially interested in literary approaches to the study of nationalism. His first book, Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern University Press, 2018) argues that narratives of civil war energized and animated nineteenth-century British imperialism and decolonization in the twentieth century. You can read it online, open access, which is pretty damn cool! He is working on two new projects, the first, tentatively titled Britain's Nineteenth Century, 1963-4, looks at how anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers from the Anglophone world turned to nineteenth century British literature and culture as a way to think decolonization. The second, titled “Colonia Moralia,” examines the dialectics of postcolonial Enlightenment through comparative readings of T.W. Adorno and V.S. Naipaul. The image for this episode is a photograph of Boston City Hall, a Brutalist building mentioned in the episode. The black and white photograph shows an interior courtyard of the building, a large concrete structure with many windows, located at One City Hall Square, Boston, Suffolk County, MA. It comes from the US Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In this episode of High Theory Nasser Mufti talks with us about Brutalism. A twentieth century architectural style featuring imposing structures made of a lot of concrete, brutalist structures tend to provoke strong reactions. People either love it or they hate it – you never get a middling conversation about brutalism. Often used for government buildings, university libraries, and hospitals, Nasser suggests it represents the architecture of the state itself, massive bureaucratic structures in which we get lost, but also perhaps, nostalgia for a state that actually takes care of its citizens. Before we recorded the episode, Nasser sent me this article about the Brutalist campus at the University of Illinois where he works, which is full of beautiful black and white images. In the episode he refers to a line in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), which describes Chesney Wold as “seamed by time.” And he reminds us that verb form “decolonizing” is quite new, even Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong'o Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986) only uses the gerund in the title. The neologism “decolonizing” is distinct from the world historical project of decolonization and the historiographic method of decolonial analysis that comes from Latin American studies. Nasser Mufti is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where his research and teaching focuses on nineteenth century British and postcolonial literature and theory. He is especially interested in literary approaches to the study of nationalism. His first book, Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture (Northwestern University Press, 2018) argues that narratives of civil war energized and animated nineteenth-century British imperialism and decolonization in the twentieth century. You can read it online, open access, which is pretty damn cool! He is working on two new projects, the first, tentatively titled Britain's Nineteenth Century, 1963-4, looks at how anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers from the Anglophone world turned to nineteenth century British literature and culture as a way to think decolonization. The second, titled “Colonia Moralia,” examines the dialectics of postcolonial Enlightenment through comparative readings of T.W. Adorno and V.S. Naipaul. The image for this episode is a photograph of Boston City Hall, a Brutalist building mentioned in the episode. The black and white photograph shows an interior courtyard of the building, a large concrete structure with many windows, located at One City Hall Square, Boston, Suffolk County, MA. It comes from the US Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Collections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/architecture

Welcome to Season 26 of Scholé Sisters! At the risk of sound like grumpy old ladies, we are kicking off this season with a conversation about homeschool history and how you can tap in to some of homeschool culture's strengths. You're going to love this conversation! *** If you've considered upgrading your Sistership membership from FREE to Sophie level, now is the time to do that! Our 2025 book clubs are underway and they are fantastic! Modern Times, Norms and Nobility, Bleak House, and more! There is something for everyone. And in March, Abby, along with Jami Marstall, will be teaching a workshop on leading homeschool co-op classes that you do NOT want to miss. To join us, all you have to do is make sure you are a Sophie level member of the Sistership! Just go to scholesisters.com/join and sign up. *** Click here to access today's show notes. Click here to join the FREE area of the Sistership.

Bleak House è il boxed set che chiuse il Ravenloft dell'era TSR.

Mark and Gray ring in the New Year with a discussion of the 1960s trend for… actually not being very 1960s at all! But just how much of Christie's 1960s writing harks back to the Edwardian and Victorian eras? Did they even ‘swing' back then?? You can listen to our guest spot on the All About Agatha podcast, here. You can read our special article for the Agatha Christie website here. You can read Mark's paper about Agatha Christie's Charles Dickens's Bleak House here. And tickets and info for The Mirror Crack'd at the Tower Theatre can be found here! You can find us on Instagram (as well as X) @Christie_Time. We are on BlueSky at christietime.bsky.social. Please do rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Our website is ChristieTime.com. The Swinging Christies is a Christie Time project by Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown. Next episode: wait and see… 00:00:00 - Opening titles 00:00:51 - Introductory chat 00:04:29 - The Sixties weren't Swinging for everyone 00:15:38 - Old-new locations 00:58:02 - The Next Generation 01:04:28 - Servants and service 01:14:44 - Reviving the greats: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Austen, Brontë 01:22:37 - Bleak House by Agatha Christie 01:33:57 - Brave monkey puzzle: remembering Christie's childhood home 01:37:22 - Next episode, how to get in touch 01:38:33 - Closing titles 01:39:01 - Coda Solutions revealed! - The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, At Bertram's Hotel

Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House, the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn't love Juliet, Girard, the development of individualism, the importance and interest of the seventeenth century, Trump and Shakespeare's fools, why Julius Cesar is over rated, the most under rated Shakespeare play, prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare as an economic thinker. We covered a lot of ground and it was interesting for me throughout. Here are some excerpts. Full transcript below.Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.And.Henry Let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.Transcript (prepared by AI)Henry Today, I am talking to Tyler Cowen, the economist, blogger, columnist, and author. Tyler works at George Mason University. He writes Marginal Revolution. He is a columnist at Bloomberg, and he has written books like In Praise of Commercial Culture and The Age of the Infovore. We are going to talk about literature and Shakespeare. Tyler, welcome.Tyler Good to chat with you, Henry.Henry So have you ever had a view quake from reading fiction?Tyler Reading fiction has an impact on you that accumulates over time. It's not the same as reading economics or philosophy, where there's a single, discrete idea that changes how you view the world. So I think reading the great classics in its entirety has been a view quake for me. But it's not that you wake up one morning and say, oh, I turned to page 74 in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, and now I realize that, dot, dot, dot. That's a yes and a no for an answer.Henry So you've never read Bleak House and thought, actually, I do see things slightly differently about Victorian London or the history of the –?Tyler Well, that's not a view quake. Certainly, that happens all the time, right? Slightly differently how you see Victorian London. But your overall vision of the world, maybe fiction is one of the three or four most important inputs. And again, I think it's more about the entirety of it and the diversity of perspectives. I think reading Proust maybe had the single biggest impact on me of any single work of fiction if I had to select one. And then when I was younger, science fiction had a quite significant impact on me. But I don't think it was the fictional side of science fiction that mattered, if that makes sense to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the models embodied in the stories, like, oh, the three laws of robotics. Well, I thought, well, what should those laws be like? I thought about that a good deal. So that would be another part of the qualified answer.Henry And what was it with Proust? The idea that people only care about what other people think or sexuality or consciousness?Tyler The richness of the internal life, the importance of both expectation and memory, the evanescence of actual events, a sense of humor.Henry It showed you just how significant these things are.Tyler And how deeply they can be felt and expressed. That's right. And there were specific pages early on in Swan's Way where it just hit me. So that's what I would say. Bleak House, I don't think, changed my views at all. It's one of my three or four favorite novels. I think it's one of the great, great, greats, as you have written yourself. But the notion that, well, the law is highly complex and reality is murky and there are all these deep mysteries, that all felt very familiar to me. And I had already read some number of newer sort of pseudo-Victorian novels that maybe do those themes in a more superficial way, but they introduce those themes to you. So you read Bleak House and you just say, well, I've imbibed this already, but here's the much better version of it.Henry One of the things I got from Bleak House, which it took me a couple of reads to get to, was how comfortable Dickens was with being quite a rational critic of the legal system and quite a credulous believer in spontaneous combustion and other things.Tyler Did Dickens actually believe in spontaneous combustion or is that a plot device? Like Gene Roddenberry doesn't actually believe in the transporter or didn't, as far as weHenry know. No, I think he believed. Yeah. Yeah. He defends it in the preface. Yeah.Tyler So it's not so confusing that there's not going to be a single behavioral model that captures deviations from rationality. So you end up thinking you ought to travel more, you ought to take in a lot of diverse different sources about our human beings behave, including from sociology, from anthropology. That makes it harder to be an economist, I would say it scatters your attention. You probably end up with a richer understanding of reality, but I'm not sure it's good for your research. It's probably bad for it.Henry It's not a good career move.Tyler It's not good for focus, but focus maybe can be a bit overrated.Henry Why are you more interested in fiction than other sort of people of a broadly rational disposition?Tyler Well, I might challenge the view that I'm of a broadly rational disposition. It's possible that all humans are roughly equally irrational, madmen aside, but if you mean the rationality community as one finds it in San Francisco, I think they're very mono in their approach to reasoning and that tends to limit the interests of many of them, not all, in fiction and travel. People are regional thinkers and in that region, San Francisco, there is incredible talent. It's maybe the most talented place in the world, but there's not the same kind of diversity of talents that you would find in London or New York and that somehow spreads to the broader ethos and it doesn't get people interested in fiction or for that matter, the visual arts very much.Henry But even in London, if I meet someone who's an economist or has an economics degree or whatever, the odds that they've read Bleak House or something are just so small.Tyler Bleak House is not that well read anymore, but I think an economist in London is likely to be much more well read than an economist in the Bay Area. That would be my prediction. You would know better than I would.Henry How important has imaginative literature been to you relative to other significant writers like philosophers or theoretical economists or something?Tyler Well, I'm not sure what you mean by imaginative literature. I think when I was 17, I read Olaf Stapleton, a great British author and Hegelian philosopher, and he was the first and first man and star maker, and that had a significant impact on me. Just how many visions you could put into a single book and have at least most of them cohere and make sense and inspire. That's one of the most imaginative works I've ever read, but people mean different things by that term.Henry How objectively can we talk about art?Tyler I think that becomes a discussion about words rather than about art. I would say I believe in the objective when it comes to aesthetics, but simply because we have no real choice not to. People actually, to some extent, trust their aesthetic judgments, so why not admit that you do and then fight about them? Trying to interject some form of extreme relativism, I think it's just playing a game. It's not really useful. Now, is art truly objective in the final metaphysical sense, in the final theory of the universe? I'm not sure that question has an answer or is even well-formulated, but I would just say let's just be objectivists when it comes to art. Why not?Henry What is wrong with historical fiction?Tyler Most of it bores me. For instance, I don't love Hilary Mantel and many very intelligent people think it's wonderful. I would just rather read the history. It feels like an in-between thing to me. It's not quite history. It's not quite fiction. I don't like biopics either when I go to the cinema. Yeah, I think you can build your own combination of extremes from history and fiction and get something better.Henry You don't have any historical fiction that you like, Penelope Fitzgerald, Tolstoy?Tyler Any is a strong word. I don't consider Tolstoy historical fiction. There's a historical element in it, as there is with say Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate or actually Dickens for that matter, but it's not driven by the history. I think it's driven by the characters and the story. Grossman comes somewhat closer to being historical fiction, but even there, I wouldn't say that it is.Henry It was written so close to the events though, right?Tyler Sure. It's about how people deal with things and what humanity means in extreme circumstances and the situations. I mean, while they're more than just a trapping, I never feel one is plodding through what happened in the Battle of Stalingrad when I read Grossman, say.Henry Yeah. Are there diminishing returns to reading fiction or what are the diminishing returns?Tyler It depends what you're doing in life. There's diminishing returns to most things in the sense that what you imbibe from your teen years through, say, your 30s will have a bigger impact on you than most of what you do later. I think that's very, very hard to avoid, unless you're an extreme late bloomer, to borrow a concept from you. As you get older, rereading gets better, I would say much better. You learn there are more things you want to read and you fill in the nooks and crannies of your understanding. That's highly rewarding in a way where what you read when you were 23 could not have been. I'm okay with that bargain. I wouldn't say it's diminishing returns. I would say it's altering returns. I think also when you're in very strange historical periods, reading fiction is more valuable. During the Obama years, it felt to me that reading fiction was somewhat less interesting. During what you might call the Trump years, and many other strange things are going on with AI, people trying to strive for immortality, reading fiction is much more valuable because it's more limited what nonfiction can tell you or teach you. I think right now we're in a time where the returns to reading more fiction are rapidly rising in a good way. I'm not saying it's good for the world, but it's good for reading fiction.Henry Do you cluster read your fiction?Tyler Sometimes, but not in general. If I'm cluster reading my fiction, it might be because I'm cluster reading my nonfiction and the fiction is an accompaniment to that. Say, Soviet Russia, I did some reading when I was prepping for Stephen Kotkin and for Russ Roberts and Vasili Grossman, but I don't, when it comes to fiction per se, cluster read it. No, I don't think you need to.Henry You're not going to do like, I'm reading Bleak House, so I'll do three other 1852 novels or three other Dickens novels or something like that.Tyler I don't do it, but I suspect it's counterproductive. The other Dickens novels will bore you more and they'll seem worse, is my intuition. I think the question is how you sequence works of very, very high quality. Say you just finished Bleak House, what do you pick up next? It should be a work of nonfiction, but I think you've got to wait a while or maybe something quite different, sort of in a way not different, like a detective story or something that won't challenge what has been cemented into your mind from Bleak House.Henry Has there been a decline of reading the classics?Tyler What I observe is a big superstar effect. I think a few authors, such as Jane Austen and Shakespeare, are more popular. I'm not completely sure they're more read, but they're more focal and more vivid. There are more adaptations of them. Maybe people ask GPT about them more. Really quite a few other works are much less read than would have been the case, say as recently as the 1970s or 1980s. My guess is, on the whole, the great works of fiction are much less read, but a few of them achieve this oversized reputation.Henry Why do you think that is?Tyler Attention is more scarce, perhaps, and social clustering effects are stronger through the internet. That would just be a guess.Henry It's not that we're all much more Jane Austen than we used to be?Tyler No, if anything, the contrary. Maybe because we're less Jane Austen, it's more interesting, because in, say, a Jane Austen novel, there will be sources of romantic tension not available to us through contemporary TV shows. The question, why don't they just sleep together, well, there's a potential answer in a Jane Austen story. In the Israeli TV show, Srugim, which is about modern Orthodox Jews, there's also an answer, but in most Hollywood TV, there's no answer. They're just going to sleep together, and it can become very boring quite rapidly.Henry Here's a reader question. Why is the market for classics so good, but nobody reads them? I think what they're saying is a lot of people aren't actually reading Shakespeare, but they still agree he's the best, so how can that be?Tyler A lot of that is just social conformity bias, but I see more and more people, and I mean intellectuals here, challenging the quality of Shakespeare. On the internet, every possible opinion will be expressed, is one way to put it. I think the market for classics is highly efficient in the following sense, that if you asked, say, GPT or Claude, which are the most important classics to read, that literally everything listed would be a great book. You could have it select 500 works, and every one of them would really be very good and interesting. If you look at Harold Bloom's list at the back of the Western canon, I think really just about every one of those is quite worthwhile, and that we got to that point is, to me, one of the great achievements of the contemporary world, and it's somewhat under-praised, because you go back in earlier points of time, and I think it's much less efficient, the market for criticism, if you would call it that.Henry Someone was WhatsAppping me the other day that GPT's list of 50 best English poets was just awful, and I said, well, you're using GPT4, o1 gives you the right list.Tyler Yeah, and o1 Pro may give you a slightly better list yet, or maybe the prompt has to be better, but it's interesting to me how many people, they love to attack literary criticism as the greatest of all villains, oh, they're all frustrated writers, they're all post-modernists, they're all extreme left-wingers. All those things might even be true to some extent, but the system as a whole, I would say completely has delivered, and especially people on the political and intellectual right, they often don't realize that. Just any work you want to read, if you put in a wee bit of time and go to a shelf of a good academic library, you can read fantastic criticism of it that will make your understanding of the work much better.Henry I used to believe, when I was young, I did sort of believe that the whole thing, oh, the Western canon's dying and everyone's given up on it, and I'm just so amazed now that the opposite has happened. It's very, very strong.Tyler I'm not sure how strong it is. I agree its force in discourse is strong, so something like, well, how often is it mentioned in my group chats? That's strongly rising, and that delights me, but that's a little different from it being strong, and I'm not sure how strong it is.Henry In an interview about your book Talent, you said this, “just get people talking about drama. I feel you learn a lot. It's not something they can prepare for. They can't really fake it. If they don't understand the topic, you can just switch to something else.”Tyler Yeah, that's great advice. You see how they think about how people relate to each other. It doesn't have to be fiction. I ask people a lot about Star Wars, Star Trek, whatever it is they might know that I have some familiarity with. Who makes the best decisions in Star Wars? Who gives the best advice? Yoda, Obi-Wan, Luke, Darth Vader, the Emperor?Henry It's a tough question.Tyler Yeah, yeah.Henry I don't know Star Wars, so I couldn't even answer that.Tyler You understand that you can't fake it. You can't prepare for it. It does show how the person thinks about advice and also drama.Henry Right. Now, you're a Shakespeare fan.Tyler Well, fan is maybe an understatement. He's better. He deserves better than fans.Henry How much of time, how much of your life have you spent reading and watching this work?Tyler I would say most of the plays from, say, like 1598 or 99 and after, I've read four to five times on average, some a bit more, some like maybe only three times. There's quite a few I've only read once and didn't like. Those typically are the earlier ones. When it comes to watching Shakespeare, I have to confess, I don't and can't understand it, so I'm really not able to watch it either on the stage or in a movie and profit from it. I think I partially have an auditory processing disorder that if I hear Shakespeare, you know, say at Folger in DC, I just literally cannot understand the words. It's like listening to Estonian, so I've gone some number of times. I cannot enjoy what you would call classic Shakespeare movies like Kenneth Branagh, Henry V, which gets great reviews, intelligent people love it. It doesn't click for me at all. I can't understand what's going on. The amount of time I've put into listening to it, watching it is very low and it will stay low. The only Shakespeare movies I like are the weird ones like Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight or Baz Luhrmann's Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. I think they're fantastic, but they're not obsessed with reciting the text.Henry So, you're reading with notes and you're piecing it together as you go.Tyler I feel the versions in my head are better than anything I see on the screen also, so that's another reason. I just think they're to be read. I fully understand that's not how Shakespeare seemed to view them, but that's a way in which we readers, in a funny way, can improve on Shakespeare's time.Henry No, I agree with you. The thing I get the most pushback about with Shakespeare is when I say that he was a great thinker.Tyler He's maybe the best thinker.Henry Right. But tell us what you mean by that.Tyler I don't feel I can articulate it. It's a bit like when o3 Pro gives you an answer so good you don't quite appreciate it yourself. Shakespeare is like o7 Pro or something. But the best of the plays seem to communicate the entirety of human existence in a way that I feel I can barely comprehend and I find in very, very little else. Even looking at other very great works such as Bleak House, I don't find it. Not all of the plays. There's very, very good plays that don't do that. Just say Macbeth and Othello. I don't feel do that at all. Not a complaint, but something like Hamlet or King Lear or Tempest or some of the comedies. It's just somehow all laid out there and all inside it at the same time. I don't know any other way of putting it.Henry A lot of people think that Shakespeare is overrated. We only read him because it's a status game. We've internalized these snobbish values. We see this stated a lot. What's your response to these people?Tyler Well, I feel sorry for them. But look, there's plenty of things I can't understand. I just told you if I go to see the plays, I'm completely lost. I know the fault is mine, so to speak. I don't blame Shakespeare or the production, at least not necessarily. Those are people who are in a similar position, but somehow don't have enough metarationality to realize the fault is on them. I think that's sad. But there's other great stuff they can do and probably they're doing it. That's fine.Henry Should everyone read Shakespeare at school?Tyler If you say everyone, I resist. But it certainly should be in the curriculum. But the real question is who can teach it? But yeah, it's better than not doing it. When I was in high school, we did Taming of the Shrew, which I actually don't like very much, and it put me off a bit. We did Macbeth, which is a much better play. But in a way, it's easy to teach. Macbeth, to me, is like a perfect two-minute punk rock song. It does something. It delivers. But it's not the Shakespeare that puts everything on the table, and the plot is easy to follow. You can imagine even a mediocre teacher leading students through it. It's to me still a little underwhelming if that's what we teach them. Then finally, my last year, we did Hamlet, and I'm like, whoa, okay, now I get it. Probably we do it wrong in a lot of cases, would be my guess. What's wrong with the Taming of the Shrew? It's a lot of yelling and screaming and ordinary. To me, it's not that witty. There's different views, like is it offensive to women, offensive to men? That's not my main worry. But those questions, I feel, also don't help the play, and I just don't think Shakespeare was fully mature when he wrote it. What was the year on that? Do you know offhand?Henry It's very early.Tyler It's very early. Very early, yeah. So if you look at the other plays that surround it, they're also not as top works. So why should we expect that one to be?Henry What can arts funding learn from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres?Tyler Current arts funding? I don't think that much. I think the situation right now is so different, and what we should do so depends on the country, the state, the province, the region. Elizabethan times do show that market support at art can be truly wonderful. We have plenty of that today. But if you're just, say, appointed to be chair of the NEA and you've got to make decisions, I'm not sure how knowing about Elizabethan theatre would help you in any direct way.Henry What do you think of the idea that the long history of arts funding is a move away from a small group, an individual patronage where taste was very important, towards a kind of institutional patronage, which became much more bureaucratic? And so one reason why we keep arguing about arts funding now is that a lot of it exhibits bad taste because the committee has to sort of agree on various things. And if we could reallocate somewhat towards individual patronage, we'd do better.Tyler I would agree with the latter two-thirds of that. How you describe earlier arts funding I think is more complicated than what you said. A lot of it is just people doing things voluntarily at zero pecuniary cost, like singing songs, songs around the campfire, or hymns in church, rather than it being part of a patronage model. But I think it's way overly bureaucratized. The early National Endowment for the Arts in the 1960s just let smart people make decisions with a minimum of fuss. And of course we should go back to that. Of course we won't. We send half the money to the state's arts agencies, which can be mediocre or just interested in economic development and a new arts center, as opposed to actually stimulating creativity per se. More over time is spent on staff. There are all these pressures from Congress, things you can't fund. It's just become far less effective, even though it spends somewhat more money. So that's a problem in many, many countries.Henry What Shakespeare critics do you like reading?Tyler For all his flaws, I still think Harold Bloom is worthwhile. I know he's gotten worse and worse as a critic and as a Shakespeare critic. Especially if you're younger, you need to put aside the Harold Bloom you might think you know and just go to some earlier Bloom. Those short little books he edited, where for a given Shakespeare play he'll collect maybe a dozen essays and write eight or ten pages at the front, those are wonderful. But Bradley, William Hazlitt, the two Goddard volumes, older works, I think are excellent. But again, if you just go, if you can, to a university library, go to the part on the shelf where there's criticism on a particular play and just pull down five to ten titles and don't even select for them and just bring those home. I think you'll learn a lot.Henry So you don't like The Invention of the Human by Bloom?Tyler Its peaks are very good, but there's a lot in it that's embarrassing. I definitely recommend it, but you need to recommend it with the caveat that a lot of it is over the top or bad. It doesn't bother me. But if someone professional or academic tells me they're totally put off by the book, I don't try to talk them out of that impression. I just figure they're a bit hopelessly stuck on judging works by their worst qualities.Henry In 2018, you wrote this, “Shakespeare, by the way, is Girard's most important precursor. Also throw in the New Testament, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and maybe Montaigne.” Tell us what you mean by that.Tyler That was pretty good for me to have written that. Well, in Shakespeare, you have rivalrous behavior. You have mimetic desire. You have the importance of twinning. There's ritual sacrifice in so many of the plays, including the political ones. Girard's title, Violence and the Sacred, also comes from Shakespeare. As you well know, the best Gerard book, Theater of Envy, is fully about Shakespeare. All of Girard is drenched with Shakespeare.Henry I actually only find Girard persuasive on Shakespeare. The further I get away from that, the more I'm like, this is super overstated. I just don't think this is how humans ... I think this is too mono-explanation of humans. When I read the Shakespeare book, I think, wow, I never understood Midsummer Night's Dream until I read Girard.Tyler I think it's a bit like Harold Bloom. There's plenty in Girard you can point to as over the top. I think also for understanding Christianity, he has something quite unique and special and mostly correct. Then on other topics, it's anthropologically very questionable, but still quite stimulating. I would defend it on that basis, as I would Harold Girard.Henry No, I like Gerard, but I feel like the Shakespeare book gets less attention than the others.Tyler That's right. It's the best one and it's also the soundest one. It's the truly essential one.Henry How important was Shakespeare in the development of individualism?Tyler Probably not at all, is my sense. Others know more about the history than I do, but if I think of 17th century England, where some strands of individualist thought come from, well, part of it is coming from the French Huguenots and not from Shakespeare. A lot of it is coming from the Bible and not from Shakespeare. The levelers, John Locke, some of that is coming from English common law and not from Shakespeare. Then there's the ancient world. I don't quite see a strong connection to Shakespeare, but I'd love it if you could talk me into one.Henry My feeling is that the 1570s are the time when diaries begin to become personal records rather than professional records. What you get is a kind of Puritan self-examination. They'll write down, I said this, I did this, and then in the margin they'll put, come back and look at this and make sure you don't do this again. This new process of overhearing yourself is a central part of what Shakespeare's doing in his drawing. I think this is the thing that Bloom gets right, is that as you go through the plays in order, you see the very strong development of the idea that a stock character or someone who's drawing on a tradition of stock characters will suddenly say, oh, I just heard myself say that I'm a villain. Am I a villain? I'm sort of a villain. Maybe I'm not a villain. He develops this great art of self-referential self-development. I think that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare became so important to being a well-educated English person, is that you couldn't really get that in imaginative literature.Tyler I agree with all that, but I'm not sure the 17th century would have been all that different without Shakespeare, in literary terms, yes, but it seemed to me the currents of individualism were well underway. Other forces sweeping down from Europe, from the further north, competition across nations requiring individualism as a way of getting more wealth, the beginnings of economic thought which became individualistic and gave people a different kind of individualistic way of viewing the world. It seems so over-determined. Causally, I wouldn't ascribe much of a role to Shakespeare, but I agree with every sentence you said and what you said.Henry Sure, but you don't think the role of imaginative literature is somehow a fundamental transmission mechanism for all of this?Tyler Well, the Bible, I think, was quite fundamental as literature, not just as theology. So I would claim that, but keep in mind the publication and folio history of Shakespeare, which you probably know better than I do, it's not always well-known at every point in time by everyone.Henry I think it's always well-known by the English.Tyler I don't know, but I don't think it's dominant in the way that, say, Pilgrim's Progress was dominant for a long time.Henry Sure, sure, sure. And you wouldn't then, what would you say about later on, that modern European liberalism is basically the culture of novel reading and that we live in a society that's shaped by that? Do you have the same thing, like it's not causal?Tyler I don't know. That's a tricky question. The true 19th century novel I think of as somewhat historicist, often nationalist, slightly collectivist, certainly not Marxist, but in some ways illiberal. And so many of the truly great novel writers were not so liberal. And the real liberal novels, like Mancini's The Betrothed, which I quite enjoy, but it's somewhat of a slight work, right? And it might be a slight work because it is happy and liberal and open-minded. There's something about the greatest of creators, they tend to be pessimistic or a bit nasty or there's some John Lennon in them, there's Jonathan Swift, Swift, it's complicated. In some ways he's illiberal, but he's considered a Tory and in many ways he's quite an extreme reactionary. And the great age of the novel I don't think of is so closely tied to liberalism.Henry One of the arguments that gets made is like, you only end up with modern European liberalism through a culture where people are just spending a lot of time reading novels and imagining what it is like to be someone else, seeing from multiple different perspectives. And therefore it's less about what is the quote unquote message of the story and more about the habitual practice of thinking pluralistically.Tyler I think I would be much more inclined to ascribe that to reading newspapers and pamphlets than novels. I think of novels as modestly reactionary in their net impact, at least in the 19th century. I think another case in point, not just Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, one of the great novelists, had bad politics, right, was through Germany in the first world war. So if you look at the very greatest novels, there's something a bit problematic about many of their creators. They're not Nazis, they're not Stalinists, but they're not where I'm at either.Henry Now in 2017, a lot of people were complaining about Donald Trump as Julius Caesar and there was some farce about a production, I think it was put on in New York or DC maybe. And you said, no, no, no, he's not Caesar. He's more like a Shakespearean fool because he's the truth teller. What do you think of that view now?Tyler That was a Bloomberg column I wrote, I think in 2017. And I think that's held up quite well. So there's many criticisms of Trump that he's some kind of fascist. I don't think those have held up very well. He is a remarkable orator, coiner of phrase, coiner of insults, teller of truths, combined with a lot of nonsense and just nonsense talk, like the Covfefe tweet or whatever it was. And there's something tragic about Trump that he may well fail even by his own standards. He has a phenomenal sense of humor. I think people have realized that more and more. The fact that his popularity has persisted has forced a lot of people to reexamine just Trump as an individual and to see what a truly unique talent he is, whether you like him as your president or not. And that, I think, is all Shakespearean.Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.Henry Yeah. Here's another quote from the Bloomberg column, “given Shakespeare's brilliance in dramatizing the irrational, one of my biggest fears is that Shakespeare is indeed still a thinker for our times.” Has that come more true in recent years?Tyler I think more true. So from my point of view, the world is getting weirder in some very good ways and in some very bad ways. The arbitrary exercise of power has become more thinkable. You see this from Putin. We may see it from China. In the Middle East, it's happened as well. So the notion also that rulers can be their own worst enemies or human beings can be their own worst enemies. I think we see more when the world is volatile than when the world is stable, almost definitionally.Henry You once said Julius Caesar was an overrated play. Tell us why.Tyler You know, I read it again after I wrote that and it went up in my eyes. But I suppose I still think it's a bit overrated by people who love it. It's one of these mono plays like Macbeth or Othello. It does one thing very, very well. I think the mystical elements in it I had underappreciated on earlier readings and the complexity of the characters I had underappreciated. So I feel I was a little harsh on it. But I just wouldn't put it in the underrated category. Julius Caesar is such a well-known historical figure. It's so easy for that play to become focal. And Brutus and, you know, the stabbing, the betrayal, it's a little too easy for it to become famous. And I guess that's why I think within the world of Shakespeare fans, it still might be a little overrated.Henry It's written at a similar time to Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and I think it gets caught up in the idea that this was a great pivotal moment for Shakespeare. But actually I agree, over the years I've come to think it's really just not the equal of the other plays it's surrounded by.Tyler Yeah, that's still my view. Absolutely. Not the equal of those two, certainly.Henry What is the most underrated play?Tyler I'm not sure how they're all rated. So I used to think Winter's Tale, clearly. But I've heard so many people say it's the most underrated, including you, I think. I don't know if I can believe that anymore. So I think I have to go with The Henriad, because to me that's the greatest thing Shakespeare ever did. And I don't think it's commonly recognized as such. I mean, Hamlet or King Lear would typically be nominated. And those are top, top, top, top. But I'll still go with The Henriad.Henry You are saying Henriad above Hamlet, above Lear, above Twelfth Night.Tyler Maybe it's not fair because you have multiple plays, right? What if, you know, there were three Hamlets? Maybe that would be better. But still, if I have to pick, no one of The Henriad comes close to Hamlet. But if you can consider it as a whole in the evolution of the story, for me it's a clear winner. And it's what I've learned the most from. And a problem with Hamlet, not Shakespeare's fault, but Hamlet became so popular you hear lesser versions of themes and ideas from Hamlet your whole life. It's a bit like seeing Mondrian on the shopping bag. That does not happen, really, with The Henriad. So that has hurt Hamlet, but without meaning it's, you know, a lesser play. King Lear, you have less of that. It's so bleak and tragic. It's harder to put on the shopping bag, so to speak. In that sense, King Lear has held up a bit better than Hamlet has.Henry Why do you admire The Winter's Tale so much? What do you like about it?Tyler There's some mysterious sense of beauty in it that even in other Shakespearean plays I don't feel. And a sense of miracle and wonder, also betrayal and how that is mixed in with the miracle and wonder. Somehow he makes it work. It's quite an unlikely play. And the jealousy and the charge of infidelity I take much more seriously than other readers of the play do. I don't think you can say there's a Straussian reading where she clearly fooled around on the king. But he's not just crazy, either. And there are plenty of hints that something might have happened. It's still probably better to infer it didn't happen. But it's a more ambiguous play than it is typically read as.Henry Yes, someone said to me, ask if he thinks Hermione has an affair. And you're saying maybe.Tyler Again, in a prediction market, I'll bet no, but we're supposed to wonder. We're not supposed to just think the king is crazy.Henry I know you don't like to see it, but my view is that because we believe in this sudden jealousy theory, it's often not staged very well. And that's one reason why it's less popular than it ought to be.Tyler I've only seen it once. I suspect that was true. I saw it, in fact, last year. And the second half of the play was just awful. The first half, you could question. But it was a painful experience. It was just offensively stupid. One of the great regrets of my life is I did not drive up to New York City to see Bergman present his version of Winter's Tale in Swedish. And I'm quite sure that would have been magnificent and that he would have understood it very deeply and very well. That was just stupid of me. This was, I think, in the early 90s. I forget exactly when.Henry I think that's right. And there's a theater library where if you want to go and sit in the archive, you can see it.Tyler I will do that at some point. Part of my worry is I don't believe their promise. I know you can read that promise on the internet, but when you actually try to find the person who can track it down for you and give you access, I have my doubts. If I knew I could do it, I would have done it by now.Henry I'll give you the email because I think I actually found that person. Does Romeo actually love Juliet?Tyler Of course not. It's a play about perversion and obsession and family obligation and rebellion. And there's no love between the two at all. And if you read it with that in mind, once you see that, you can't unsee it. So that's an underrated play. People think, oh, star-crossed teen romance, tragic ending, boo-hoo. That's a terrible reading. It's just a superficial work of art if that's what you think it is.Henry I agree with you, but there are eminent Shakespeare professors who take that opinion.Tyler Well maybe we're smarter than they are. Maybe we know more about other things. You shouldn't let yourself be intimidated by critics. They're highly useful. We shouldn't trash them. We shouldn't think they're all crummy left-wing post-modernists. But at the end of the day, I don't think you should defer to them that much either.Henry Sure. So you're saying Juliet doesn't love Romeo?Tyler Neither loves the other.Henry Okay. Because my reading is that Romeo has a very strong death drive or dark side or whatever.Tyler That's the strong motive in the play is the death drive, yeah.Henry And what that means is that it's not his tragedy, it's her tragedy. She actually is an innocent young girl. Okay, maybe she doesn't love him, it's a crush or it's whatever, but she actually is swept up in the idea of this handsome stranger. She can get out of her family. She's super rebellious. There's that wonderful scene where she plays all sweetness and light to her nurse and then she says, I'm just lying to you all and I'm going to get out of here. Whereas he actually is, he doesn't have any romantic feeling for her. He's really quite a sinister guy.Tyler Those are good points. I fully agree. I still would interpret that as she not loving him, but I think those are all good insights.Henry You've never seen it staged in this way? You've never seen any one?Tyler The best staging is that Baz Luhrmann movie I mentioned, which has an intense set of references to Haitian voodoo in Romeo and Juliet when you watch the movie. The death drive is quite clear. That's the best staging I know of, but I've never seen it on the stage ever. I've seen the Zeffirelli movie, I think another film instance of it, but no, it's the Haitian voodoo version that I like.Henry He makes it seem like they love each other, right?Tyler In a teenage way. I don't feel that he gets it right, but I feel he creates a convincing universe through which the play usefully can be viewed.Henry The Mercutio death, I think, is never going to be better than in that film. What do you like about Antonin Cleopatra?Tyler It's been a long time since I've read that. What a strong character she is. The sway people can exercise over each other. The lines are very good. It's not a top Shakespeare favorite of mine, but again, if anyone else had done it, you would just say this is one of the greatest plays ever, and it is.Henry I think it's going to be much more of a play for our times because many people in the Trump administration are going to have that. They're torn between Rome and Egypt, as it were, and the personal conflicts are going to start getting serious for them, if you like.Tyler There's no better writer or thinker on personal conflict than Shakespeare, right?Henry Yes. Now, you do like Measure for Measure, but you're less keen on All's Well That Ends Well. Is that right?Tyler I love Measure for Measure. To me, it's still somewhat underrated. I think it's risen in status. All's Well That Ends Well, I suspect you need to be good at listening to Shakespeare, which as I've already said, I'm not. It's probably much better than I realize it is for that reason. I'm not sure on the printed page it works all that well.Henry Yeah. That's right. I think it's one of the most important plays. Why? Because I think there are two or three basic factors about Shakespeare's drama, which is like the story could often branch off in different directions. You often get the sense that he could swerve into a different genre. The point Samuel Johnson made about whenever someone's running off to the tavern, someone else is being buried, right? And a lot of the time he comes again and again to the same types of situations, the same types of characters, the same types of family set up. And he ends the plays in different ways and he makes it fall out differently. And I think Helena is very representative of a lot of these facets. Everyone thinks she's dead, but she's not dead. Sometimes it looks like it's going badly for her when actually it's going well. No one in the play ever really has an honest insight into her motives. And there comes a point, I think, when just the overall message of Shakespeare's work collectively is things go very wrong very quickly. And if you can get to some sort of happy ending, you should take it. You should be pragmatic and say, OK, this isn't the perfect marriage. This isn't the perfect king. But you know what? We could be in a civil war. Everyone could be dead. All's well that ends well. That's good advice. Let's take it.Tyler I should reread it. Number one in my reread pile right now is Richard II, which I haven't read in a long time. And there's a new biography out about Richard II. And I'm going to read the play and the biography more or less in conjunction. And there's a filming of Richard II that I probably won't enjoy, but I'll try. And I'm just going to do that all together, probably sometime over this break. But I'll have all's well that ends well is next on my reread list. You should always have a Shakespeare to reread list, right?Henry Always. Oh, of course. Is Shakespeare a good economic thinker?Tyler Well, he's a great thinker. I would say he's better than a good economic thinker. He understands the motive of money, but it's never just the motive of money. And Shakespeare lowers the status of economic thinking, I would say, overall, in a good way. He's better than us.Henry What are your thoughts on The Merchant of Venice?Tyler Quite underrated. People have trouble with it because it is very plausibly anti-Semitic. And everyone has to preface any praise they give it with some kind of disavowal or whatever. The way I read the play, which could be wrong, but it's actually more anti-anti-Semitic than it is anti-Semitic. So the real cruel mean people are those who torment the Jew. I'm not saying Shakespeare was not in some ways prejudiced against Jews and maybe other groups, but actually reading it properly should make people more tolerant, not because they're reacting against Shakespeare's anti-Semitism, but because the proper message of the play understood at a deeper level is toleration.Henry You teach a law and literature class, I think.Tyler Well, I did for 20 years, but I don't anymore.Henry Did you teach Merchant of Venice?Tyler I taught it two or three times, yes.Henry How did your students react to it?Tyler Whenever I taught them Shakespeare, which was actually not that much, they always liked it, but they didn't love it. And there's some version of Shakespeare you see on the screen when it's a decent but not great filmed adaptation where there's the mechanics of the plot and you're held in suspense and then there's an ending. And I found many of them read Shakespeare in those terms and they quite enjoyed it, but somehow they didn't get it. And I think that was true for Merchant of Venice as well. I didn't feel people got hung up on the anti-Semitism point. They could put that aside and just treat it as a play, but still I didn't feel that people got it.Henry Should we read Shakespeare in translation?Tyler Well, many people have to. I've read some of the Schlegel translations. I think they're amazing. My wife, Natasha, who grew up in the Soviet Union, tells me there are very good Russian language translations, which I certainly believe her. The Schlegels are different works. They're more German romantic, as you might expect, but that's fine, especially if you know the original. My guess is there are some other very good translations. So in that qualified way, the translations, a few of them can be quite valuable. I worry that at some point we'll all need to read it in some sort of translation, as Chaucer is mostly already true for Chaucer. You probably don't have to read Chaucer in translation, but I do.Henry I feel like I shouldn't read it in translation, I think.Tyler But you do, right? Or you don't?Henry No, I read the original. I make myself do the original.Tyler I just can't understand the original well enough.Henry But I put the time in when I was young, and I think you retain a sense of it. Do you think, though, if we read, let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.Henry I'd like to read some of that. That would be quite an exciting project.Tyler Maybe it's been done. I don't know. But just an Americanized Hollywood version, like, no, that's just a negative. It's destructive.Henry Now, you're very interested in the 17th century, which I think is when we first get steady economic growth, East India Company, England is settling in America.Tyler Political parties. Some notion of the rule of law. A certain theory of property rights. Very explicit individualism. Social contract theories. You get Hobbes, Isaac Newton, calculus. We could go on. Some people would say, well, Westphalia, you get the modern nation state. That to me is a vaguer date to pin that on. But again, it's a claim you can make of a phenomenal century. People aren't that interested in it anymore, I think.Henry How does Shakespeare fit into this picture?Tyler Well, if you think of the years, if you think of the best ones, they start, like what, 1598, 1599. And then by 1600, they're almost all just wonderful. He's a herald. I don't think he's that causal. But he's a sign, the first totally clear sign that all the pieces have fallen into place. And we know the 17th century gave us our greatest thinker. And in terms of birth, not composition, it gave us our greatest composer, Bach.Henry So we can't have Shakespeare without all of this economic and philosophic and political activity. He's sort of, those things are necessary conditions for what he's doing.Tyler He needed the 16th century, and there's some very good recent books on how important the 16th century was for the 17th century. So I think more and more, as I read more, I'll come to see the roots of the 17th and the 16th century. And Shakespeare is reflecting that by bridging the two.Henry What are the recent books that you recommend about the 16th century?Tyler Oh, I forget the title, but there's this book about Elizabethan England, came out maybe three or four years ago, written by a woman. And it just talks about markets and commerce and creativity, surging during that time. In a way, obvious points, but she put them together better than anyone else had. And there's this other new German book about the 16th century. It's in my best of the year list that I put up on Marginal Revolution, and I forget the exact title, but I've been reading that slowly. And that's very good. So I expect to make further intellectual moves in that direction.Henry Was Shakespeare anti-woke?Tyler I don't know what that means in his context. He certainly understands the real truths are deeper, but to pin the word anti on him is to make him smaller. And like Harold Bloom, I will refuse to do that.Henry You don't see some sense in which ... A lot of people have compared wokeness to the Reformation, right? I mean, it's a kind of weak comparison.Tyler Yes, but only some strands of it. You wouldn't say Luther was woke, right?Henry But you don't see some way in which Shakespeare is, not in an anti way, in a complicated way, but like a reaction against some of these forces in the way that Swift would be a reaction against certain forces in his time.Tyler Well I'm not even sure what Shakespeare's religion was. Some people claim he was Catholic. To me that's plausible, but I don't know of any clear evidence. He does not strike me as very religious. He might be a lapsed Catholic if I had to say. I think he simply was always concerned with trying to view and present things in a deeper manner and there were so many forces he could have been reacting against with that one. I don't know exactly what it was in the England of his time that specifically he was reacting against. If someone says, oh, it was the strand of Protestant thought, I would say fine, it might have been that. A la Peter Thiel, couldn't you say it's over determined and name 47 other different things as well?Henry Now, if you were talking to rationalists, effective altruists, people from Silicon Valley, all these kinds of groups, would you say to them, you should read Shakespeare, you should read fiction, or would you just say, you're doing great, don't worry that you're missing out on this?Tyler Well, I'm a little reluctant to just tell people you should do X. I think what I've tried to do is to be an example of doing X and hope that example is somewhat contagious. Other people are contagious on me, as for instance, you have been. That's what I like to do. Now, it's a question, if someone needs a particular contagion, does that mean it's high marginal value or does it mean, in some sense, they're immue from the bug and you can't actually get them interested? It can go either way. Am I glad that Peter Singer has specialized in being Peter Singer, even though I disagree with much of it? I would say yes. Peter had his own homecoming. As far as I know, it was not Shakespearean, but when he wrote that book about the history of Vienna and his own family background, that was in a sense Peter doing his version of turning Shakespearean. It was a good book and it deepened his thought, but at the end of the day, I also see he's still Peter Singer, so I don't know. I think the Shakespearean perspective itself militates a bit against telling people they should read Shakespeare.Henry Sure. Patrick Collison today has tweeted about, I think, 10 of the great novels that he read this year. It's a big, long tweet with all of his novels.Tyler Yeah, it's wonderful.Henry Yeah, it's great. At the end, he basically says the reason to read them is just that they're great. Appreciation of excellence is a good thing for its own sake. You're not going to wrench a utilitarian benefit out of this stuff. Is that basically your view?Tyler I fully agree with that, but he might slightly be underrating the utilitarian benefits. If you read a particular thing, whatever it is, it's a good way of matching with other people who will deepen you. If it's Shakespeare, or if it's science fiction, or if it's economics, I think there's this big practical benefit from the better matching. I think, actually, Patrick himself, over time in his life, he will have a different set of friends, somewhat, because he wrote that post, and that will be good.Henry There's a utilitarian benefit that we both love Bleak House, therefore we can talk about it. This just opens up a lot of conversation and things for us that we wouldn't otherwise get.Tyler We're better friends, and we're more inclined to chat with each other, do this podcast, because we share that. That's clearly true in our case. I could name hundreds of similar cases, myself, people I know. That's important. So much of life is a matching problem, which includes matching to books, but also, most importantly, matching to people.Henry You're what? You're going to get better matching with better books, because Bleak House is such a great book. You're going to get better opportunities for matching.Tyler Of course, you'll understand other books better. There's something circular in that. I get it. A lot of value is circular, and the circle is how you cash in, not leaving the circle, so that's fine.Henry You don't think there's a ... I mean, some of the utilitarian benefits that are claimed like it gives you empathy, it improves your EQ or whatever, I think this is all complete rubbish.Tyler I'd love to see the RCTs, but in the prediction markets, I'll bet no. But again, I have an open mind. If someone had evidence, they could sway me, but I doubt it. I don't see it.Henry But I do think literature is underrated as a way of thinking.Tyler Yes, absolutely, especially by people we are likely to know.Henry Right. And that is quite a utilitarian benefit, right? If you can get yourself into that mindset, that is directly useful.Tyler I agree. The kind of career I've had, which is too complicated to describe for those of you who don't know it, but I feel I could not have had it without having read a lot of fiction.Henry Right. And I think that would be true for a lot of people, even if they don't recognize it directly in their own lives, right?Tyler Yes. In Silicon Valley, you see this huge influence of Lord of the Rings. Yes. And that's real, I think. It's not feigned, and that's also a great book.Henry One of the best of the 20th century, no doubt.Tyler Absolutely. And the impact it has had on people still has. It's an example of some classics get extremely elevated, like Shakespeare, Austen, and also Tolkien. It's one of them that just keeps on rising.Henry Ayn Rand is quite influential.Tyler Increasingly so. And that has held up better than I ever would have thought. Depends on the book. It's complicated, but yes, you have to say, held up better than one ever would have thought.Henry Are you going to go and do a reread?Tyler I don't think I can. I feel the newspaper is my reread of Atlas Shrugged, that suffices.Henry Is GPT good at Shakespeare, or LLMs generally?Tyler They're very useful for fiction, I've found. It was fantastic for reading Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. I have never used them for Shakespeare, not once. That's an interesting challenge, because it's an earlier English. There's a depth in Shakespeare that might exceed current models. I'd love to see a project at some point in time to train AI for Shakespeare the way some people are doing it for Math Olympiads. But finding the human graders would be tough, though not impossible. You should be one of them. I would love that. I hope some philanthropist makes that happen.Henry Agreed. We're here, and we're ready.Tyler Yes, very ready.Henry What do you think about Shakespeare's women?Tyler The best women in all of fiction. They're marvelous, and they're attractive, and they're petulant, and they're romantic, and they're difficult, and they're stubborn, or whatever you want, it's in there. Just phenomenal. It's a way in which Shakespeare, again, I don't want to say anti-woke, but he just gives you a much deeper, better vision than the wokes would give you. Each one is such a distinctive voice. Yeah, fantastic. In a funny way, he embodies a lot of woke insights. The ways in which gender becomes malleable in different parts of stories is very advanced for his time.Henry It's believable also. The thing that puzzles me, so believable. What puzzles me is he's so polyphonic, and he represents that way of thinking so well, but I get the sense that John Stuart Mill, who wrote the Bentham essay and everything, just wasn't that interested in Shakespeare relative to the other things he was reading.Tyler He did write a little bit on Shakespeare, didn't he? But not much. But it wasn't wonderful. It was fine, but not like the Bentham Coleridge.Henry I think I've seen it in letters where he's like, oh, Shakespeare, pretty good. This, to me, is a really weird gap in the history of literature.Tyler But this does get to my point, where I don't think Shakespeare was that important for liberalism or individualism. The people who were obsessed with Shakespeare, as you know, were the German romantics, with variants, but were mostly illiberal or non-liberal. That also, to me, makes sense.Henry That's a good point. That's a good challenge. My last question is, you do a lot of talent spotting and talent assessing. How do you think about Shakespeare's career?Tyler I feel he is someone I would not have spotted very well. I feel bad about that. We don't know that much about him. As you well know, people still question if Shakespeare was Shakespeare. That's not my view. I'm pretty orthodox on the matter. But what the signs would have been in those early plays that he would have, say, by so far have exceeded Marlowe or even equaled Marlowe, I definitely feel I would have had a Zoom call with him and said, well, send me a draft, and read the early work, and concluded he would be like second-tier Marlowe, and maybe given him a grant for networking reasons, totally missed the boat. That's how I assess, how I would have assessed Shakespeare at the time, and that's humbling.Henry Would you have been good at assessing other writers of any period? Do you think there are other times when you would have?Tyler If I had met young Thomas Mann, I think there's a much greater chance I would have been thrilled. If I had met young Johann Sebastian Bach, I think there's a strong chance I would have been thrilled. Now, music is different. It's like chess. You can excel at quite a young age. But there's something about the development of Shakespeare where I think it is hard to see where it's headed early on. And it's the other question, how would I have perceived Shakespeare's work ethic? There's different ways you could interpret the biography here. But the biography of Bach, or like McCartney, clearly just obsessed with work ethic. You could not have missed it if you met young Bach, I strongly suspect. But Shakespeare, it's not clear to me you would see the work ethic early on or even later on.Henry No, no. I agree with that, actually.Tyler Same with Goethe. If I met early Goethe, my guess is I would have felt, well, here's the next Klopstock, which is fine, worthy of a grand. But Goethe was far more than that. And he always had these unfinished works. And you would, oh, come on, you're going to finish this one. Like you'd see Werther. OK, you made a big splash. But is your second novel just going to bomb? I think those would have been my hesitations. But I definitely would have funded Goethe as the next Klopstock, but been totally wrong and off base.Henry Right. And I think the thing I took away from the A.N. Wilson biography, which you also enjoyed recently, was I was amazed just how much time Goethe didn't spend working. Like I knew he wasn't always working, but there was so much wasted time in his life.Tyler Yes, but I do wonder with that or any biography, and I don't mean this as a criticism of Wilson, I think we know much less than we think we do about earlier times in general. So he could have been doing things that don't turn up in any paperwork. Sure, sure, sure. So I'm not sure how lazy he was, but I would just say, unlike Bach or say Paul McCartney, it's not evident that he was the world's hardest worker.Henry And Mozart, would you have? How do you feel about Mozart's early career?Tyler Well, Mozart is so exceptional, so young, it's just very easy to spot. I don't I don't even think there's a puzzle there unless you're blind. Now, I don't love Mozart before, I don't know, like the K-330s maybe, but still as a player, even just as a lower quality composer, I think you would bet the house on Mozart at any age where you could have met him and talked to him.Henry So you think K-100s, you can see the beginnings of the great symphonies, the great concertos?Tyler Well, I would just apply the Cowen test at how young in age was this person trying at all? And that would just dominate and I wouldn't worry too much about how good it was. And if I heard Piano Concerto No. 9, which is before K-330, I'm pretty sure that's phenomenal. But even if I hadn't heard that, it's like this guy's trying. He's going to be on this amazing curve. Bet the house on Mozart. It's a no-brainer. If you don't do that, you just shouldn't be doing talent at all. He's an easy case. He's one of the easiest cases you can think of.Henry Tyler Cowen, this was great. Thank you very much.Tyler Thank you very much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

“A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!” A Christmas Carol is a huge success and Dickens is an international celebrity. There's lots of money coming in – Bleak House, Hard Times, David Copperfield all do well - but he has a big family and a lavish lifestyle to fund, as well as his Home for Homeless Women. Plus, there's trouble in his marriage when Dickens' eye is caught by the turn of a pretty ankle.Listen to Legacy on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting wondery.com/links/legacy now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Who else in literature today could be more interesting to interview than Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans, as well as the author of popular reviews and the sweater weather Substack? We talked about so much, including: Chopin and who plays him best; why there isn't more tennis in fiction; writing fiction on a lab bench; being a scientific critic; what he has learned working as a publisher; negative reviews; boring novels; Jane Austen. You'll also get Brandon's quick takes on Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Franzen, Lionel Trilling, György Lukács, and a few others; the modern critics he likes reading; and the dead critics he likes reading.Brandon also talked about how his new novel is going to be different from his previous novels. He told me:I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation.I have enjoyed Brandon's fiction (several people I recommend him to have loved Real Life) and I think he's one of the best critics working today. I was delighted to interview him.Oh, and he's a Dickens fan!Transcript (AI produced, lightly formatted by me)Henry: Today I am talking to Brandon Taylor, the author of Real Life, Filthy Animals, and The Late Americans. Brandon is also a notable book reviewer and of course he writes a sub stack called Sweater Weather. Brandon, welcome.Brandon: Yeah, thanks for having me.Henry: What did you think of the newly discovered Chopin waltz?Brandon: Um, I thought, I mean, I remember very vividly waking up that day and there being a new waltz, but it was played by Lang Lang, which I did not. I don't know that, like, he's my go-to Chopin interpreter. But I don't know, I was, I was excited by it. Um, I don't know, it was in a world sort of dominated by this ethos of like nothing new under the sun. It felt wonderfully novel. I don't know that it's like one of Chopin's like major, I don't know that it's like major. Um, it's sort of definitively like middle of the road, middle tier Chopin, I think. But I enjoyed it. I played it like 20 times in a row.Henry: I like those moments because I like, I like it when people get surprised into realizing that like, it's not fixed what we know about the world and you can even actually get new Chopin, right?Brandon: I mean, it felt a little bit like when Beyonce did her first big surprise drop. It was like new Chopin just dropped. Oh my God. All my sort of classical music nerd group texts were buzzing. It felt like a real moment, actually.Henry: And I think it gives people a sense of what art was like in the past. You can go, oh my God, new Chopin. Like, yes, those feelings are not just about modern culture, right? That used to happen with like, oh my God, a new Jane Austen book is here.Brandon: Oh, I know. Well, I mean, I was like reading a lot of Emile Zola up until I guess late last year. And at some point I discovered that he was like an avid amateur photographer. And in like the French Ministry of Culture is like digitized a lot of his glass plate negatives. And one of them is like a picture that Zola has taken of Manet's portrait of him. And it's just like on a floor somewhere. Like he's like sort of taken this like very rickety early camera machinery to this place where this portrait is and like taken a picture of it. It's like, wow. Like you can imagine that like Manet's like, here's this painting I did of you. And Zola's like, ah, yes, I'm going to take a picture to commemorate it. And so I sort of love that.Henry: What other of his photos do you like?Brandon: Well, there's one of him on a bike riding toward the camera. That's really delightful to me because it like that impulse is so recognizable to me. There are all these photos that he took of his mistress that were also just like, you can like, there are also photographs of his children and of his family. And again, those feel so like recognizable to me. He's not even like a very good photographer. It's just that he was taking pictures of his like daily life, except for his kind of stunt photos where he's riding the bike. And it's like, ah, yes, Zola, he would have been great with an iPhone camera.Henry: Which pianists do you like for Chopin?Brandon: Which pianists do I love for Chopin? I like Pollini a lot. Pollini is amazing. Pollini the elder, not Pollini the younger. The younger is not my favorite. And he died recently, Maurizio Pollini. He died very recently. Maybe he's my favorite. I love, I love Horowitz. Horowitz is wonderful at Chopin. But it's obviously it's like not his, you know, you don't sort of go to Horowitz for Chopin, I guess. But I love his Chopin. And sometimes Trifonov. Trifonov has a couple Chopin recordings that I really, really like. I tend not to love Trifonov as much.Henry: Really?Brandon: I know it's controversial. It's very controversial. I know. Tell me why. I, I don't know. He's just a bit of a banger to me. Like, like he's sort of, I don't know, his playing is so flashy. And he feels a bit like a, like a, like a keyboard basher to me sometimes.Henry: But like, do you like his Bach?Brandon: You know, I haven't done a deep dive. Maybe I should do a sort of more rigorous engagement with Trifonov. But yeah, I don't, he's just not, he doesn't make my heart sing. I think he's very good at Bach.Henry: What about a Martha Argerich?Brandon: Oh, I mean, she's incredible. She's incredible. I bought that sort of big orange box out of like all of her, her sort of like masterwork recordings. And she's incredible. She has such feel for Chopin. But she doesn't, I think sometimes people can make Chopin feel a little like, like treacly, like, like a little too sweet. And she has this perfect understanding of his like rhythm and his like inner nuances and like the crispness in his compositions. Like she really pulls all of that out. And I love her. She has such, obviously great dexterity, but like a real sort of exquisite sensitivity to the rhythmic structures of Chopin.Henry: You listen on CD?Brandon: No, I listen on vinyl and I listen on streaming, but mostly vinyl. Mostly vinyl? Yeah, mostly vinyl. I know it's very annoying. No, no, no, no, no.Henry: Which, what are the good speakers?Brandon: I forget where I bought these speakers from, but I sort of did some Googling during the pandemic of like best speakers to use. I have a U-Turn Audio, U-Turn Orbital record player. And so I was just looking for good speakers that were compatible and like wouldn't take up a ton of space in my apartment because I was moving to New York and had a very tiny, tiny apartment. So they're just from sort of standard, I forget the brand, but they've served me well these past few years.Henry: And do you like Ólafsson? He's done some Chopin.Brandon: Who?Henry: Víkingur Ólafsson. He did the Goldbergs this year, but he's done some Chopin before. I think he's quite good.Brandon: Oh, that Icelandic guy?Henry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the glasses? That's right. And the very neat hair.Brandon: Yes. Oh, he's so chic. He's so chic. I don't know his Chopin. I know his, there's another series that he did somewhat recently that I'm more familiar with. But he is really good. He has good Beethoven, Víkingur.Henry: Yeah.Brandon: And normally I don't love Beethoven, but like—Henry: Really? Why? Why? What's wrong with Beethoven? All these controversial opinions about music.Brandon: I'm not trying to have controversial opinions. I think I'm, well, I'm such a, I'm such, I mean, I'm just like a dumb person. And so like, I don't, I don't have a really, I feel like I don't have the robust understanding to like fully appreciate Beethoven and all of his sort of like majesty. And so maybe I've just not heard good Beethoven and I need to sort of go back and sort of get a real understanding of it. But I just tend not to like it. It feels like, I don't know, like grandma's living room music to me sometimes.Henry: What other composers do you enjoy?Brandon: Oh, of course.Henry: Or other music generally, right?Brandon: Rachmaninoff is so amazing to me. There was, of course, Bach. Brahms. Oh, I love Brahms, but like specifically the intermezzi. I love the intermezzi. I recently fell in love with, oh, his name is escaping me now, but he, I went to a concert and they sort of did a Brahms intermezzi. And they also played this, I think he was an Austrian composer. And his music was like, it wasn't experimental, but it was like quite, I had a lot of dissonance in it. And I found it like really interesting and like really moving actually. And so I did a sort of listening to that constantly. Oh, I forget his name. But Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, love Rachmaninoff. I have a friend who says that Rachmaninoff writes Negro spirituals. And I love that theory that Rachmaninoff's music is like the music of the slaves. It just, I don't know. I really, that really resonates with me spiritually. Which pieces, which Rachmaninoff symphonies, concertos? Yeah, the concertos. But like specifically, like I have a friend who said that Rach II sounded to her like the sort of spiritual cry of like the slaves. And we were at like a hangout with like mostly Black people. And she like stopped playing like Juvenile, like the rapper. And she put on Rach II. And we just like sat there and listened. And it did feel like something powerful had entered the room. Yeah, but he's my guy. I secretly really, really love him. I like Liszt, but like it really depends on the day and the time for him. He makes good folk music, Liszt. I love his folky, his folk era.Henry: What is it that you enjoy about tennis?Brandon: What do I enjoy about tennis? I love the, I love not thinking. I love being able to hit the ball for hours on end and like not think. And like, it's the one part of my life. It's the one time in my life where my experience is like totally unstructured. And so like this morning, I went to a 7am drill and play class where you do drills for an hour. Then you play doubles for an hour. And during that first hour of drills, I was just like hitting the ball. I was at the mercy of the guy feeding us the ball. And I didn't have a single thought about books or literature or like the status of my soul or like the nature of American democracy. It was just like, did I hit that ball? Well, did I hit it kind of off center? Were there tingles in my wrist? Yes or no. Like it was just very, very grounding in the moment. And I think that is what I love about it. Do you like to watch tennis? Oh, yeah, constantly. Sometimes when I'm in a work meeting, the Zoom is here and the tennis is like playing in the background. Love tennis, love to watch, love to play, love to think about, to ponder. Who are the best players for you? Oh, well, the best players, my favorite players are Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Stanislas Wawrinka, love Wawrinka. And I was a really big Davydenko head back in the day. Nikolai Davydenko was this Russian player who had, he was like a metronome. He just like would not miss. Yeah, those are my favorites. Right now, the guy I'm sort of rooting for who's still active is Kasper Rud, who's this Norwegian guy. And I love him because he just looks like some guy. Like he just looks like he should be in a seminary somewhere. I love it. I love, I love his normalness. He just looks like an NPC. And I'm drawn to that in a tennis player.Henry: It's hard to think of tennis in novels. Why is that?Brandon: Well, I think a lot of people don't, well, I think part of it is a lot of novelists. Part of it is a lot of novelists don't play sports. I think that they, at least Americans, I can't speak for other parts of the world, but in America, a lot of novelists are not doing sports. So that's one. And I think two, like, you know, like with anything, I think that tennis has not been subjected to the same schemes of narrativization that like other things are. And so like it's, a lot of novelists just like don't see a sort of readily dramatizable thing in tennis. Even though if you like watch tennis and like listen to tennis commentary, they are always erecting narratives. They're like, oh yeah, she's been on a 19 match losing streak. Is this where she turns it around? And to me, tennis is like a very literary sport because tennis is one of those sports where it's all about the matchup. It's like your forehand to my backhand, like no matter how well I play against everyone else, like it's you and me locked in the struggle. And like that to me feels incredibly literary. And it is so tied to your individual psychology as well. Like, I don't know, I endlessly am fascinated by it. And indeed, I got an idea for a tennis novel the other day that I'm hopefully going to write in three to five years. We'll see.Henry: Very good. How did working in a lab influence your writing?Brandon: Well, somewhat directly and materially in the case of my first book, because I wrote it while I was working in the lab and it gave me weirdly like time and structure to do that work where I would be pipetting. And then while I was waiting for an assay or a experiment to run or finish, I would have 30 minutes to sit down and write.Henry: So you were writing like at the lab bench?Brandon: Oh, yeah, absolutely. One thousand percent. I would like put on Philip Glass's score for the hours and then just like type while my while the centrifuge was running or whatever. And and so like there's that impression sort of baked into the first couple books. And then I think more, I guess, like spiritually or broadly, it influenced my work because it taught me how to think and how to organize time and how to organize thoughts and how to sort of pursue long term, open ended projects whose results may or may not, you know, fail because of something that you did or maybe you didn't do. And that's just the nature of things. Who knows? But yeah, I think also just like discipline, the discipline to sort of clock in every day. And to sort of go to the coalface and do the work. And that's not a thing that is, you know. That you just get by working in a lab, but it's certainly something that I acquired working in a lab.Henry: Do you think it's affected your interest in criticism? Because there's there are certain types of critic who seem to come from a scientific background like Helen Vendler. And there's something something about the sort of the precision and, you know, that certain critics will refuse to use critical waffle, like the human condition. And they won't make these big, vague gestures to like how this can change the way we view society. They're like, give me real details. Give me real like empirical criticism. Do you think this is — are you one of these people?Brandon: Yeah, yeah, I think I'm, you know, I'm all about what's on the page. I'm all about the I'm not gonna go rooting in your biography for not gonna go. I'm not I'm not doing that. It's like what you brought to me on the page is what you've brought to me. And that is what I will be sort of coming over. I mean, I think so. I mean, very often when critics write about my work, or when people respond to my work, they sort of describe it as being put under a microscope. And I do think like, that is how I approach literature. It's how I approach life. If there's ever a problem or a question put to me, I just sort of dissect it and try to get down to its core bits and its core parts. And and so yeah, I mean, if that is a scientific way of doing things, that's certainly how I but also I don't know any other way to think like that's sort of that's sort of how I was trained to think about stuff. You've been to London. I have. What did you think of it? The first time I didn't love it. The second and third times I had a good time, but I felt like London didn't love me back. London is the only place on earth I've ever been where people have had a hard time understanding me like I like it's the only place where I've like attempted to order food or a drink or something in a store or a cafe or a restaurant. And the waiters like turned to my like British hosts and asked them to translate. And that is an entirely foreign experience for me. And so London and I have like a very contentious relationship, I would say.Henry: Now, you've just published four classic novels.Brandon: Yes.Henry: George Gissing, Edith Wharton, Victor Hugo and Sarah Orne Jewett. Why did you choose those four writers, those four titles?Brandon: Oh, well, once we decided that we were going to do a classics imprint, you know, then it's like, well, what are we going to do? And I'm a big Edith Wharton fan. And there are all of these Edith Wharton novels that Americans don't really know about. They know Edith Wharton for The Age of Innocence. And if they are an English major, they maybe know her for The House of Mirth. Or like maybe they know her for The Custom of the Country if they're like really into reading. But then they sort of think of her as a novelist of the 19th century. And she's writing all of these books set in the 1920s and about the 1920s. And so it felt important to show people like, oh, this is a writer who died a lot later than you think that she did. And whose creative output was, you know, pretty, who was like a contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald in a lot of ways. Like, these books are being published around the same time as The Great Gatsby. And to sort of, you know, bring attention to a part of her over that, like, people don't know about. And like, that's really exciting to me. And Sarah Orne Jewett, I mean, I just really love The Country of the Pointed Furs. I love that book. And I found it in like in a 10 cents bin at a flea market one time. And it's a book that people have tried to bring back. And there have been editions of it. But it just felt like if we could get two people who are really cool to talk about why they love that book, we could sort of have like a real moment. And Sarah Orne Jewett was like a pretty big American writer. Like she was a pretty significant writer. And she was like really plugged in and she's not really read or thought about now. And so that felt like a cool opportunity as well to sort of create a very handsome edition of this book and to sort of talk about a bit why she matters. And the guessing of it all is we were going to do New Grub Street. And then my co-editor thought, well, The Odd Women, I think, is perhaps more relevant to our current moment than New Grub Street necessarily. And it would sort of differentiate us from the people, from the presses that are doing reissues of New Grub Street, because there's just been a new edition of that book. And nobody in America really knows The Odd Women. And it's a really wonderful novel. It's both funny and also like really biting in its satire and commentary. So we thought, oh, it'll be fun to bring this writer to Americans who they've never heard of in a way that will speak to them in a lot of ways. And the Victor Hugo, I mean, you know, there are Hugos that people know all about. And then there are Hugos that no one knows about. And Toilers of the Sea was a passion project for my co-editor. She'd read it in Guernsey. That's where she first discovered that book. And it really meant a lot to her. And I read it and really loved it. I mean, it was like Hugo at his most Hugo. Like, it's a very, it's a very, like, it's a very abundant book. And it's so wild and strange and changeful. And so I was like, oh, that seems cool. Let's do it. Let's put out Toilers of the Sea. So that's a bit of why we picked each one.Henry: And what have you learned from being on the other side of things now that you're the publisher?Brandon: So much. I've learned so much. And indeed, I just, I was just asked by my editor to do the author questionnaire for the novel that I have coming out next. And I thought, yes, I will do this. And I will do it immediately. Because now I know, I know how important these are. And I know how early and how far in advance these things need to be locked in to make everyone's life easier. I think I've learned a bit about the sometimes panicked scramble that happens to get a book published. I've learned about how hard it is to wrangle blurbs. And so I think I'm a little more forgiving of my publishers. But they've always been really great to me. But now I'm like, oh, my gosh, what can I do for you? How can I help you make this publication more of a success?Henry: Do you think that among literary people generally, there's a lack of appreciation of what business really involves in some of the senses you're talking about? I feel like I see a lot of either indifferent or hostile attitudes towards business or commerce or capitalism, late stage capitalism or whatever. And I sometimes look at it and I'm like, I don't think you guys really know what it takes to just like get stuff done. You know what I mean? Like, it's a lot of grind. I don't think it's a big nasty thing. It's just a lot of hard work, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, 1000%. Or if it's not a sort of misunderstanding, but a sort of like disinterest in like, right, like a sort of high minded, like, oh, that's just the sort of petty grimy commerce of it all. I care about the beauty and the art. And it's just like, friend, we need booksellers to like, sell this. I mean, to me, the part of it that is most to me, like the most illustrative example of this in my own life is that when I first heard how my editor was going to be describing my book, I was like, that's disgusting. That's horrible. Why are you talking about my race? Why are you talking about like my sexuality? Like, this is horrible. Why can't you just like talk about the plot of the book? Like, what is the matter with you? And then I had, you know, I acquired and edited this book called Henry Henry, which is a queer contemporary retelling of the Henry ad. And it's a wonderful novel. It's so delightful. And I had to go into our sales conference where we are talking to the people whose job it is to sell that book into bookstores to get bookstores to take that book up. And I had to write this incredibly craven description of this novel. And as I was writing it, I was like, I hope Alan, the author, I hope Alan never sees this. He never needs to hear how I'm talking about this book. And as I was doing it, I was like, I will never hold it against my editor again for writing this like, cheesy, cringy copy. Because it's like you, like, you so believe in the art of that book, so much that you want it to give it every fighting chance in the marketplace. And you need to arm your sales team with every weapon of commerce they need to get that book to succeed so that when readers pick it up, they can appreciate all of the beautiful and glorious art of it. And I do think that people, you know, like, people don't really kind of, people don't really understand that. And I do think that part of that is publishing's fault, because they are, they've been rather quick to elide the distinctions between art and commerce. And so like publishing has done a not great job of sort of giving people a lot of faith in its understanding that there's a difference between art and commerce. But yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of misapprehension out there about like, what goes into getting bookstores to acquire that book.Henry: What are the virtues of negative book reviews?Brandon: I was just on a panel about this. I mean, I mean, hopefully a negative book review, like a positive review, or like any review, will allow a reader or the audience to understand the book in a new way, or to create a desire in the reader to pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree or that they, that they have something to argue with or push against as they're reading. You know, when I'm writing a negative review, when I'm writing a review that I feel is trending toward negative, I should say, I always try to like, I don't know, I try to always remember that like, this is just me presenting my experience of the book and my take of the book. And hopefully that will be productive or useful for whoever reads the review. And hopefully that my review won't be the only thing that they read and that they will in fact, go pick up the book and see if they agree or disagree. It's hopefully it creates interesting and potentially divergent dialogues or discourses around the text. And fundamentally, I think not every critic feels this way. Not every piece of criticism is like this. But the criticism I write, I'm trying to create the conditions that will refer the reader always back to the text, be it through quotation, be it through, they're so incensed by my argument that they're going to go read the book themselves and then like, yell at me. Like, I think that that's wonderful, but like, always keeping the book at the center. But I think a negative review can, you know, it can start a conversation. It can get people talking about books, which in this culture, this phase of history feels like a win. And hopefully it can sort of be a corrective sometimes to less genuine or perceived less genuine discourses that are existing around the book.Henry: I think even whether or not it's a question of genuine, it's for me, it's just a question of if you tell people this book is good and they give up their time and money and they discover that it's trash, you've done a really bad thing to that person. And like, there might be dozens of them compared to this one author who you've been impolite to or whatever. And it's just a question of don't lie in book, right?Brandon: Well, yeah. I mean, hopefully people are honest, but I do feel sometimes that there is, there's like a lack of honesty. And look, I think that being like, well, I mean, maybe you'll love this. I don't love it, you know, but at least present your opinion in that way. At least be like, you know, there are many interpretations of this thing. Here's my interpretation. Maybe you'll feel differently or something like that. But I do think that people feel that there have been a great number of dishonest book reviews. Maybe there have been, maybe there have not been. I certainly have read some reviews I felt were dishonest about books that I have read. And I think that the negative book review does feel a bit like a corrective in a lot of ways, both, you know, justified or unjustified. People are like, finally, someone's being honest about this thing. But yeah, I think it's interesting. I think it's all really, I think it's all fascinating. I do think that there are some reviews though, that are negative and that are trying to be about the book, but are really about the author. There are some reviews that I have read that have been ostensibly about reviewing a text, but which have really been about, you don't like that person and you have decided to sort of like take an axe to them. And that to me feels not super productive. I wouldn't do it, but other people find it useful.Henry: As in, you can tell that from the review or you know that from background information?Brandon: I mean, this is all projection, of course, but like there have been some reviews where I've read, like, for example, some of the Lauren Oyler reviews, I think some of the Lauren Oyler reviews were negative and were exclusively about the text. And they sort of took the text apart and sort of dissected it and came to conclusions, some of which I agreed with, some of which I didn't agree with, but they were fundamentally about the text. And like all the criticisms referred back to the text. And then there were some that were like projecting attitudes onto the author that were more about creating this sort of vaporous shape of Lauren Oyler and then sort of poking holes in her literary celebrity or her stature as a critic or what have you. And that to me felt less productive as like a book review.Henry: Yes. Who are your favorite reviewers?Brandon: Ooh, my favorite reviewers. I really love Christian Lawrence. And he does my, of the critics who try to do the sort of like mini historiography of like a thing. He's my favorite because he teaches me a lot. He sort of is so good at summing up an era or summing up a phase of literary production without being like so cringe or so socialist about it. I really love, I love it when he sort of distills and dissects an era. I really like Hermione Hobie. I think she's really interesting. And she writes about books with a lot of feeling and a lot of energy. And I really love her mind. And of course, like Patricia Lockwood, of course, everyone, perhaps not everyone, but I enjoy Patricia Lockwood's criticism. You don't?Henry: Not really.Brandon: Oh, is it because it's too chatty? Is it too, is it too selfie?Henry: A little bit. I think, I think that kind of criticism can work really well. But I think, I think it's too much. I think basically she's very, she's a very stylized writer and a lot of her judgments get, it gets to the point where it's like, this is the logical conclusion of what you're trying to do stylistically. And there are some zingers in here and some great lines and whatever, but we're no longer, this is no longer really a book review.Brandon: Yeah.Henry: Like by the, by the end of the paragraph, this, like, we didn't want to let the style go. We didn't want to lose the opportunity to cap that off. And it leads her into, I think, glibness a lot of the time.Brandon: Yeah. I could see that. I mean, I mean, I enjoy reading her pieces, but do I understand like what's important to her at a sort of literary level? I don't know. I don't, and in that sense, like, are they, is it criticism or is it closer to like personal essay, humorous essay? I don't know. Maybe that's true. I enjoy reading them, but I get why people are like, this is a very, very strong flavor for sure.Henry: Now you've been reading a lot of literary criticism.Brandon: Oh yeah.Henry: Not of the LRB variety, but of the, the old books in libraries variety. Yes. How did that start? How did, how did you come to this?Brandon: Somewhat like ham-fistedly. I, in 2021, I had a really bad case of writer's block and I thought maybe part of the reason I had writer's block was that I didn't know anything about writing or I didn't know anything about like literature or like writing. I'd been writing, I'd published a novel. I was working on another novel. I'd published a book of stories, but like, I just like truly didn't know anything about literature really. And I thought I need some big boy ideas. I need, I need to find out what adults think about literature. And so I went to my buddy, Christian Lorenzen, and I was like, you write criticism. What is it? And what should I read? And he gave me a sort of starter list of criticism. And it was like the liberal imagination by Lionel Trilling and Guy Davenport and Alfred Kazin who wrote On Native Grounds, which is this great book on the American literary tradition and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. And I, and then Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle. And I read all of those. And then as each one would sort of refer to a different text or person, I sort of like followed the footnotes down into this rabbit hole of like literary criticism. And now it's been a sort of ongoing project of the last few years of like reading. I always try to have a book of criticism on the go. And then earlier this year, I read Jameson's The Antimonies of Realism. And he kept talking about this Georg Lukács guy. And I was like, I guess I should go read Lukács. And so then I started reading Lukács so that I could get back to Jameson. And I've been reading Lukács ever since. I am like deep down the Lukács rabbit hole. But I'm not reading any of the socialism stuff. I told myself that I wouldn't read any of the socialism stuff and I would only read the literary criticism stuff, which makes me very different from a lot of the socialist literary critics I really enjoy because they're like Lukács, don't read in that literary criticism stuff, just read his socialism stuff. So I'm reading all the wrong stuff from Lukács, but I really, I really love it. But yeah, it sort of started because I thought I needed grown up ideas about literature. And it's been, I don't know, I've really enjoyed it. I really, really enjoy it. It's given me perhaps terrible ideas about what novels should be or do. But, you know, that's one of the side effects to reading.Henry: Has it made, like, what specific ways has it changed how you've written since you've acquired a set of critical principles or ideas?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is, part of it has to do with Lukács' idea of the totality. And, you know, I think that the sort of most direct way that it shows up in a sort of really practical way in my novel writing is that I no longer really want to be starting my books, quote unquote, in media res. Like, I don't want, I want my books to feel like books. I don't want my books to feel like movies. And I don't want them to feel like treatments for film. And so I want to sort of bring back all of what a novel can do in terms of its structure and in terms of its form and stuff like that. And so it means starting books, you know, with this sort of Dickensian voice of God speaking from on high, sort of summing up an era. And I think also sort of allowing the narrators in my work to dare to sum up, allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies. I feel like that is a thing that was sort of denuded from the American novel for a lot of millennials and just sort of like trying to put back some of that old fashioned machinery that was like stripped out of the novel. And seeing what of it can still function, seeing, trying to figure out if there's any juice left in these modes of representation and stuff like that. And so like that, that's sort of, that's sort of abstract, but like in a concrete way, like what I'm kind of trying to resolve in my novel writing these days.Henry: You mentioned Dickens.Brandon: Oh, yes.Henry: Which Dickens novels do you like?Brandon: Now I'm afraid I'm going to say something else controversial. We love controversial. Which Dickens? I love Bleak House. I love Bleak House. I love Tale of Two Cities. It is one of the best openings ever, ever, ever, ever in the sweep of that book at once personal and universal anyway. Bleak House, Tale of Two Cities. And I also, I read Great Expectations as like a high school student and didn't like it, hated it. It was so boring. But now coming back to it, I think it, honestly, it might be the novel of our time. I think it might accidentally be a novel. I mean, it's a novel of scammers, a novel of like, interpersonal beef taken to the level of like, spiritual conflict, like it's about thieves and class, like it just feels like like that novel could have been written today about people today, like that book just feels so alive to today's concerns, which perhaps, I don't know, says something really evil about this cultural stagnation under capitalism, perhaps, but I don't know, love, love Great Expectations now.Henry: Why are so many modern novels boring?Brandon: Well, depends on what you mean by boring, Henry, what do you mean? Why?Henry: I mean, you said this.Brandon: Oh.Henry: I mean, I happen to agree, but this is, I'm quoting you.Brandon: Oh, yes. I remember that. I remember that review.Henry: I mean, I can tell you why I think they're boring.Brandon: Oh, yes, please.Henry: So I think, I think what you said before is true. They all read like movies. And I think I very often I go in, I pick up six or seven books on the new book table. And I'm like, these openings are all just the same. You're all thinking you can all see Netflix in your head. This is not really a novel. And so the dialogue is really boring, because you kind of you can hear some actor or actress saying it. But I can't hear that because I'm the idiot stuck in the bookshop reading your Netflix script. Whereas, you know, I think you're right that a lot of those traditional forms of storytelling, they like pull you in to the to the novel. And they and they like by the end of the first few pages, you sort of feel like I'm in this funny place now. And to do in media res, like, someone needs to get shot, or something, something weird needs to be said, like, you can't just do another, another standard opening. So I think that's a big, that's a big point.Brandon: Well, as Lukasz tells us, bourgeois realism has a, an unholy fondness for the, the average, the merely average, as opposed to the typical. And I think, yeah, a lot of it, a lot of why I think it's boring echoes you, I think that for me, what I find boring, and a lot of them is that it feels like novelists have abandoned any desire to, to have their characters or the novels themselves integrate the sort of disparate experiences within the novel into any kind of meaningful hole. And so there isn't this like sense of like things advancing toward a grander understanding. And I think a lot of it is because they've, they are writing under the assumption that like the question of why can never be answered. There can never be like a why, there can never be a sort of significance to anything. And so everything is sort of like evacuated of significance or meaning. And so you have what I've taken to calling like reality TV fiction, where the characters are just like going places and doing things, and there are no thoughts, there are no thoughts about their lives, or no thoughts about the things that they are doing, there are no thoughts about their experiences. And it's just a lot of like, like lowercase e events in their lives, but like no attempt to organize those events into any sort of meaningful hole. And I think also just like, what leads to a lot of dead writing is writers who are deeply aware that they're writing about themes, they're writing about themes instead of people. And they're working from generalities instead of particularities and specificities. And they have no understanding of the relationship between the universal and the particular. And so like, everything is just like, like beans in a can that they're shaking around. And I think that that's really boring. I think it's really tedious. Like, like, sure, we can we can find something really profound in the mundane, but like, you have to be really smart to do that. So like the average novelist is like better off like, starting with a gunshot or something like do something big.Henry: If you're not Virginia Woolf, it is in fact just mundane.Brandon: Indeed. Yeah.Henry: Is there too much emphasis on craft? In the way, in the way, in like what's valued among writers, in the way writers are taught, I feel like everything I see is about craft. And I'm like, craft is good, but that can just be like how you make a table rather than like how you make a house. Craft is not the guarantor of anything. And I see a lot of books where I think this person knows some craft. But as you say, they don't really have an application for it. And they don't. No one actually said to them, all style has a moral purpose, whether you're aware of it or not. And so they default to this like pointless use of the craft. And someone should say to them, like, you need to know history. You need to know tennis. You need to know business. You need to know like whatever, you know. And I feel like the novels I don't like are reflections of the discourse bubble that the novelist lives in. And I feel like it's often the continuation of Twitter by other means. So in the Rachel Kong novel that I think it came out this year, there's a character, a billionaire character who comes in near the end. And everything that he says or that is said about him is literally just meme. It's online billionaire meme because billionaires are bad because of all the things we all know from being on Twitter. And I was like, so you just we literally have him a character as meme. And this is the most representative thing to me, because that's maybe there's craft in that. Right. But what you've chosen to craft is like 28 tweets. That's pointless.Brandon: 28 tweets be a great title for a book, though, you have to admit, I would buy that book off the new book table. 28 tweets. I would. I would buy that. Yeah, I do think. Well, I think it goes both ways. I think it goes both ways. I somewhat famously said this about Sally Rooney that like she her books have no craft. The craft is bad. And I do think like there are writers who only have craft, who are able to sort of create these wonderfully structured books and to sort of deploy these beautiful techniques. And those books are absolutely dead. There's just like nothing in them because they have nothing to say. There's just like nothing to be said about any of that. And on the other hand, you have these books that are full of feelings that like would be better had someone taught that person about structure or form or had they sort of had like a rigorous thing. And I would say that like both of those are probably bad, like depending on who you are, you find one more like, like easier to deal with than the other. I do think that like part of why there's such an emphasis on craft is because not to sort of bring capitalism back in but you can monetize craft, you know what I mean? Like, craft is one of those things that is like readily monetizable. Like, if I'm a writer, and I would like to make money, and I can't sell a novel, I can tell people like, oh, how to craft a perfect opening, how to create a novel opening that will make agents pick it up and that will make editors say yes, but like what the sort of promise of craft is that you can finish a thing, but not that it is good, as you say, there's no guarantor. Whereas you know, like it's harder to monetize someone's soul, or like, it's harder to monetize like the sort of random happenstance of just like a writer's voice sort of emerging from from whatever, like you can't turn that into profit. But you can turn into profit, let me help you craft your voice. So it's very grind set, I think craft has a tendency to sort of skew toward the grind set and toward people trying to make money from, from writing when they can't sell a book, you know. Henry: Let's play a game. Brandon: Oh dear.Henry: I say the name of a writer. You give us like the 30 second Brandon Taylor opinion of that writer.Brandon: Okay. Yeah.Henry: Jonathan Franzen.Brandon: Thomas Mann, but like, slightly more boring, I think.Henry: Iris Murdoch.Brandon: A friend of mine calls her a modern calls her the sort of pre Sally Rooney, Sally Rooney. And I agree with that.Henry: When I'm at parties, I try and sell her to people where I say she's post-war Sally Rooney.Brandon: Yes, yes. And like, and like all that that entails, and so many delightful, I read all these like incredible sort of mid century reviews of her novels, and like the men, the male critics, like the Bernard Breganzis of the world being like, why is there so much sex in this book? It's amazing. Please go look up those like mid-century reviews of Iris Murdoch. They were losing their minds. Henry: Chekhov.Brandon: Perfect, iconic, baby girl, angel, legend. Can't get enough. 10 out of 10.Henry: Evelyn Waugh.Brandon: So Catholic, real Catholic vibes. But like, scabrously funny. And like, perhaps the last writer to write about life as though it had meaning. Hot take, but I'll, I stand by it.Henry: Yeah, well, him and Murdoch. But yeah, no, I think I think there's a lot in that. C.V. Wedgwood.Brandon: Oh, my gosh. The best, a titan, a master of history. Like, oh, my God. I would not be the same without Wedgwood.Henry: Tell us which one we should read.Brandon: Oh, the 30 Years War. What are you talking about?Henry: Well, I think her books on the English Civil War… I'm a parochial Brit.Brandon: Oh, see, I don't, not that I don't, I will go read those. But her book on the 30 Years War is so incredible. It's, it's amazing. It's second to like, Froissart's Chronicles for like, sort of history, history books for me.Henry: Northrop Frye.Brandon: My father. I, Northrop Frye taught me so much about how to see and how to think. Just amazing, a true thinker in a mind. Henry: Which book? Brandon: Oh, Anatomy of Criticism is fantastic. But Fearful Symmetry is just, it will blow your head off. Just amazing. But if you're looking for like, to have your, your mind gently remapped, then Anatomy of Criticism.Henry: Emma Cline.Brandon: A throwback. I think she's, I think she's Anne Beattie meets John Cheever for a new era. And I think she's amazing. She's perfect. Don't love her first novel. I think her stories are better. She's a short story writer. And she should stay that way.Henry: Okay, now I want you to rank Jane Austen's novels.Brandon: Wait, okay. So like, by my preference, or by like, what I think is the best?Henry: You can do both.Brandon: Okay. So in terms, my favorite, Persuasion. Then Mansfield Park. Sense and Sensibility. Pride and Prejudice. And then Emma, then Northanger Abbey. Okay.Henry: Now, how about for which ones are the best?Brandon: Persuasion. Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park. Emma,.Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey.Henry: Why do people not like Fanny Price? And what is wrong with them?Brandon: Fanny Price is perfect. Fanny Price, I was just talking to someone about this last night at dinner. Fanny Price, she's perfect. First of all, she is, I don't know why people don't like her. She's like a chronically ill girl who's hot for her cousin and like, has deep thoughts. It seems like she would be the icon of literary Twitter for like a certain kind of person, you know? And I don't know why they don't like her. I think I'm, I am becoming the loudest Mansfield Park apologist on the internet. I think that people don't like Fanny because she's less vivacious than Mary Crawford. And I think that people are afraid to see themselves in Fanny because she seems like she's unfun or whatever. But what they don't realize is that like Fanny Price, Fanny Price has like a moral intelligence and like a moral consciousness. And like Fanny Price is one of the few Austen characters who actually argues directly and literally about the way the world is. Like with multiple people, like the whole, the whole novel is her sort of arguing about, well, cities are this and the country is this. And like, we need Parsons as much as we need party boys. Like, like she's arguing not just about, not just about these things like through the lens of like marriage or like the sort of marriage economy, but like in literal terms, I mean, she is so, she's like a moral philosopher. I love Fanny Price and she's so smart and so sensitive and so, and I guess like maybe it's just that people don't like a character who's kind of at the mercy of others and they view her as passive. When in fact, like a young woman arguing about the way the world should be, like Mary Crawford's, Mary Crawford's like kind of doing the above, not really, not like Fanny. But yeah, I love her. She's amazing. I love Fanny Price. And I also think that people love Margaret Hale from North and South. And I think that when people are saying they hate Fanny Price, what they're picturing is actually how Margaret Hale is. Margaret Hale is one of the worst heroines of a novel. She's so insufferable. She's so rude. She's so condescending. And like, she does get her comeuppance and like Gaskell does sort of bring about a transformation where she's actually able to sort of like see poor people as people first and not like subjects of sympathy. But Margaret is what people imagine Fanny is, I think. And we should, we should start a Fanny Price, like booster club. Henry, should we? Let's do it. It begins here. I just feel so strongly about her. I feel, I love, I love Fanny.Henry: She's my favorite of Austen's characters. And I think she is the most representative Austen character. She's the most Austen of all of them, right?Brandon: Yeah, I mean, that makes great deal of sense to me. She's just so wonderful. Like she's so funny and so observant. And she's like this quiet little girl who's like kind of sickly and people don't really like her. And she's kind of maybe I'm just like, maybe I just like see myself in her. And I don't mind being a sort of annoying little person who's going around the world.Henry: What are some good principles for naming literary characters?Brandon: Ooh, I have a lot of strong feelings about this. I think that names should be memorable. They should have like, like an aura of sort of literariness about them. I don't mean, I mean, taken to like hilarious extremes. It's like Henry James. Catherine Goodwood, Isabelle Archer, Ralph Touchett, like, you know, Henry had a stack pole. So like, not like that. But I mean, that could be fun in a modern way. But I think there's like an aura of like, it's a name that you might hear in real life, but it sort of add or remove, it's sort of charged and elevated, sort of like with dialogue. And that it's like a memorable thing that sort of like, you know, it's like, you know, memorable thing that sort of sticks in the reader's mind. It is both a name, a literary, a good literary name is both a part of this world and not of this world, I think. And, yeah, and I love that. I think like, don't give your character a name like you hear all the time. Like, Tyler is a terrible literary name. Like, no novel has ever, no good novel has ever had a really important character named Tyler in it. It just hasn't. Ryan? What makes a good sentence? Well, my sort of like, live and let live answer is that a good sentence is a sentence that is perfectly suited to the purpose it has. But I don't know, I like a clear sentence, regardless of length or lyric intensity, but just like a clear sentence that articulates something. I like a sentence with motion, a sense of rhythm, a sense of feel without any bad words in it. And I don't mean like curse words, I mean like words that shouldn't be in literature. Like, there's some words that just like don't belong in novels.Henry: Like what?Brandon: Squelch. Like, I don't think the word squelch should be in a novel. That's a gross word and it doesn't sound literary to me. I don't want to see it.Henry: I wouldn't be surprised if it was in Ulysses.Brandon: Well, yes.Henry: I have no idea, but I'm sure, I'm sure.Brandon: But so few of us are James Joyce. And that novel is like a thousand bodily functions per page. But don't love it. Don't love it.Henry: You don't love Ulysses?Brandon: No, I don't… Listen, I don't have a strong opinion, but you're not going to get me cancelled about Ulysses. I'm not Virginia Woolf.Henry: We're happy to have opinions of that nature here. That's fine.Brandon: You know, I don't have a strong feeling about it, actually. Some parts of it that I've read are really wonderful. And some parts of it that I have read are really dense and confusing to me. I haven't sort of given it the time it needs or deserves. What did you learn from reading Toni Morris? What did I learn? I think I learned a lot about the moral force of melodrama. I think that she shows us a lot about the uses of melodrama and how it isn't just like a lesion of realism, that it isn't just a sort of malfunctioning realism, but that there are certain experiences and certain lives and certain things that require and necessitate melodrama. And when deployed, it's not tacky or distasteful that it actually is like deeply necessary. And also just like the joy of access and language, like the sort of... Her language is so towering. I don't know, whenever I'm being really shy about a sentence being too vivid or too much, I'm like, well, Toni Morrison would just go for it. And I am not Toni Morrison, but she has given me the courage to try.Henry: What did you like about the Annette Benning film of The Seagull?Brandon: The moment when Annette Benning sings Dark Eyes is so good. It's so good. I think about it all the time. And indeed, I stole that moment for a short story that I wrote. And I liked that part of it. I liked the set design. I think also Saoirse Ronan, when she gives that speech as Nina, where she's like, you know, where the guy's like, what do you want from, you know, what do you want? Why do you want to be an actress? And she's like, I want fame. You know, like, I want to be totally adored. And I'm just like, yeah, that's so real. That's so, that is so real. Like Chekhov has understood something so deep, so deep about the nature of commerce and art there. And I think Saoirse is really wonderful in that movie. It's a not, it's not a good movie. It's maybe not even a good adaptation of The Seagull. But I really enjoyed it. I saw it like five times in a theater in Iowa City.Henry: I don't know if it's a bad adaptation of The Seagull, because it's one of the, it's one of the Chekhov's I've seen that actually understands that, like, the tragic and the and the comic are not meant to be easily distinguishable in his work. And it does have all this lightheartedness. And it is quite funny. And I was like, well, at least someone's doing that because I'm so sick of, like, gloomy Chekhov. You know what I mean? Like, oh, the clouds and the misery. Like, no, he wants you, he wants you to laugh and then be like, I shouldn't laugh because it's kind of tragic, but it's also just funny.Brandon: Yeah. Yes, I mean, all the moments were like, like Annette Bening's characters, like endless stories, like she's just like constantly unfurling a story and a story and a story and a story. Every scene kind of was like, she's in the middle of telling another interminable anecdote. And of course, the sort of big tragic turn at the end is like, where like, Kostya kills himself. And she's like, in the middle of like, another really long anecdote while they're in the other room playing cards. Like, it's so, it's so good. So I love that. I enjoy watching that movie. I still think it's maybe not. It's a little wooden, like as a movie, like it's a little, it's a little rickety.Henry: Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure. But for someone looking to like, get a handle on Chekhov, it's actually a good place to go. What is the best make of Fountain Pen?Brandon: That's a really good, that's a really, really, really good question. Like, what's your Desert Island Fountain Pen? My Desert Island Fountain Pen. Right now, it's an Esterbrook Estee with a needlepoint nib. It's like, so, I can use that pen for hours and hours and hours and hours. I think my favorite Fountain Pen, though, is probably the Pilot Custom 743. It's a really good pen, not too big, not too small. It can hold a ton of ink, really wonderful. I use, I think, like a Soft Fine nib, incredible nib, so smooth. Like, I, you could cap it and then uncap it a month later, and it just like starts immediately. It's amazing. And it's not too expensive.Henry: Brandon Taylor, thank you very much.Brandon: Thanks for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

In this episode we chat with the man who gave us the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice—for many, the definitive Austen adaptation. A prolific author and screenwriter, Andrew Davies is also responsible for the 1996 ITV adaptation of Emma, Northanger Abbey (2007), Sense and Sensibility (2008), and the recent dramatization of Sanditon—not to mention adaptations of a host of other classic novels. Join us as we discuss Andrew's thoughts on adapting Austen's novels to film and, of course, Mr. Darcy in a wet shirt. Andrew Davies, prominent author and screenwriter, began his career writing radio plays and eventually moved into writing for television, film, and theater. He is also the author of several novels and children's books. In addition to the screen adaptations of Austen's novels mentioned above, he has dramatized television series such as Bleak House, House of Cards (ITV), Mr. Selfridge, Little Dorrit, To Serve Them All My Days, Vanity Fair, and War & Peace, in addition to films such as Bridget Jones's Diary, and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Andrew's work has garnered dozens of nominations and awards, and in 2002, he received the highest honor bestowed by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, a BAFTA Fellowship, in recognition of his “outstanding achievement in the art forms of the moving image.” For a transcript and show notes, visit https://jasna.org/austen/podcast/ep18.Visit our website: www.jasna.orgFollow us on Instagram and FacebookSubscribe to the podcast on our YouTube channelEmail: podcast@jasna.org

Drawing upon St. Theophan the Recluse's commentary, Fr. Seraphim Rose briefly discusses how souls formed in the "emotional and spiritual wasteland of our times" can become aware of this reality and how to live spiritually profitable lives in the Orthodox Church. Sometimes, as a stepping stone, even the best of the secular arts can be used to form the soul in godliness.

Born in Yorkshire, Anna Maxwell Martin is an actress celebrated for her versatility across theatre, television and film. After studying history at Liverpool University, she trained at LAMDA, launching her career at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her breakthrough role came in 2005, when she portrayed Esther Summerson in the BBC adaptation of Bleak House, earning her the Bafta TV Award for Best Actress. Since then, Anna has delighted audiences playing Julia in sitcom Motherland, and the unsavoury DCS Patricia Carmichael in Line of Duty. Anna's new show Ludwig, also starring David Mitchell, is on BBC iPlayer now. Nick pours a round of margaritas, while Angela concentrates her efforts on a hearty pot-roasted lamb with flageolet beans. The experts at Waitrose pair this with a Côte des Roses organic rosé Anna Maxwell Martin is a tonic. Her sense of humour is infectious and Nick and Angela enjoy comedic tales about cooking for her teenage daughters, meeting Tom Cruise and her absolute aversion to sandwiches. You can watch full episodes of Dish now on Youtube  All recipes from this podcast can be found at waitrose.com/dishrecipes A transcript for this episode can be found at waitrose.com/dish We can't all have a Michelin star chef in the kitchen, but you can ask Angela for help. Send your dilemmas to dish@waitrose.co.uk and she'll try to answer them in a future episode. Dish is a S:E Creative Studio production for Waitrose Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey HBs! We're here with a brand new historical era: Dickens' Times! Elizabeth Hoyt came out swinging with WICKED INTENTIONS, the first book in her Maiden Lane series. We've got a do-gooding heroine who needs cash for her orphanage, a bad boy aristocrat who needs entree into London's worst neighborhood, a murder mystery, a vigilante hero clown, and some BIG SWOONS. We're super into it.Bonus Content: Mel is having legal dreams because we're in Dickens' Times and Bleak House left it's mark on her soul, new Times alert! Dickens' Times! Is there an urchin? Are people starving in the gutters? Are babies being rescued from the arms of their corpse mother? You might be in Dickens' Times!, atoning for your clitoris, filming with a gray filter to account for the soot and misery, and so much more! Lady Loves: Mel: Microfiber gloves! Lots of people use them for dusting, but I like to use them to give my houseplants a periodic mashashge! I spray a little water on the leaves and then wipe them down while wearing my gloves to remove dust, promote shine, make sure they can photosynthesize efficiently, and know they're loved!Sabrina: STORYGRAPH CHARTS ARE NOW EDITABLE!!!!!!!!!!! That's right, you can get your books and tags all organized and graphed and then you can fine-tune them!Make sure to check out Mel's new podcast Bonkers Romance! Subscribe! Rate! Review! Tell all your friends :)Get more content on PATREON!!Sign up for our Newsletter! MERCH! Teepublic, Chicaloo Kate, RedbubbleInstagram: @heavingbosomsTwitter: @heaving_bosoms*Disclaimer: the above contains Amazon affiliate links. That means that if you click a link and decide to make a purchase the podcast will receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall…' This week, Sally has been reading and teaching Charles Dickens' Bleak House (1852). Follow her on a journey through his London, in the company of its climate, characters, and the bewildering legal bureaucracy not very far from our own…. Music used throughout includes ‘Tuesday' and ‘Thursday' by Paul Sebastian. This episode was edited and produced by James Bowen. Special thanks to Andrew Smith, Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

On the latest episode of Feckin' Metal, I chat to Graham Killin, one of the two guitarists of NWOBHM band, Bleak House. If you're not familiar with the band, this is the perfect place to start. Formed in the early 1970s, in Hertfordshire, England, they survived many name changes, and the emergence of punk, to release two critically-acclaimed, but relatively-obscure EPs in the 1980s, then disappeared. That was until singer Graham Shaw received a phonecall from Oliver Weinsheimer, organiser of the Keep It True Festival, in early 2021. Since then, they've been on the up and up, and we cover all bases in between.

In Which Murderer's 46th episode of Season 6, the girls cover Boobytrap Murders. Mel starts us off with the explosive case involving Ronan Kerr, before Holly goes over the crazy story of Anthony Edward Martin and Bleak House. Emma Jo suggested this week's topic - thanks so much! In this week's episode there is far too much weather related moaning, we learn Holly has a background in Boobytraps, some sweeping (and likely inaccurate) terrorist statements are made and dental traumas are recounted. Production, recording and post production completed by Holly who is currently building a boobytrap for Consulting Producer Craig where he will spend all of eternity editing podcast episodes. Holly edited this week. All complaints should be sent directly to Mel while Consulting Producer Craig watches Holly try to dig a hole and give up after approximately 3.5 seconds of effort.Big thank you to all our listeners for subscribing, leaving fantastic reviews and sending in great theme suggestions. WE HAVE MERCH!  www.whichmurderer.com - CLICK ON THE MERCHANDISE TAB FOR A LINK!WARNING - Explicit language, content and themes (plus whatever else will cover us legally).All opinions stated are our own and case information was gathered from legitimate sources within the public realm. Pre-recorded in Scotland

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1183, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: Dickens Book By Character 1: Bob Cratchit. A Christmas Carol. 2: Bill Sikes. Oliver Twist. 3: Esther Summerson. Bleak House. 4: Dr. Alexandre Manette. A Tale of Two Cities. 5: Uriah Heep. David Copperfield. Round 2. Category: All Hail The Creator 1: This Mindy of "The Mindy Project" was named after Mindy in "Mork and Mindy". Mindy Kaling. 2: Its creator Phil Rosenthal summed it up as "a guy with this family who lives across the street from his parents". Everybody Loves Raymond. 3: In 1998 this man played up "Sports Night"; the next year, he came up with "The West Wing". Sorkin. 4: The initials of this creator of "Alias", also a big-time movie director, stand for Jeffrey Jacob. Abrams. 5: Ronald D. Moore co-created the 2005 version of this frakkin' awesome sci-fi show featuring Adama and Starbuck. Battlestar Galactica. Round 3. Category: In The Mouth 1: Muscle which extends up and forward from the hyoid bone to, and sometimes past, the lips. the tongue. 2: They're "set" in the mouths of fish. hooks. 3: This company claimed they had 50% of the chewing gum market's sales in 1986. Wrigley's. 4: 3 of the 4 general types of teeth in the adult human mouth. (3 of) molars, incisors, cuspids, or bicuspids. 5: Comprised of a hard and soft portion, it's the roof of the mouth. the palate. Round 4. Category: Which Time Zone? 1: Portland, Oregon. Pacific. 2: Medford, Oregon. Pacific. 3: Vancouver, British Columbia. Pacific. 4: Wichita, Kansas. Central. 5: Omaha, Nebraska. Central. Round 5. Category: Ron Howard Films 1: He reprised the role of Robert Langdon in "Angels and Demons". Tom Hanks. 2: He played math genius John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind". Russell Crowe. 3: He's worked with Ron Howard twice, playing astronaut Jack Swigert in "Apollo 13" and Jack Brennan in "Frost/Nixon". Kevin Bacon. 4: Ron Howard was on fire with this film in which Kurt Russell and William Baldwin starred as firefighting brothers. Backdraft. 5: This actor and Nicole Kidman light out for the Oklahoma territory in 1992's "Far and Away". Tom Cruise. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

Retired teacher Chris Starling shares a few of his favourite works of literature that inspired him as a linguaphile and educator. We hope Chris' book list inspires you to continue the conversation by sharing your favourite titles with your teaching community and in the comments section on the TESOL Pop website.KEY TALKING POINTSDiscussion of "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joan Didion:"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is a collection of 1960s journalism by Joan Didion, offering a critical look at the counterculture movement.Chris appreciates Didion's style and personal approach to journalism, which invites readers into her world and provides insightful commentary.Favourite quote: "This is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke…"Discussion of "Fugitive Pieces" by Anne Michaels:Chris describes "Fugitive Pieces" as a powerful exploration of memory, personal history, and self-construction set against the backdrop of the Holocaust.He praises Anne Michaels' poetic writing style and the depth of insight each reading offers.Favorite quote: "The past is never dead, it's never even past."Discussion of "Bleak House" by Charles Dickens:Chris highlights Charles Dickens' storytelling prowess in "Bleak House," emphasising its intricate plot and rich character development.He discusses Dickens' use of symbolism, particularly the fog, to represent societal issues and interconnectedness.Favourite quote: "Fog everywhere... Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners."ABOUTChris qualified as a librarian and then as a teacher of English, careers he followed with pleasure for over 30 years although he was drawn away from the librarianship side quite early. His longest service, over 20 years, was in a school where the students had over sixty home languages.REFERENCESDidion, J. (1968) Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and GirouxMichaels, A. (1996) Fugitive Pieces. McClelland & Stewart Ltd.Dickens, C. (1852-1853) Bleak House. Bradbury & EvansLinks to later editions of these title can be found on the TESOL Pop website.TRANSCRIPTWatch with closed captions.SUPPORTWe'd love to record more special episodes like this one for you.Please support us to make this possible by buying us a coffee here.JOIN OUR EVENTSUpcoming lives and workshopsCREDITSProducer Laura WilkesEditor Haven TsangThanks to our charming guest, Chris Starling. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bible Study – Job Class Six: Job 8:1-11:1; 11:1-42:22  From the Orthodox Study Bible.  JOB 8: [Bildad's nonsense] TO THE EARS OF BILDAD, JOB'S SECOND RESPONDENT, a man even less tolerant than Eliphaz, the foregoing lament seems to be an attack on the justice of God and the entire moral order. Unlike Eliphaz, however, Bildad is able to make no argument on the basis of his own personal experience. He is obliged to argue, rather, solely from the moral tradition, which he does not understand very well. Indeed, Bildad treats the moral structure of the world in a nearly impersonal way. To the mind of Bildad, the effects of sin follow automatically, as the inevitable effects of a sufficient cause. The presence of the effect, that is, implies the presence of the cause. If Eliphaz's argument had been too personal, bordering on the purely subjective, the argument of Bildad may be called too objective, bordering on the purely mechanical. In the mind of Bildad the principle of retributive justice functions nearly as a law of nature, or what the religions of India call the Law of Karma. Both Eliphaz and Job show signs of knowing God personally, but we discern nothing of this in Bildad. Between Bildad and Job, therefore, there is even less of a meeting of minds than there was between Eliphaz and Job. We should remember, on the other hand, that Job himself has never raised the abstract question of the divine justice; he has shown no interest, so far, in the problems of theodicy. Up to this point in the story, Job has been concerned only with his own problems, and his lament has been entirely personal, not theoretical. Bildad, for his part, does not demonstrate even the limited compassion of Eliphaz. We note, for example, his comments about Job's now perished children. In the light of Job's own concern for the moral wellbeing of those children early in the book (1:5), there is an especially cruel irony in Bildad's speculation on their moral state: “If your sons have sinned against [God], He has cast them away for their transgression” (8:4). What a dreadful thing to say to a man who loved his sons as Job did! Like Eliphaz before him, Bildad urges Job to repent (8:5–7), for such, he says, is the teaching of traditional morality (8:8–10). Clearly, Bildad is unfamiliar with the God worshipped by Job, the God portrayed in the opening chapters of this book. Bildad knows nothing of a personal God who puts man to the test through the trial of his faith. Bildad's divinity is, on the contrary, a nearly mechanistic adjudicator who functions entirely as a moral arbiter of human behavior, not a loving, redemptive God who shapes man's destiny through His personal interest and intervention. Nonetheless, in his comments about Job's final lot Bildad speaks with an unintended irony, because in fact Job's latter end will surpass his beginning (8:7), and “God will not cast away the blameless” (8:20—tam; cf. 1:1, 8; 2:3). On our first reading of the story, we do not know this yet, of course, because we do not know, on our first reading, how the story will end (for example 42:12). So many comments made by Job's friends, including these by Bildad in this chapter, are full of ironic, nearly prophetic meaning, which will become clear only at the story's end, so the reader does not perceive this meaning on his first trip through the book. As Edgar Allen Poe argued in his review of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, the truly great stories cannot be understood on a single reading, because the entire narrative must be known before the deeper significance of the individual episodes can become manifest. As Poe remarked, we do not understand any great story well until our second reading of it. This insight is preeminently helpful in the case of the Book of Job. JOB 11 [Zophar's nonsense] WE NOW COME TO THE FIRST SPEECH OF ZOPHAR, Job's most strident critic, a man who can appeal to neither personal religious experience (as did Eliphaz) nor inherited moral tradition (as did Bildad). Possessed of neither resource, Zophar's contribution is what we may call “third-hand.” He bases his criticism on his own theory of wisdom. Although he treats his theory as self-evidently true, we recognize it as only a personal bias. Moreover, Zophar seems to identify his own personal perception of wisdom as the wisdom of God Himself. Whereas Bildad had endeavored to defend the divine justice, Zophar tries to glorify “divine” wisdom in Job's case. If it is difficult to see justice verified in Job's sufferings, however, it is even harder to see wisdom verified by those sufferings. Like the two earlier speakers, Zophar calls on Job to repent in order to regain the divine favor. (This is a rather common misunderstanding that claims, “If things aren't going well for you, you should go figure out how you have offended God, because He is obviously displeased with you.”) Zophar also resorts to sarcasm. Although this particular rhetorical form is perfectly legitimate in some circumstances (and the prophets, beginning with Elijah, use it often), sarcasm becomes merely an instrument of cruelty when directed at someone who is suffering incomprehensible pain. In the present case, Job suffers in an extreme way, pushed to the very limits of his endurance. It is such a one that Zophar has the vile temerity to call a “man full of talk” (11:2), a liar (11:3), a vain man (11:11–12), and wicked (11:14, 20). The final two verses (19–20) contain an implied warning against the “death wish” to which Job has several times given voice. This very sentiment, Zophar says, stands as evidence of Job's wickedness. The author of the Book of Job surely understands this extended criticism by Zophar as an exercise in irony. Though the context of his speech proves the speaker himself insensitive and nearly irrational in his personal cruelty, there is an undeniable eloquence in his description of the divine wisdom (11:7–9) and his assertion of the moral quality of human existence (11:10–12). Moreover, those very rewards that Zophar promises to Job in the event of his repentance (11:13–18) do, in fact, fall into Job's life at the end of the book. In this story of Job, men are not divided into those who have wisdom and those who don't. In the Book of Job no one is really wise. There is no real wise man, as there is in, say, the Book of Proverbs. While wisdom is ever present in the plot of the story, no character in the story has a clear grasp of it. True wisdom will not stand manifest until God, near the end of the narrative, speaks for Himself. Even then God will not disclose to Job the particulars of His dealings with him throughout the story. From St. Gregory the Great Ver. 3. Doth God pervert judgment? Or doth the Almighty pervert justice? xxxvi. 59. These things blessed Job had neither in speaking denied, nor yet was ignorant of them in holding his tongue. But all bold persons, as we have said, speak with big words even well known truths, that in telling of them they may appear to be learned. They scorn to hold their peace in a spirit of modesty, lest they should be thought to be silent from ignorance. But it is to be known that they then extol the rectitude of God's justice, when security from ill uplifts themselves in joy, while blows are dealt to other men; when they see themselves enjoying prosperity in their affairs, and others harassed with adversity. For whilst they do wickedly, and yet believe themselves righteous, the benefit of prosperity attending them, they imagine to be due to their own merits; and they infer that God does not visit unjustly, in proportion as upon themselves, as being righteous, no cloud of misfortune falls. But if the power of correction from above touches their life but in the least degree, being struck they directly break loose against the policy of the Divine inquest, which a little while before, unharmed, they made much of in expressing admiration of it, and they deny that judgment to be just, which is at odds with their own ways; they canvass the equity of God's dealings, they fly out in words of contradiction, and being chastened because they have done wrong, they do worse. Hence it is well spoken by the Psalmist against the confession of the sinner, He will confess to Thee, when Thou doest well to him. Ps. 49:18. For the voice of confession is disregarded, when it is shaped by the joyfulness of prosperity. But that confession alone possesses merit of much weight, which the force of pain has no power to part from the truth of the rule of right, and which adversity, the test of the heart, sharpens out even to the sentence of the lips. Therefore it is no wonder that Bildad commends the justice of God, in that he experiences no hurt therefrom. 60. Now whereas we have said that the friends of blessed Job bear the likeness of heretics, it is well for us to point out briefly, how the words of Bildad accord with the wheedling ways of heretics. For whilst in their own idea they see the Holy Church corrected with temporal visitations, they swell the bolder in the bigness of their perverted preaching, and putting forward the righteousness of the Divine probation, they maintain that they prosper by virtue of their merits; but they avouch that she is rewarded with deserved chastisements, and thereupon without delay they seek by beguiling words a way to steal upon her, in the midst of her sorrows, and they strike a blow at the lives of some, by making the deaths of others a reproach, as if those were now visited with deserved death, who refused to hold worthy opinions concerning God. We have heard what Job, his wife, and his three friends have to say.  They cycle through similar things several times.  Next week, we will briefly see what a new speaker, Elihuh has to say and spend most of the class – the last one before Great Lent – to look at God's conversation with Job.  During Great Lent, we will work through chapters of Tito Coriander's Way of Ascetics.     Scriptural review  Mentioned historically as Jobab in Genesis (4), Joshua (1), and 1 Chronicles (5) Ezekial 14:20. Though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live, saith the Lord God, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter; they shall but deliver their own souls by their righteousness.  James 5:11. Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy. Liturgical review Mentioned (through James) at Holy Unction; “You have heard of the patience of Job.” From the Funeral for a Priest Beatitudes: Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.   “Why do you lament me bitterly, O men? Why do you murmur in vain?” he that has been translated proclaims unto all. For death is rest for all. Therefore, let us listen to the voice of Job saying, “Death is rest unto man.” But give rest with Thy Saints, O God, unto him whom Thou hast received. Ode Six:   I remind you, O my brethren, my children, and my friends, that you forget me not when you pray to the Lord. I pray, I ask, and I make entreaty, that you remember these words, and weep for me, day and night. As said Job unto his friends, so I say unto you: Sit again and say: Alleluia.   Forsaking all things, we depart, and naked and afflicted we become. For beauty withers like grass, but only we men delude ourselves. Thou wast born naked, O wretched one, and altogether naked shall you stand there. Dream not, O man, in this life, but only groan always with weeping: Alleluia.   If thou, O man, hast been merciful to a man, he shall be merciful there unto thee. And if thou hast been compassionate to any orphan, he shall deliver you there from need. If in this life thou hast covered the naked, there he shall cover thee, and sing the psalm: Alleluia. Triodion Wednesday of Cheesfare Week; Matins Canticle Eight Let us preserve these virtues: the fortitude of Job, the singlemindedness of Jacob, the faith of Abraham, the chastity of Joseph and the courage of David. Saturday of Cheesefare Week; Matins; Canticle Two … a second Job was Benjamin in his constancy … Thursday of Clean Week (and Thursday of the Fifth Week); Great Canon Ode 4 Thou hast heard, O my soul, of Job justified on a dung-hill, but thou hast not imitated his fortitude. In all thine experiences and trials and temptations, thou hast not kept firmly to thy purpose but hast proved inconstant.          Have mercy on me, Oh God, have mercy on me. Once he sat upon a throne, but now he sits upon a dung-hill, naked and covered with sores. Once he was blessed with many children and admired by all, but suddenly he is childless and homeless. Yet he counted the dung-hill as a palace and his sores as pearls.          Have mercy on me, Oh God, have mercy on me. A man of great wealth and righteous, abounding in riches and cattle, clothed in royal dignity, in crown and purple robe, Job became suddenly a beggar, stripped of wealth, glory and kingship.          Have mercy on me, Oh God, have mercy on me. If he who was righteous and blameless above all men did not escape the snares and pits of the deceiver, what wilt thou do, wretched and sin-loving soul, when some sudden misfortune befalls thee?          Have mercy on me, Oh God, have mercy on me. I have defiled my body, I have stained my spirit, and I am all covered with wounds: but as physician, O Christ, heal both body and spirit for me through repentance. Wash, purify and cleanse me, O my Saviour, and make me whiter than snow. Read at Vespers/PSL on Monday of Holy Week: Job 1:1–12. Read at Vespers/PSL on Tuesday of Holy Week: Job 1:13–22. Read at Vespers/PSL on Wednesday of Holy Week: Job 2:1–10. Read at Vespers/Vesperal Liturgy on Thursday of Holy Week: Job 38:1–21; 42:1–5. Read at Vespers on Friday of Holy Week: Job 42:12–17 (LXX ending) --- Job 38  FROM FR. PATRICK REARDON NOW THE LORD HIMSELF WILL SPEAK, for the first time since chapter 2. After all, Job has been asking for God to speak (cf. 13:22; 23:5; 30:20; 31:35), and now he will get a great deal more than he anticipated. With a mere gesture, as it were, God proceeds to brush aside all the theories and pseudoproblems of the preceding chapters. … [Whirlwind, Lord] … At this point, all philosophical discussion comes to an end. There are questions, to be sure, but the questions now come from the Lord. Indeed, we observe in this chapter that God does not answer Job's earlier questions. The Lord does not so much as even notice those questions; He renders them hopelessly irrelevant. He has His own questions to put to Job. The purpose of these questions is not merely to bewilder Job. These questions have to do, rather, with God's providence over all things. The Lord is suggesting to Job that His providence over Job's own life is even more subtle and majestic than these easier questions which God proposes and which Job cannot begin to answer, questions about the construction of the world (verses 4–15), the courses of the heavenly bodies (verses 31–38), the marvels of earth and sea (verses 16–30), and animal life (38:39–39:30). Utterly surrounded by things that he cannot understand, will Job still demand to know mysteries even more mysterious? If the world itself contains creatures that seem improbable and bewildering to the human mind, should not man anticipate that there are even more improbable and bewildering aspects to the subtler forms of the divine providence? God will not be reduced simply to an answer to Job's shallow questions. Indeed, the divine voice from the whirlwind never once deigns even to notice Job's questions. They are implicitly subsumed into a mercy vaster and far richer. Implicit in these questions to Job is the quiet reminder of the Lord's affectionate provision for all His creatures. If God so cares for the birds of the air and the plants of the fields, how much more for Job! 39 - 41. On the Behemoth and the Leviathan Both behemoth and Leviathan are God's household pets, as it were, creatures that He cares for with gentle concern, His very playmates (compare Psalms 104[103]:26). God is pleased with them. Job cannot take the measure of these animals, but the Lord does. What, then, do these considerations say to Job? Well, Job has been treading on some very dangerous ground through some of this book, and it is about time that he manifest a bit more deference before things he does not understand. Behemoth and Leviathan show that the endeavor to transgress the limits of human understanding is not merely futile. There is about it a strong element of danger. A man can be devoured by it. It is remarkable that God's last narrative to Job resembles nothing so much as a fairy tale, or at least that darker part of a fairy tale that deals with dragons. Instead of pleading His case with Job, as Job has often requested, the Lord deals with him as with a child. Job must return to his childhood's sense of awe and wonder, so the Lord tells him a children's story about a couple of unimaginably dangerous dragons. These dragons, nonetheless, are only pets in the hands of God. Job is left simply with the story. It is the Lord's final word in the argument. 42.  Finale THE TRIAL OF JOB IS OVER. This last chapter of this book contains (1) a statement of repentance by Job (verses 1–6), (2) the Lord's reprimand of Eliphaz and his companions (verses 7–8), and (3) a final narrative section, at the end of which Job begins the second half of his life (verses 9–17). The book begins and ends, then, in narrative form. First, one observes in Job's repentance that he arrives at a new state of humility, not from a consideration of his own sins, but by an experience of God's overwhelming power and glory. (Compare Peter in Luke 5:1–8.) When God finally reveals Himself to Job, the revelation is different from anything Job either sought or expected, but clearly he is not disappointed. All through this book, Job has been proclaiming his personal integrity, but now this consideration is not even in the picture; he has forgotten all about any alleged personal integrity. It is no longer pertinent to his relationship to God (verse 6). Job is justified by faith, not by any claims to personal integrity. All that is in the past, and Job leaves it behind. Second, the Lord then turns and deals with the three comforters who have failed so miserably in their task. Presuming to speak for the Almighty, they have fallen woefully short of the glory of God. Consequently, Job is appointed to be the intercessor on their behalf. Ironically, the offering that God prescribes to be made on behalf of the three comforters (verse 8) is identical to that which Job had offered for his children out of fear that they might have cursed God (1:5). The Book of Job both begins and ends, then, with Job and worship and intercession. In just two verses (7–8) the Lord four times speaks of “My servant Job,” exactly as He had spoken of Job to Satan at the beginning of the book. But Job, for his part, must bear no grudge against his friends, and he is blessed by the Lord in the very act of his praying for them (verse 10). Ezekiel, remembering Job's prayer more than his patience, listed him with Noah and Daniel, all three of whom he took to be men endowed with singular powers of intercession before the Most High (Ezekiel 14:14–20). The divine reprimand of Job's counselors also implies that their many accusations against Job were groundless. Indeed, Job had earlier warned them of God's impending anger with them in this matter (13:7–11), and now that warning is proved accurate (verse 7). Also, ironically, whereas Job's friends fail utterly in their efforts to comfort him throughout almost the entire book, they succeed at the end (verse 11). Third, in the closing narrative we learn that Job lives 140 years, exactly twice the normal span of a man's life (cf. Psalm 90[89]:10). Each of his first seven sons and three daughters is replaced at the end of the story, and all of his original livestock is exactly doubled (Job 1:3; 42:12). St. John Chrysostom catches the sense of this final section of Job:   His sufferings were the occasion of great benefit. His substance was doubled, his reward increased, his righteousness enlarged, his crown made more lustrous, his reward more glorious. He lost his children, but he received, not those restored, but others in their place, and even those he still held in assurance unto the Resurrection (Homilies on 2 Timothy 7). ___ Saint Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, vol. 1 (Oxford; London: John Henry Parker; J. G. F. and J. Rivington, 1844), 83. Robert Charles Hill.  St. John Chrysostom Commentaries on the Sages, Volume One – Commentary on Job.  Holy Cross Orthodox Press. Patrick Henry Reardon, The Trial of Job: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Job (Chesterton, IN: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2005), 22. Manlio Simonetti and Marco Conti, eds., Job, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 4–5. Orthodox Church, The Lenten Triodion, trans. Kallistos Ware with Mother Mary, The Service Books of the Orthodox Church (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon's Seminary Press, 2002), 222. Mother Mary, Metropolitan Kallistos of Diokleia, trans., The Lenten Triodion: Supplementary Texts, The Service Books of the Orthodox Church (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon's Seminary Press, 2007), 60. Orthodox Church, The Lenten Triodion, trans. Kallistos Ware with Mother Mary, The Service Books of the Orthodox Church (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon's Seminary Press, 2002), 559. St. Tikhon's Monastery, trans., The Great Book of Needs: Expanded and Supplemented, vol. III (South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon's Seminary Press, 2002), 283.        

All is revealed. Buckle up. Dorothy Sayers, today on The Classic Tales Podcast.  Welcome to The Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening.  The Vintage Episode for the week is “The Man Who Would Be King”, by Rudyard Kipling. Be sure to check it out on Tuesday.  If you've enjoyed the show, please become a monthly supporter, and help us keep doing what we do.  Please go to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a monthly supporter for as little as $5 a month. As a thank you gesture, we'll send you a coupon code every month for $8 off any audiobook order. Give more, and you get more! It's a great way to help us keep producing amazing audiobook content.  Go to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a supporter today.  Mark your calendars for The Classic Tales Book Club! Our first meeting will be at 4:00 Pacific time, 7:00 Eastern time on March 13th. We'll talk over Zoom about the podcast, and what genre you'd like to hear more often. See you then!  I'm pivoting a bit on the Kickstarter for Bleak House. I just think it's too long for our first Kickstarter. So, I'm thinking of the next in the Arsène Lupin series – The Golden Triangle. I'll be making a custom enamel pin only available for supporters of the Kickstarter, among other fun deals. More details coming soon!  And now, Clouds of Witness, Part 9 of 9, by Dorothy Sayers.   Follow this link to become a monthly supporter:   Follow this link to subscribe to our YouTube Channel:   Follow this link to subscribe to the Arsène Lupin Podcast:   Follow this link to follow us on Instagram:   Follow this link to follow us on Facebook:   Follow this link to follow us on TikTok:    

Is an anatomy professor having murder done to secure his specimens? Robert Louis Stevenson, today on The Classic Tales Podcast.  Welcome to this Vintage Episode of The Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening. A new Vintage Episode is released every Tuesday. Clouds of Witness, by Dorothy Sayers will continue episodically every Friday. Please help us to continue producing amazing audiobooks by going to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com, and becoming a supporter. Thank you so much.  Keep an ear open for our coming Kickstarter campaign to fund the audiobook of Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. We've got a ton of special bonuses planned. More details coming soon! And mark your calendar for the Classic Tales Book Club! We'll be meeting on Zoom on March 13th at 4:00PM pacific time. See you then!  Today's story was inspired by true events. William Burke and William Hare committed 16 murders over a period of about 10 months in 1828 in Edinburgh,  Scotland. They sold the bodies to Robert Knox, who used them in his anatomy lessons. Of course, Robert Louis Stevenson puts his wonderful spin on the tale. I hope you like it.  And now, “The Body Snatcher”, by Robert Louis Stevenson.  Follow this link to become a monthly supporter:   Follow this link to subscribe to our YouTube Channel:   Follow this link to subscribe to the Arsène Lupin Podcast:   Follow this link to follow us on Instagram:   Follow this link to follow us on Facebook:    

Peter runs off in a final mad dash to secure a secret testimony. But will it be enough to save his brother?  Dorothy Sayers, today on The Classic Tales Podcast.  Welcome to The Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening.  The Vintage Episode for the week is “The Body Snatcher”, by Robert Louis Stevenson. Be sure to check it out on Tuesday.  If you've enjoyed the show, please become a monthly supporter, and help us keep doing what we do.  Please go to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a monthly supporter for as little as $5 a month. As a thank you gesture, we'll send you a coupon code every month for $8 off any audiobook order. Give more, and you get more! It's a great way to help us keep producing amazing audiobook content. Go to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a supporter today.  The Classic Tales Book Club's first meeting is set! We will be meeting via Zoom on March 13th, at 4:00 Pm Pacific time. That should make it 7:00 Eastern time. I'll be joined by the illustrious Christopher Oulette, and we'll have a fun little chat talking about the show and whatever else comes up. Mark you calendars for March 13th.  I'm working on setting up the Kickstarter project for Dickens' Bleak House. This is a long one, and I can't wait to dive in to an immersive story like this. I'm working on the artwork now, and I'll have more information in the weeks to come. Big thanks to Ammon Anderson for helping me set this up.  And now, Clouds of Witness, Part 8 of 9, by Dorothy Sayers. Follow this link to become a monthly supporter:   Follow this link to subscribe to our YouTube Channel:   Follow this link to subscribe to the Arsène Lupin Podcast:   Follow this link to follow us on Instagram:   Follow this link to follow us on Facebook:    Follow this link to follow us on TikTok:    

Why does Inspector Valentin, while following the track of the thief Flambeau, keep crossing paths with two argumentative priests? G.K. Chesterton, today on The Classic Tales Podcast.  Welcome to this Vintage Episode of The Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening.  A new Vintage Episode is released every Tuesday. Clouds of Witness, by Dorothy Sayers will continue episodically every Friday. Please help us to continue producing amazing audiobooks by going to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com, and becoming a supporter. Thank you so much.  Keep an ear open for our coming Kickstarter campaign to fund the audiobook of Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. We've got a ton of special bonuses planned. More details coming soon!  Gilbert Keith Chesterton was a philosopher, writer, Christian apologist, and a critic of art and literature. He wrote around 80 books, 200 short stories, and  4,000 essays, (most of the essays appeared as newspaper articles). His most famous literary creation was Father Brown, a catholic priest that has heard the confessions of so many thieves, burglars, and law breakers over the course of his holy career, that he can usually anticipate and deduce the solution to any puzzling crime. Today's story is the first Father Brown story, first published on July 23rd, 1910 in The Saturday Evening Post.  And now, “The Blue Cross”, by G.K. Chesterton.  Follow this link to become a monthly supporter:    Follow this link to subscribe to our YouTube Channel:     Follow this link to subscribe to the Arsène Lupin Podcast:   Follow this link to follow us on Instagram:   Follow this link to follow us on Facebook:      

Meg investigates the true story behind John Guare's theatrical masterpiece Six Degrees of Separation. Jessica untangles the cheesy threads of the legendary Ray's Pizza litigation.Please check out our website, follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, and...WRITE US A REVIEW HEREWe'd LOVE to hear from you! Let us know if you have any ideas for stories HEREThank you for listening!Love,Meg and Jessica

How can Wimsey escape the sucking mud pits of Peter's Pot?  Dorothy Sayers, today on The Classic Tales Podcast.  Welcome to The Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening.  The Vintage Episode for the week is “The Blue Cross”, by G.K. Chesterton. Be sure to check it out on Tuesday.  If you've enjoyed the show, please become a monthly supporter, and help us keep the lights on.  Please go to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a monthly supporter for as little as $5 a month. As a thank you gesture, we'll send you a coupon code every month for $8 off any audiobook order. Give more, and you get more! It's a great way to help us keep producing amazing audiobook content.  Go to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a supporter today.  We have a couple of new developments. The first is The Classic Tales Book Club! We're going to be having our first meeting in March! This will be a monthly meeting where we discuss the stories on the podcast, and we want you to come and chat with us. I'll be joined by Classic Tales and classic literature enthusiast Christopher Oulette. Keep an eye on our social media channels for more information. You may have noticed that I haven't been able to record the longer audiobooks like I used to. It's just hard to justify reserving that time in my schedule – taking it away from recording something I could get paid for. But there are still so many books I still want to do. Well, I think I may have found a way around that.  I've been wanting to record Bleak House, by Charles Dickens for some time, now. It's got his outlandish and deep characters, amazing plot twists, and his beautiful prose tying it all together. So, I'm going to do a Kickstarter project for it! This way I can justify reserving time in my schedule to record and produce this audiobook. I'm planning to have TONS of bonus material and specials to make this happen. So get ready for a lot of fun, and some amazing deals in the near future.  And now, Clouds of Witness, Part 7 of 9, by Dorothy Sayers. Follow this link to become a monthly supporter:    Follow this link to subscribe to our YouTube Channel:   Follow this link to subscribe to the Arsène Lupin Podcast:   Follow this link to follow us on Instagram:   Follow this link to follow us on Facebook:   Follow this link to follow us on TikTok:    

Lucy Worsley travels back in time to revisit the unthinkable crimes of 19th century murderesses from the UK, Australia and North America.This episode sees Lucy traverse London, hot on the heels of Maria Manning, the so-called Lady Macbeth of Bermondsey, a woman who confounds expectations of respectable Victorian England. Maria shocked the nation in 1849, when she conspired with her husband to kill her lover, before stealing the dead man's money and making a break for freedom on the all-new intercity rail network. She's the inspiration for a key character in Charles Dickens' famous proto-detective novel Bleak House and her fate leads to a pivotal change in the law.To untangle this remarkable story, Lucy is joined by international literary superstar Kate Mosse, author of historical fiction novels including the Joubert Family Chronicles and founder-director of The Women's Prize for Fiction. Lucy also visits the scene of the crime and recreates Maria's escape across the capital with Lady Killers' in-house historian Professor Rosalind Crone from the Open University. They uncover a bizarre trail of evidence, including the huge stash of belongings Maria deposited at London Bridge Station as she fled London, which included 28 pairs of stockings, 11 petticoats, a teapot, an apron and several items of bloodstained clothing.Together, the team ask why the buttoned-up Victorians had such an appetite for grisly tales of lust, crime and punishment. Are the same impulses behind today's fascination with true crime? Can we respect Maria's independent spirit and sharp mind, despite what she did? Does she deserve her place in history?Produced in partnership with the Open UniversityProducer: Sarah Goodman Readers: Meena Rayann and Jonathan Keeble Sound design: Chris Maclean Series Producer: Julia HayballA StoryHunter production for BBC Radio 4New episodes will be released on Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts. But if you're in the UK, listen to the latest full series of Lady Killers first on BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds - Lady Killers with Lucy Worsley - Available Episodes: http://bbc.in/3M2pT0K

Lives hang in the balance in this epic conclusion to Bleak House! Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

VEiiLA (Pronounced Vay-la)  is Vif Nute and Bes Eirid, a "band without a country," the duo fled their homeland of Russia with a couple of suitcases when Russia invaded The Ukraine in 2022 unwilling to support the ugly war and the horrible autocratic regime.  They embarked on a journey without a destination. "VEiiLA" is a stylized reference to a Baltic mountain dwelling demon that lures men into her cave by singing and then devouring them. Currently in Armenia,  VEiiLA released their second studio album in 2023  called "Sentimental Craving For Beauty" and it's available via Projekt Records.  Genres:  Dark Cold Wave, Downtempo, Alternative Pop, Bleak House, Dream Pop, Trip Hop, Witch House, Electronic.https://veiila.comhttps://www.projekt.comQUEEN OF WANDS with DJ Nocturna Every Saturday on ModSnap Radio | KMOD: San Antonio3pm (HST), 5pm (PST), 6pm (MST), 7pm (CST), 8pm (EST)Follow me on my other social media sites :Website: https://djnocturna.comRadio: https://modsnapradio.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nocturna.remixed/Instagram :  https://www.instagram.com/djnocturna/

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 23, 2023 is: nobby • NAH-bee • adjective Nobby is a synonym of chic and typically describes people and things that are cleverly stylish. The word is sometimes disapproving in modern use. // The restaurant was a bit too nobby for my tastes, but I did enjoy the food. See the entry > Examples: “If documentaries about famously nobby creatives are your schtick, you should also bookmark Todd Haynes's much-lauded The Velvet Underground, which reconsiders the figure of Lou Reed and premiered in the Grand Théâtre Lumière to rapturous applause.” — Hayley Maitland, British Vogue, 16 July 2021 Did you know? Nobby comes from the noun nob, which is used in British English to mean “one in a superior position in life.” (This nob may have begun as a slang word for “head,” but a possible connection to noble has been suggested as well.) Appearing in English in the 18th century, nobby was first used to describe people in society's upper echelons. In a way similar to that of a more recent coinage, posh, it has extended in usage to describe the places frequented by such people, as well as their genteel customs. Charles Dickens, for example, wrote in his 1853 novel Bleak House of “[r]especting this unfortunate family matter, and the nobbiest way of keeping it quiet.”

Celeste Callen returns to share her insights on how Henri  Bergson's theories of the 'superficial self' and the 'mechanical man' permeate through Dickens' novels such as The Signal-Man,  Bleak House,  Hard Times, The Chimes,  and Master Humphrey's Clock Celeste Callen holds a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature from King's College London and an MSc in Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian Literature from the University of Edinburgh. She is a third year PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD research explores subjective temporal experience in Dickens' fiction,  through the lens of Henri Bergson's philosophy of time. Her other areas of interest include representations of selfhood, memory, subjectivity and temporality, as well as reflections on the novel and the philosophy of time more broadly. Support the showIf you like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrardHost: Dominic GerrardSeries Artwork: Léna GibertOriginal Music: Dominic GerrardThank you for listening!

This week on From the Front Porch, you get a sneak peek at our super-popular Conquer a Classic book club for Patreon supporters! Today's episode is an excerpt from one of Annie and Hunter's Patreon-exclusive discussions about Bleak House, our Conquer a Classic book of 2023. Do you want to Conquer a Classic with us in 2024? Now is the perfect time to join Patreon and read along with our bookish community from across the globe. Join Patreon to unlock exclusive episodes where Annie and Hunter discuss Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, our Conquer a Classic pick for 2024! We'll read this 20th-century American western together over the next year starting in January. If already own Lonesome Dove, you can access the reading tracker for free as a Patreon member, or purchase a digital PDF download here. To conquer Lonesome Dove with us in 2024, follow these three steps: 1. Join our Patreon community at the $5, $20, or $50 levels here. 2. Stop by the store, call us at (229) 228-7767, or order your copy of Lonesome Dove online here. Your purchase includes an exclusive reading tracker and Conquer a Classic sticker. 3. Start reading and discussing this American western with us in January 2024! We can't wait to Conquer a Classic with you and readers from across the world! In other news, friend of The Bookshelf Sean Dietrich (aka Sean of the South) is returning to Thomasville Center for the Arts on Thursday, November 30 for a book launch, performance, and book signing! We're thrilled to partner with this terrific Southern author, storyteller, and musician to launch his heartwarming new novel, Kinfolk, releasing on Tuesday, November 14! Tap below to get tickets to his performance and preorder Kinfolk. Kinfolk by Sean Dietrich - Signed Copy Kinfolk by Sean Dietrich Tickets to the Sean Dietrich event Thank you to this week's sponsor, Visit Thomasville. Fall is a wonderful time to see Thomasville, Georgia!  If it's time to hit the road for a quick getaway, we're exactly what you're looking for! You can rekindle your spark, explore historical sites, indulge in dining out, shop at amazing independent stores, and finally relax and unwind. There's no better getaway than Thomasville!  Whether you live close by or are passing through, we hope you'll visit beautiful Thomasville, Georgia – it's worth the trip! Plan your visit at ThomasvilleGa.com. From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in South Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf's daily happenings on Instagram at @bookshelftville, and all the books from today's episode can be purchased online through our store website, www.bookshelfthomasville.com.  A full transcript of today's episode can be found here.  Special thanks to Dylan and his team at Studio D Podcast Production for sound and editing and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.  This week, Annie is reading The Fury by Alex Michaelides. If you liked what you heard in today's episode, tell us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also support us on Patreon, where you can access bonus content, monthly live Porch Visits with Annie, our monthly live Patreon Book Club with Bookshelf staffers, Conquer a Classic episodes with Hunter, and more. Just go to patreon.com/fromthefrontporch. We're so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week. Our Executive Producers are...Ashley Ferrell, Cammy Tidwell, Chanta Combs, Chantalle C, Kate O'Connell, Kristin May, Laurie Johnson, Linda Lee Drozt, Martha, Nicole Marsee, Stacy Laue, Stephanie Dean, Susan Hulings, and Wendi Jenkins.

A conversation with Dr. Jennifer MacLure, Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University, on the occasion of the publication of her book, The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2023). (Our conversation is also occasioned by our Library's Classics Book Discussion current tackling of Bleak House, Charles Dickens' massive 1853 masterpiece!)  The Feeling of Letting Die looks at how the Victorian novel addresses a knotty problem at the heart of England's rapidly industrializing society—how does a system that creates so much wealth also intentionally let certain people die in the service of the free market? Dr. MacLure explores the underpinnings of this “necroeconomic” system by looking at how fiction by Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Morris can be seen as a “literary laboratory,” as experiments in how the feelings that support and thwart this economic system circulate.   It's both a delightful conversation and about the origins of some of our most pressing issues today—epidemics, workers rights, gender, racism, poverty, charity—and it all builds to an affirmation of the study of literature as an “epistemological tool” for understanding our world today. As Dr. MacLure puts it, the histories of political economy and literature are more intertwined—and weirder—than normally assumed. Whether you are already a fan or not of Victorian literature, this podcast offers an opportunity for thinking anew.  You can check out The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction here at the library in our podcast collection.  We hope you enjoy our 61st interview episode! Each month (or so), we release an episode featuring a conversation with an author, artist, or other notable guests from Chicagoland or around the world. Learn more about the podcast (and our seven years of archives) on our podcast page. You can listen to all of our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. We welcome your comments and feedback—please send to podcast@deerfieldlibrary.org. You can listen to all of our episodes in the player below.

In this episode, I tell the story of Fred Barras, a 16-year-old boy killed in Emneth Hungate, Norfolk, on August 20, 1999.Fred and his friend, 29-year-old Brendon Fearon, were burgling the isolated farmhouse Bleak House when its owner, 54-year-old farmer Tony Martin, caught them in the act and unloaded his shotgun at them. Both men were hit, but only Fred died due to his injuries.Tony was handed a life sentence in April 2000 after being found guilty of murder. His conviction was later reduced to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility in October 2001 after a successful appeal.Receiving a retrospective five-year prison sentence, Tony served just over three and was released in August 2003.Almost a quarter of a century after the shooting at Bleak House, this case remains one of the most divisive in British history.**The following is NOT a sponsored message**If you are experiencing domestic abuse or are concerned that someone you know is, please consider contacting one of the following charities:Refuge (the largest specialist domestic abuse organisation in the UK): 0808 2000 247Respect (Men's Advice Line): 0808 801 0327Galop (the UK's LGBT+ anti-abuse charity): 0800 999 5428Women's Aid (a national charity working to end domestic abuse against women and children): helpline@womensaid.org.ukREMEMBER - If you are in immediate danger, please call 999!For all things British Murders, please visit my website:⁣britishmurders.com⁣Intro music:⁣David John Brady - 'Throw Down the Gauntlet'⁣linktr.ee/davidjohnbradymusic⁣References:⁣britishmurders.com/fredbarras Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, I tell the story of Fred Barras, a 16-year-old boy killed in Emneth Hungate, Norfolk, on August 20, 1999. Fred and his friend, 29-year-old Brendon Fearon, were burgling the isolated farmhouse Bleak House when its owner, 54-year-old farmer Tony Martin, caught them in the act and unloaded his shotgun at them. Both men were hit, but only Fred died due to his injuries. Tony was handed a life sentence in April 2000 after being found guilty of murder. His conviction was later reduced to manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility in October 2001 after a successful appeal. Receiving a retrospective five-year prison sentence, Tony served just over three and was released in August 2003. Almost a quarter of a century after the shooting at Bleak House, this case remains one of the most divisive in British history. **The following is NOT a sponsored message** If you are experiencing domestic abuse or are concerned that someone you know is, please consider contacting one of the following charities: Refuge (the largest specialist domestic abuse organisation in the UK): 0808 2000 247 Respect (Men's Advice Line): 0808 801 0327 Galop (the UK's LGBT+ anti-abuse charity): 0800 999 5428 Women's Aid (a national charity working to end domestic abuse against women and children): helpline@womensaid.org.uk REMEMBER - If you are in immediate danger, please call 999! For all things British Murders, please visit my website:⁣ britishmurders.com⁣ Intro music:⁣ David John Brady - 'Throw Down the Gauntlet'⁣ linktr.ee/davidjohnbradymusic⁣ References:⁣ britishmurders.com/fredbarras Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Episode 152, author Liz Nugent talks about her latest novel, Strange Sally Diamond. Liz is known for her dark and psychological storytelling. Strange Sally Diamond is character-driven, delving deep into psychology and trauma, and despite Sally's damaged nature, Liz portrays her with empathy and nuance. Strange Sally Diamond challenges us to consider the “why” behind someone's behavior. Plus, we get some great book recommendations from Liz. This post contains affiliate links through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!). CLICK HERE for the full episode Show Notes on the blog. Highlights Liz shares a spoiler-free summary of Strange Sally Diamond. The literary character who inspired this story. The amazing way Liz wrote the psychological aspects in Strange Sally Diamond. Why Liz finds it easier to write from the male perspective and how that changed (or didn't!) for writing Sally. All about those two different endings (UK vs. US editions) and the reasoning behind it! Liz's philosophy about opening lines. The inspiration behind the opening line for Strange Sally Diamond. Liz shares a little about her next book — including her opening line (though that could change)! We get a little behind-the-scenes scoop about book cover art and an author's role in choosing their book cover. Liz's Book Recommendations [32:45] Two OLD Books She Loves I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb | Amazon | Bookshop.org [32:58] Razorblade Tears by S. A. Cosby | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [37:08] Other Books Mentioned: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen [33:12] Bleak House by Charles Dickens [33:13] She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb [36:02] All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby [41:05] Two NEW Books She Loves Everyone Here is Lying by Shari Lapena | Amazon | Bookshop.org [41:21] I Will Find You by Harlan Coben | Amazon | Bookshop.org [42:33] Other Books Mentioned: The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena [42:08] One Book She Didn't Love American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis | Amazon | Bookshop.org [45:17] TWO NEW RELEASES She's Excited About The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose (November 28, 2023) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [47:58] End of Story by A. J. Finn (February 20, 2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org[49:43] Other Books Mentioned: The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn [49:46] Last 5-Star Book Liz Read The Lost Man by Jane Harper | Amazon | Bookshop.org [50:54] Other Books Mentioned Unraveling Oliver by Liz Nugent [1:44] Lying in Wait by Liz Nugent [1:47] Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent [1:48] To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee [3:27] The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. [10:33] The Maid by Nita Prose [21:52] Other Links Esquire | Book Publishing's Broken Blurb System (September 7, 2023)

(Apologies for the slightly late upload.)It's sequel season, because Hallie has written a second game all about people and characters named Martin! We also talk about cars, American history, and a scandal that hits home for people with our particular hobby.2:24: Q1 (Everything Else): What automaker became popular after its DB5 model was featured in the 1964 film Goldfinger?7:23: Q2 (Movies & TV): In what 1994 film, directed and produced by Robert Redford, does Martin Scorsese play Martin Rittenhome, a business executive involved in the rigging of the 1950s show Twenty-One?13:04: Q3 (Times & Places): In 1840, Martin van Buren lost his reelection bid to what member of the short-lived Whig party?24:32: Q4 (Arts & Literature): Martin Chuzzlewit was one of the least popular novels written by what author, whose other less popular novels include Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend?31:21: Q5 (Sports & Games): Matt Martin is a winger for what National Hockey League team who played at Nassau Coliseum until 2021 when they moved to UBS Arena at Belmont Park?37:32: Q6 (Music): What American singer known as the “King of Cool” is best known for the songs “That's Amore”, “Ain't That a Kick in the Head?”, and “Sway”?Theme music: "Thinking it Over" by Lee Rosevere, licensed under CC BY 2.0E-Mail: quizandhers@gmail.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/quizandhers/Twitter: https://twitter.com/quizandhersInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/quizandhers/Voice from the Underground Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/voice-from-the-underground-politics-pop-culture/id1302884018Cormac on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CormacsThoughts

Guests: Adam Carrington, Kimberley Strassel, & Dwight Lindley Host Scot Bertram talks with Adam Carrington, Associate Professor of Politics and William and Patricia LaMothe Chair in the U.S. Constitution at Hillsdale College, about the impact of the Supreme Court's recent opinion regarding affirmative action on College campuses. Kimberley Strassel, Editorial Board member and Columnist at the Wall Street Journal, discusses the Biden Administration and her new book The Biden Malaise: How America Bounces Back from Joe Biden's Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years. And Dwight Lindley, Associate Professor of English at Hillsdale College, continues his series on Charles Dickens, this time focusing on Dickens' masterpiece of political commentary, Bleak House.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Susan Williams (winner of a 2023 Windham-Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction) joins Windham-Campbell Prizes director Michael Kelleher to talk about the majesty and the drudgery of Bleak House, walking through history in the present, and the complicated realities of Charles Dickens the human. Reading List: White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa by Susan Williams David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin "Do They Know It's Christmas?" -- BandAid 1984 for a full episode transcript, click here. Dr Susan Williams is a senior research fellow in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her pathbreaking books include White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa; Who Killed Hammarskjöld?, which in 2015 triggered a new, ongoing UN investigation into the death of the UN Secretary-General; Spies in the Congo, which spotlights the link between US espionage in the Congo and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945; Colour Bar, the story of Botswana's founding president, which was made into the major 2016 film A United Kingdom; and The People's King, which presents an original perspective on the abdication of Edward VIII and his marriage to Wallis Simpson.

The Chancery Court had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including administration of estates, the guardianship of orphans, and disputed property disbursement. In Dickens' time, some cases could take years to be settled, changing the lives of those involved.Esther Summerson, a young woman raised in a tough and unloving atmosphere, is unexpectedly requested to be a companion to two teenage orphans, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, for whom the court has appointed as guardian, John Jarndyce. They take up residence at Mr. Jarndyce's home, Bleak House. The story of their lives and fortunes is the main thrust of the novel, and is related at times through the eyes of Esther, whose gentle point of view gives the reader a different and more intimate perspective.Richard is sure his fortune is ‘just around the corner' when the case of Jarndyce-v-Jarndyce, of which he and Ada will be beneficiaries, is settled. He tries his hand at a career or two, but he becomes obsessed with hastening the probate of the willed fortune he feels must soon be theirs. Further difficulties arise when he and Ada fall in love, while he, penniless, continues the quest to bring his case to justice.A scriber of legal documents dies, and from his death, questions arise which unearth secrets that the Jarndyce's neighbour, Lady Dedlock, has kept hidden for years. Inspector Bucket enters the case, and begins investigating the disappearance of Lady Dedlock. In the dirt poor part of London comes a young boy called Joe who claims to ‘know noffink' but who has witnessed something very important.Several other colorful characters are wound into the story. Nearly insane Miss Flite, who for years has attended court every day, with her little folder of documents, is ever hopeful of a settlement. Mr. Boythorn is a boisterous friend of Jarndyce who has a vendetta with Sir Leicester Dedlock. The Jellyby Family, invariably on the verge of a disaster, is neglected by their Mother who is obsessed with an overseas project. The Smallweed family is mean and avaricious – squeezing money from poor clients. Mr. Skimpole is the childlike captivating friend of Mr. Jarndyce who sees no harm in living off everybody else. Mr. Guppy fawns after Esther, and plots to steal documents with his friend Weevle. Mr. Woodcourt is a gentle surgeon and family friend, who becomes a hero.Since the writing of Bleak House, the property laws of England were changed, and disbursements were thenceforth conducted in court with the object of swiftly coming to a settlement for the benefit of inheritors.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Chancery Court had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including administration of estates, the guardianship of orphans, and disputed property disbursement. In Dickens' time, some cases could take years to be settled, changing the lives of those involved.Esther Summerson, a young woman raised in a tough and unloving atmosphere, is unexpectedly requested to be a companion to two teenage orphans, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, for whom the court has appointed as guardian, John Jarndyce. They take up residence at Mr. Jarndyce's home, Bleak House. The story of their lives and fortunes is the main thrust of the novel, and is related at times through the eyes of Esther, whose gentle point of view gives the reader a different and more intimate perspective.Richard is sure his fortune is ‘just around the corner' when the case of Jarndyce-v-Jarndyce, of which he and Ada will be beneficiaries, is settled. He tries his hand at a career or two, but he becomes obsessed with hastening the probate of the willed fortune he feels must soon be theirs. Further difficulties arise when he and Ada fall in love, while he, penniless, continues the quest to bring his case to justice.A scriber of legal documents dies, and from his death, questions arise which unearth secrets that the Jarndyce's neighbour, Lady Dedlock, has kept hidden for years. Inspector Bucket enters the case, and begins investigating the disappearance of Lady Dedlock. In the dirt poor part of London comes a young boy called Joe who claims to ‘know noffink' but who has witnessed something very important.Several other colorful characters are wound into the story. Nearly insane Miss Flite, who for years has attended court every day, with her little folder of documents, is ever hopeful of a settlement. Mr. Boythorn is a boisterous friend of Jarndyce who has a vendetta with Sir Leicester Dedlock. The Jellyby Family, invariably on the verge of a disaster, is neglected by their Mother who is obsessed with an overseas project. The Smallweed family is mean and avaricious – squeezing money from poor clients. Mr. Skimpole is the childlike captivating friend of Mr. Jarndyce who sees no harm in living off everybody else. Mr. Guppy fawns after Esther, and plots to steal documents with his friend Weevle. Mr. Woodcourt is a gentle surgeon and family friend, who becomes a hero.Since the writing of Bleak House, the property laws of England were changed, and disbursements were thenceforth conducted in court with the object of swiftly coming to a settlement for the benefit of inheritors.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Chancery Court had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including administration of estates, the guardianship of orphans, and disputed property disbursement. In Dickens' time, some cases could take years to be settled, changing the lives of those involved.Esther Summerson, a young woman raised in a tough and unloving atmosphere, is unexpectedly requested to be a companion to two teenage orphans, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, for whom the court has appointed as guardian, John Jarndyce. They take up residence at Mr. Jarndyce's home, Bleak House. The story of their lives and fortunes is the main thrust of the novel, and is related at times through the eyes of Esther, whose gentle point of view gives the reader a different and more intimate perspective.Richard is sure his fortune is ‘just around the corner' when the case of Jarndyce-v-Jarndyce, of which he and Ada will be beneficiaries, is settled. He tries his hand at a career or two, but he becomes obsessed with hastening the probate of the willed fortune he feels must soon be theirs. Further difficulties arise when he and Ada fall in love, while he, penniless, continues the quest to bring his case to justice.A scriber of legal documents dies, and from his death, questions arise which unearth secrets that the Jarndyce's neighbour, Lady Dedlock, has kept hidden for years. Inspector Bucket enters the case, and begins investigating the disappearance of Lady Dedlock. In the dirt poor part of London comes a young boy called Joe who claims to ‘know noffink' but who has witnessed something very important.Several other colorful characters are wound into the story. Nearly insane Miss Flite, who for years has attended court every day, with her little folder of documents, is ever hopeful of a settlement. Mr. Boythorn is a boisterous friend of Jarndyce who has a vendetta with Sir Leicester Dedlock. The Jellyby Family, invariably on the verge of a disaster, is neglected by their Mother who is obsessed with an overseas project. The Smallweed family is mean and avaricious – squeezing money from poor clients. Mr. Skimpole is the childlike captivating friend of Mr. Jarndyce who sees no harm in living off everybody else. Mr. Guppy fawns after Esther, and plots to steal documents with his friend Weevle. Mr. Woodcourt is a gentle surgeon and family friend, who becomes a hero.Since the writing of Bleak House, the property laws of England were changed, and disbursements were thenceforth conducted in court with the object of swiftly coming to a settlement for the benefit of inheritors.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Chancery Court had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including administration of estates, the guardianship of orphans, and disputed property disbursement. In Dickens' time, some cases could take years to be settled, changing the lives of those involved.Esther Summerson, a young woman raised in a tough and unloving atmosphere, is unexpectedly requested to be a companion to two teenage orphans, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, for whom the court has appointed as guardian, John Jarndyce. They take up residence at Mr. Jarndyce's home, Bleak House. The story of their lives and fortunes is the main thrust of the novel, and is related at times through the eyes of Esther, whose gentle point of view gives the reader a different and more intimate perspective.Richard is sure his fortune is ‘just around the corner' when the case of Jarndyce-v-Jarndyce, of which he and Ada will be beneficiaries, is settled. He tries his hand at a career or two, but he becomes obsessed with hastening the probate of the willed fortune he feels must soon be theirs. Further difficulties arise when he and Ada fall in love, while he, penniless, continues the quest to bring his case to justice.A scriber of legal documents dies, and from his death, questions arise which unearth secrets that the Jarndyce's neighbour, Lady Dedlock, has kept hidden for years. Inspector Bucket enters the case, and begins investigating the disappearance of Lady Dedlock. In the dirt poor part of London comes a young boy called Joe who claims to ‘know noffink' but who has witnessed something very important.Several other colorful characters are wound into the story. Nearly insane Miss Flite, who for years has attended court every day, with her little folder of documents, is ever hopeful of a settlement. Mr. Boythorn is a boisterous friend of Jarndyce who has a vendetta with Sir Leicester Dedlock. The Jellyby Family, invariably on the verge of a disaster, is neglected by their Mother who is obsessed with an overseas project. The Smallweed family is mean and avaricious – squeezing money from poor clients. Mr. Skimpole is the childlike captivating friend of Mr. Jarndyce who sees no harm in living off everybody else. Mr. Guppy fawns after Esther, and plots to steal documents with his friend Weevle. Mr. Woodcourt is a gentle surgeon and family friend, who becomes a hero.Since the writing of Bleak House, the property laws of England were changed, and disbursements were thenceforth conducted in court with the object of swiftly coming to a settlement for the benefit of inheritors.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SO MANY SPOILERS ALERT!  8 years worth of spoilers, if we are being truthful.  Sit down with Scarlet and Blackbird as they take you on a journey through one of their most beloved films, The VVitch, directed by Robert Eggers and starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson and Harvey Scrimshaw.   Set in Puritan New England, this folk tale is about so much more than its title.  Join the witches on a frightening, zealot-infested cult hoedown as we find out what TRUE horror really looks like, and what perpetrates it.  Trust, we want to live deliciously at all times, and that does not include traveling back to 1630.  

This week on From the Front Porch, Annie is joined by Hunter McLendon (@shelfbyshelf) to chat about their 2023 reading resolutions! We're thrilled that you can now shop for the books mentioned in this episode on our brand-new website: Annie's reading resolutions last year: Recitatif by Toni Morrison Beloved by Toni Morrison Sula by Toni Morrison Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas Annie's resolutions this year: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry Standing by Words by Wendell Berry (unavailable to order) Bleak House by Charles Dickens From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in South Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf's daily happenings on Instagram at @bookshelftville, and all the books from today's episode can be purchased online through our store website, www.bookshelfthomasville.com.  A full transcript of today's episode can be found here. Special thanks to Dylan and his team at Studio D Podcast Production for sound and editing and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.  This week, Annie is reading Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny. Hunter is reading The Farewell Tour by Stephanie Clifford. If you liked what you heard in today's episode, tell us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Or, if you're so inclined, support us on Patreon, where you can hear our staff's weekly New Release Tuesday conversations, read full book reviews in our monthly Shelf Life newsletter and follow along as Hunter and I conquer a classic. Just go to patreon.com/fromthefrontporch. We're so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week. Our Executive Producers are... Donna Hetchler, Cammy Tidwell, Chantalle C, Kate O'Connell, Nicole Marsee, Wendi Jenkins, and Laurie Johnson.

This week on From the Front Porch, Annie tells you all about her favorite books ever! Don't forget to join our bookish Patreon community and get your copy of Bleak House if you'd like to join our Conquer a Classic Book Club this year. To purchase the books mentioned in this episode, visit our website: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee The Mothers by Brit Bennett The Road by Cormac McCarthy Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner Little Women by Louisa May Alcott An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott (unavailable to order) Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel From the Front Porch is a weekly podcast production of The Bookshelf, an independent bookstore in South Georgia. You can follow The Bookshelf's daily happenings on Instagram at @bookshelftville, and all the books from today's episode can be purchased online through our store website, www.bookshelfthomasville.com.  A full transcript of today's episode can be found here. Special thanks to Dylan and his team at Studio D Podcast Production for sound and editing and for our theme music, which sets the perfect warm and friendly tone for our Thursday conversations.  This week, Annie is reading Decent People by De'Shawn Charles Winslow. If you liked what you heard in today's episode, tell us by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Or, if you're so inclined, support us on Patreon, where you can hear our staff's weekly New Release Tuesday conversations, read full book reviews in our monthly Shelf Life newsletter and follow along as Hunter and I conquer a classic. Just go to patreon.com/fromthefrontporch. We're so grateful for you, and we look forward to meeting back here next week. Our Executive Producers are... Donna Hetchler, Cammy Tidwell, Chantalle C, Kate O'Connell, Nicole Marsee, Wendi Jenkins, Laurie Johnson and Kate Johnston Tucker.

This week on The Literary Life podcast our hosts introduce the 2023 Reading Challenge! Angelina, Cindy and Thomas are excited to share with you about all the categories on this year's Literary Life Bingo Reading Challenge! You can download your own copy of the challenge here, as well as check out our past reading challenges. Scroll down in the show notes to see a list of the links and books mentioned in this episode. You can use the hashtag #LitLifeBingo on social media so we can all see what everyone is reading in 2023! Don't forget to shop the House of Humane Letters Christmas Sale now through the end of the year. The Literary Life Back to School online conference recordings are also on sale at Morning Time for Moms right now. Commonplace Quotes: Much that we call Victorian is known to us only because the Victorians laughed at it. George Malcolm Young, from Portrait of an Age I think that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there. Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Reading is to the mind as exercise is to the body. Joseph Addison Thunderstorms by William H. Davies My mind has thunderstorms, That brood for heavy hours: Until they rain me words, My thoughts are drooping flowers And sulking, silent birds. Yet come, dark thunderstorms, And brood your heavy hours; For when you rain me words, My thoughts are dancing flowers And joyful singing birds. Book and Link List: Hercule Poirot's Christmas by Agatha Christie Episode 14: “The Adventures of a Shilling” by Joseph Addison Episode 3: The Importance of Detective Fiction Episode 16: “Why I Write” by George Orwell Reading Challenge Downloads The Letters of Jane Austen by Jane Austen Abigail Adams: Letters ed. by Edith Gelles The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple ed. by G. C. Moore Smith Few Eggs and No Oranges by Vere Hodgson Letters to an American Lady by C. S. Lewis Letters of C. S. Lewis by C. S. Lewis Letters from Father Christmas by J.R.R. Tolkien Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor ed. by Sally Fitzgerald Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman by Lord Chesterfield The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer The Aeneid by Virgil The Saga of the Volsungs by Anonymous The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Ramayana of Valmiki ed. and trans. by Robert and Sally Goldman The Prelude by William Wordsworth Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton P. D. James Edmund Crispin Alan Bradley Patricia Moyes Peter Granger Rex Stout Sir Walter Scott The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke Mythos by Stephen Fry The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell Coming Up for Air by George Orwell P. G. Wodehouse The Last Days of Socrates by Plato The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis Champagne for the Soul by Mike Mason Edges of His Ways by Amy Carmichael The Footsteps at the Lock by Ronald Knox Queen Victoria by Lytton Strachey Jane Austen Patrick Leigh Fermor Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson Heroes by Stephen Fry Troy by Stephen Fry Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman The Mabinogion trans. by Sioned Davies The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson Cindy's List of Literature of Honor for Boys (archived webpage) Bleak House by Charles Dickens David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. Chesterton The 39 Steps by John Buchan Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith The Well Read Poem An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis The Truth and the Beauty by Andrew Klavan The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill Jacob's Room is Full of Books by Susan Hill The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason Baxter 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff Q's Legacy by Helene Hanff Support The Literary Life: Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support! Connect with Us: You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/ Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy's own Patreon page also! Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let's get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

On Today's Trivia Patron Tournament: We are excited to have Round 5 of our Patron Tournament! We have Jeff (from Bequiz I said so) vs Alix in this shortened version of the show. We challenge them to some hard questions like: Who wrote the 1852 novel Bleak House? The degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity is known by what term? On this day in history, Sept. 16th, 1932, who began a hunger strike to protest the government's electoral system decision? Seascape, The Zoo Story, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf were plays written by which American playwright? 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch were the sizes of what now-obsolete computer storage devices? In golf, which type of clubs are used for long shots from the tee or fairway? Commonly symbolizing the concept of enlightenment, which aquatic plant plays a central role in the art of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism? Which modern day Italian city does Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed Pompei, overlook? If you liked this episode, check out our last trivia episode! Music Hot Swing, Fast Talkin, Bass Walker, Dances and Dames by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Don't forget to follow us on social media for more trivia: Patreon - patreon.com/quizbang - Please consider supporting us on Patreon. Check out our fun extras for patrons and help us keep this podcast going. We appreciate any level of support! Website - quizbangpod.com Check out our website, it will have all the links for social media that you need and while you're there, why not go to the contact us page and submit a question! Facebook - @quizbangpodcast - we post episode links and silly lego pictures to go with our trivia questions. Enjoy the silly picture and give your best guess, we will respond to your answer the next day to give everyone a chance to guess. Instagram - Quiz Quiz Bang Bang (quizquizbangbang), we post silly lego pictures to go with our trivia questions. Enjoy the silly picture and give your best guess, we will respond to your answer the next day to give everyone a chance to guess. Twitter - @quizbangpod We want to start a fun community for our fellow trivia lovers. If you hear/think of a fun or challenging trivia question, post it to our twitter feed and we will repost it so everyone can take a stab it. Come for the trivia - stay for the trivia. Ko-Fi - ko-fi.com/quizbangpod - Keep that sweet caffeine running through our body with a Ko-Fi, power us through a late night of fact checking and editing!