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Mary Whitehouse successfully sued Gay News and publisher Denis Lemon at the Old Bailey in a trial that began on 11th July, 1977 - Britain's last conviction for blasphemy. What had ired the notorious Christian campaigner was the magazine's publication of “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name”, a poem by James Kirkup written from the perspective of a Roman centurion who graphically describes having sex with Jesus after his crucifixion. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain why the poem literally could not be defended on its artistic merit; reveal how it came to Whitehouse's attention in the first place; and consider the literary potency of ‘Foxy Judas'...  Content Warning: explicit poetry, necrophilia, material likely to offend Christians. Further Reading: • ‘The gay poem that broke blasphemy laws' (Pink News, 2008): https://www.thepinknews.com/2008/01/10/the-gay-poem-that-broke-blasphemy-laws/ • ‘Blasphemy in the Christian World - A History, By David Nash' (OUP, 2010): https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Blasphemy_in_the_Christian_World/BPYkhnY-3_cC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=robertson+whitehouse+lemon&pg=PA98&printsec=frontcover • ‘The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name, by James Kirkup' (Stand Up Jesus, 2010): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iiIORJTOqY This episode first aired in 2023 Love the show? Support us!  Join 

This lecture considers ‘You'll Never Walk Alone' from Carousel (1945). Perhaps Rodgers and Hammerstein's most operatic song, it was originally written for Metropolitan Opera star Christine Johnson but has gone on to be recorded by artists as diverse as Elvis Presley and Marcus Mumford and sung at both the Last Night of the Proms and Liverpool Football Club.This lecture will include live performances by international soprano and Grammy Award winner Rebecca Evans CBE.This lecture was recorded by Dominic Broomfield-McHugh on 2nd of May 2025 at Conway Hall, London.Dominic Broomfield-McHugh is Gresham Visiting Professor of Film and Theatre Music. He is also Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield and is a graduate of King's College London.His scholarship focuses on the American musical on stage and screen, and he has published eight books including Loverly: The Life and Times of 'My Fair Lady' (OUP, 2012), The Letters of Cole Porter (Yale, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical (2022).He is Associate Producer of the PBS documentary Meredith Willson: America's Music Man and has appeared on all the main BBC television and radio stations as well as NPR in America. He has given talks and lectures at the Sydney Opera House, New York City Center, the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Sadler's Wells, and Lincoln Center, among many others.The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/operatic-showstopperGresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Website:  https://gresham.ac.ukX: https://x.com/GreshamCollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollegeSupport Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-todaySupport the show

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so 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

ABOUT Léa Salje is an associate professor at the University of Leeds. She joined Leeds in 2015 on a postdoc, and has been there ever since. Before that she did a PhD at UCL. She works in Philosophy of Mind, mostly on issues around self-knowledge and first person thought. Her first monograph Saying What One Thinks (forthcoming with OUP), is about the special form of self-knowledge we get by putting our thoughts into words.

The Friday Five for May 30, 2025: Field Notes for This Week Helpful Keyboard Shortcuts Mozilla Pocket Alternatives YouTube Adds Top Podcasts Chart How to Avoid Using Elderspeak   Field Notes: “AHIP Medicare + Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Online Course.” Ahipmedicaretraining.Com, AHIP, www.ahipmedicaretraining.com/page/login. Accessed 28 May 2025. “NABIP Medicare Advantage Certification.” NABIP.Org, NABIP, www.nabiptraining.org/nabip/medicare. Accessed 28 May 2025. Register for Ritter Insurance Marketing Summits: https://summits.ritterim.com/   Helpful Keyboard Shortcuts: Wawro, Alex. “9 MacBook Keyboard Shortcuts You Need to Know First.” Tomsguide.Com, Tom's Guide, 20 Apr. 2025, www.tomsguide.com/computing/macos/9-macbook-keyboard-shortcuts-you-need-to-know-first. Kasiya, Chifundo. “12 Windows Key Shortcuts I Use Every Day.” Howtogeek.Com, How-To Geek, 23 Feb. 2025, www.howtogeek.com/windows-key-shortcuts-i-use-every-day/. Brookes, Tim. “13 Mac Keyboard Shortcuts I Couldn't Live Without.” Howtogeek.Com, How-To Geek, 10 Apr. 2025, www.howtogeek.com/mac-keyboard-shortcuts-i-couldnt-live-without/. “Mac Split Screen: How to Chop Your Screen in Half for Multitasking.” Cnet.Com, CNET, 3 Feb. 2025, www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mac-split-screen-how-to-chop-your-screen-in-half-for-multitasking/. Aamoth, Doug. “These 10 Windows 11 Keyboard Shortcuts Will Boost Your Productivity.” Fastcompany.Com, Fast Company, 27 May 2025, www.fastcompany.com/91337250/best-windows-11-keyboard-shortcuts. Fisher, Tim. “Windows Keyboard Shortcuts to Know in 2025.” Lifewire.Com, Lifewire, 14 Jan. 2025, www.lifewire.com/best-windows-keyboard-shortcuts-6503973.   Mozilla Pocket Alternatives: Reddy, Ramesh. “6 Best Pocket Alternatives to Save and Read Articles Later [2025].” Techpp.Com, TechPP, 24 May 2025, techpp.com/2025/05/24/best-pocket-alternatives/. Manuel, Beatrice. “Best Read-It-Later Apps in 2025: Top Ways to Save Web Pages & Content.” Edited by Samuel Chapman and Eugenie Tiu, Cloudwards.Net, Cloudwards, 16 May 2025, www.cloudwards.net/best-read-it-later-apps/. Instapaper: https://instapaper.com/ Matter: https://hq.getmatter.com/ Blake, Alex. “Mozilla Is Shutting down Pocket – Here Are the 3 Best Bookmarking Alternatives.” TechRadar, techradar.com, 23 May 2025, www.techradar.com/computing/websites-apps/mozilla-is-shutting-down-pocket-here-are-the-3-best-bookmarking-alternatives. Delima, David. “Mozilla's Pocket Shuts down in July: Try These Four Pocket Alternatives.” Gadgets360.Com, Gadgets 360, 24 May 2025, www.gadgets360.com/apps/features/mozilla-pocket-shutdown-alternatives-bookmarks-app-8497286. Krasnoff, Barbara. “Pocket Alternatives for Bookmarking Your Content.” Theverge.Com, The Verge, 23 May 2025, www.theverge.com/22927750/bookmarks-pocket-firefox-instapaper-raindrop. Raindrop.io: https://raindrop.io/ Mehta, Ivan, and Sarah Perez. “Read-It-Later App Pocket Is Shutting down - Here Are the Best Alternatives.” Techcrunch.Com, TechCrunch, 27 May 2025, techcrunch.com/2025/05/27/read-it-later-app-pocket-is-shutting-down-here-are-the-best-alternatives/. Peckham, James. “Read-It-Later Pocket App Will Shut down on July 8.” Pcmag.Com, PCMAG, 23 May 2025, www.pcmag.com/news/pocket-shut-down-the-read-it-later-app-will-close-on-july-8. Pot, Justin. “The 4 Best Read It Later Apps.” Zapier.Com, Zapier, 15 Aug. 2024, zapier.com/blog/best-bookmaking-read-it-later-app/.   YouTube Adds Top Podcasts Chart: “Apple Podcast Charts.” Podcasts.Apple.Com, Apple, podcasts.apple.com/us/charts. Accessed 28 May 2025. “Spotify Podcast Charts.” Podcastcharts.Byspotify.Com, Spotify, podcastcharts.byspotify.com/. Accessed 28 May 2025. “YouTube Podcast Charts.” Charts.Youtube.Com, YouTube, charts.youtube.com/podcasts. Accessed 28 May 2025.   How to Avoid Using Elderspeak: Senior Speak: Talking to Medicare Clients Age 65 & Older: https://ritterim.com/blog/senior-speak-talking-to-medicare-clients-age-65-and-older/ Shaw, Clarissa A., et al. “The Iowa Coding Scheme for Elderspeak: Development and Validation.” Academic.Oup.Com, Oxford Academic, 4 Mar. 2025, academic.oup.com/gerontologist/article/65/6/gnaf093/8051882. Span, Paula. “Honey, Sweetie, Dearie: The Perils of Elderspeak.” Nytimes.Com, The New York Times, 3 May 2025, www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/health/elderly-treatment-aides.html.   Rueppel Recommends: Ridgely, Charlie. “Everything Coming to Netflix, Disney+, Max & Other Streaming Services in June 2025.” ComicBook.Com, Comic Book, 26 May 2025, comicbook.com/movies/news/new-streaming-movies-tv-june-2025-netflix-disney-hbo-services/.   Resources: 4 Ancillary Cross-Sales to Show Clients You Care: https://lnk.to/asg670 Apps for Comparing Healthcare & Prescriptions: https://lnk.to/ASGA85 Community Engagement & ACA Marketing Suggestions for Agents: https://lnk.to/ASG665 Reassuring Your Clients During Difficult Times: https://lnk.to/asg671 Takeaways on Social Media Marketing in 2025: https://lnk.to/asgf20250523   Follow Us on Social! Ritter on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/RitterIM Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/ritter.insurance.marketing/ LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/company/ritter-insurance-marketing TikTok, https://www.tiktok.com/@ritterim X, https://x.com/RitterIM and YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/user/RitterInsurance     Sarah on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/sjrueppel/ Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/thesarahjrueppel/ and Threads, https://www.threads.net/@thesarahjrueppel  Tina on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/tina-lamoreux-6384b7199/   Not affiliated with or endorsed by Medicare or any government agency. Contact the Agent Survival Guide Podcast! Email us ASGPodcast@Ritterim.com or call 1-717-562-7211 and leave a voicemail.

ABSTRACT Many of our practices presuppose moral responsibility. Arguably, agents can only be morally responsible if they are able to act otherwise than they do. Compatibilists and incompatibilists traditionally disagree about whether determinism precludes the ability to do otherwise, often reaching an impasse because they endorse different readings of “able to do otherwise”. I argue that the correct reading of “able to do otherwise” depends on the purposes of our responsibility-entailing practices. Practices serving different purposes may warrant different readings. Consequently, there may be no single independently ascertainable definition of freedom to do otherwise that justifies our responsibility-entailing practices wholesale ABOUT Nadine Elzein is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD at University College London, and has held posts at the University of Oxford, King's College London, the University of Southampton, and University College London. Her research focuses predominantly on free will, moral responsibility, blame, and determinism. She has a present writing project with OUP on this theme.

ABOUT Eric Schliesser is professor of Political Science, with a focus on Political Theory, at the University of Amsterdam. He was previously affiliated with Syracuse University, Leiden University, and Ghent University among others. Schliesser has published on early modern philosophy, philosophy of economics, the history of analytic philosophy, the history of feminism, and metaphilosophy. His publications include his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP, 2017). He has edited numerous volumes including (inter alia) Newton and empiricism. (OUP, with Zvi Biener, 2014); Sympathy, a History of a Concept (OUP, 2015); Ten Neglected Classics of philosophy (Oxford, 2017), Neglected Classics of Philosophy, Vol 2 (Oxford 2022), and a translation of Sophie de Grouchy's Letters on Sympathy (together with Sandrine Berges, Oxford 2019). He keeps a daily blog Digressionsnimpressions.

1085. Do abbreviations like “plz” and “ty” actually make your texts feel less sincere? New research suggests they might. We explore how shortened words affect how your messages are received — even in romantic conversations. Then, we offer practical tips for writing thoughtful, specific thank-you notes that reflect real gratitude.The texting segment was written by David Fang, a PhD student in marketing at Stanford University. Sam Maglio, an Associate Professor of Marketing and Psychology at the University of Toronto, also contributed to the writing. It originally ran on The Conversation, and appears here through a Creative Commons license.The "thank-you" segment originally ran on the OUP Blog and appears here with permission. Edwin Battistella taught linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he served as a dean and as interim provost. He is the author of "Do You Make These Mistakes in English?" (OUP, 2009), "Bad Language" (OUP, 2005), and "The Logic of Markedness" (OUP, 1996).

Tessa Watson is a music therapist and trainer. She is Associate Professor and Programme Leader for the MA Music Therapy at University of Roehampton and works in that setting with colleagues across the Arts and Play Therapies and other HCPC registered professions. She has extensive clinical experience in mental health and learning disability work and her current music therapy work is with the children and families who use Alexander Devine Hospice. Tessa has an interest in co-production and is one of the founders of HENCoP (The Health Education Network for Co-Production). Tessa has published and spoken widely about her music therapy work to support adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities, the experience of women in secure psychiatric settings, multi-disciplinary work and learning and teaching music therapy. She has contributed to the development of the profession in the UK (BAMT) and internationally (EMTC) and in 2020 led the BAMT online conference which attracted over 570 delegates. Tessa is an HCPC partner, working on CPD and FTP schemes. She plays cello and sings in local amateur musical groups. Tessa's most recent book, written with Cathy Warner is Contemporary Issues in Music Therapy Training, A Resource for Trainees, Trainers and Practitioners (Routledge 2024). Some other notable publications are ‘Music Therapy with Adults with Learning Disabilities - a view from the United Kingdom' in The Handbook of Music Therapy (2024), ‘Supporting the Unplanned Journey' in Collaboration and Assistance in Music Therapy Practice (2017), ‘The World is Alive! Music Therapy with Adults with Learning Disabilities' in the Oxford Handbook of Music Therapy, OUP (2016), Integrated Team Working: Music Therapy as Part of Transdisciplinary and Collaborative Approaches, London; Jessica Kingsley Publishers (2008) with Karen Twyford, and Music Therapy with Adults with Learning Disabilities, London; Routledge (2007). Links: https://www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Issues-in-Music-Therapy-Training-A-Resource-for-Trainees-Trainers-and-Practitioners/Watson-Warner/p/book/9781032853963?srsltid=AfmBOoqv92gfeHbBxe_zmiemr1pyCC769xqTMPqxlu1E7Hfqo-imlCXw https://alexanderdevine.org/ https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-taught-courses/music-therapy/  

The Adultery Act, passed into British law on 14th May, 1650, made having sex with a married woman a crime so severe it was punishable by death – but only for her.  Radical groups like the Ranters mocked Puritan prudishness, Royalists called the law joyless and tyrannical, and Presbyterians argued the law would be impossible to apply fairly. But the Puritans needed something everyone could rally around – and sexual sin was an easy target.  Those who thought the English Civil War had been divine punishment for a sinful nation believed only Old Testament-style legislation could stop society from descending into full-blown chaos. Yet, during the time the law was on the statue books, no one was actually executed. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly consider the practicalities of proving adultery in a time when no reliable records of marriage existed; explain why sex with your son's wife or daughter's husband was considered incest; and reveal how, in some form, adultery stayed on the books until 2022.... Further Reading: • ‘An Act for suppressing the detestable sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication' (House of Parliament, 1650): https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp387-389 • 'England's Culture Wars - Puritan Reformation and Its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660, By B. S. Capp' (OUP, 2012): https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/England_s_Culture_Wars/d42Z-58lIdcC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=7+Puritans+and+Sex&pg=PA132&printsec=frontcover • '60 Second Lecture Series- "The Puritans Had Sex? Why, Yes, They Did...!" - Kathy Cooke' (Quinnipiac University, 2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faHxWKgtkkw Love the show? Support us!  Join 

New Zealand American cellist and professor of cello at the University of Idaho (making her my favorite Vandal) chats with Emily about, well, lots of stuff. This is a pretty special episode, as I've been a fan of Miranda's work forever, and we have both written for Strings for a long time. I had to have her on because her new book, Notes for Cellists is an absolute banger. Like most of the better episodes, this one is all over the place! Buckle up and enjoy. :) Miranda's website: https://mirandawilsoncellist.com/ Miranda's faculty profile: https://www.uidaho.edu/class/music/our-people/faculty/miranda-wilson eBook of her Davidoff translation: https://uidaho.pressbooks.pub/violoncellschule/ OUP website for her latest text, Notes for Cellists: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/notes-for-cellists-9780197623749?lang=en&cc=us As always, you can visit emilywright.net to see what's going on there: an upcoming class entitled Using Time and Texture to Create Musical Ideas will be enrolling into the summer, as well as a level-based studio class. Send a text or give me a call on the Lonely Cello text/voicemail line: 323 657 9444 or email contact at emily wright dot net to ask questions or make a request for an episode topic!

Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/-TsWDdeQK34Composed by Jerry Herman of Hello, Dolly! fame, ‘I Am What I Am' first appeared in the Broadway musical La Cage aux Folles (1983). As well as gaining importance as a gay anthem during the AIDS crisis, the song has gone on to become a hit for several Black divas including Gloria Gaynor and Shirley Bassey. This lecture was recorded by Dominic Broomfield-McHugh on 3rd of April 2025 at Conway Hall, London.Dominic Broomfield-McHugh is Gresham Visiting Professor of Film and Theatre Music. He is also Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield and is a graduate of King's College London.His scholarship focuses on the American musical on stage and screen, and he has published eight books including Loverly: The Life and Times of 'My Fair Lady' (OUP, 2012), The Letters of Cole Porter (Yale, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical (2022).He is Associate Producer of the PBS documentary Meredith Willson: America's Music Man and has appeared on all the main BBC television and radio stations as well as NPR in America. He has given talks and lectures at the Sydney Opera House, New York City Center, the Library of Congress, New York Public Library, Sadler's Wells, and Lincoln Center, among many others.The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/lgbt-showstopper-i-am-what-i-amGresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Website:  https://gresham.ac.ukX: https://x.com/GreshamCollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollegeSupport Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-todaySupport the show

Dominic is joined by the inimitable Prof. Hugo Bowles who is currently working the OUP edition of The Pickwick Papers  to guide us through this riot of a novel - if it is a novel? Hugo is an alumnus of both Oxford and Cambridge where he read English, Classics and Applied Linguistics. For over three decades he lectured at four Italian Universities and is the author of Dickens and Stenographic Mind (published by Edinburgh University Press). We last caught up with Hugo in his joint episodes with Dr. Claire Wood as they spoke about their award-winning Dickens Code Project.Joining us today, to read extracts from this dizzying narrative is the wonderful actress Gina Beck.The sounds of horses, carriages, seagulls and nature are used with permission from Epidemic SoundCaution: Listeners please note that the topic of suicide is covered in the earlier parts of the Pickwick story.Support the showIf you'd like to make a donation to support the costs of producing this series you can buy 'coffees' right here https://www.buymeacoffee.com/dominicgerrardThank you so much!Host: Dominic GerrardSeries Artwork: Léna GibertOriginal Music: Dominic GerrardThank you for listening!

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/jewish-studies

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). 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

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/german-studies

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past (Oxford UP, 2024) is a new title in OUP's Graphic History Series that chronicles the events of the Holocaust and its aftermath in a small village in rural Germany. Based on meticulous research and using powerful visual storytelling, the book provides a multilayered narrative that explores the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish villagers from the First World War to the present. Its focus on how "ordinary" people experienced this time offers a new and illuminating insight into everyday life and the processes of violence, rupture, and reconciliation that characterized the history of the twentieth century in Germany and beyond. The graphic narrative is accompanied by source documents published in English translation for the first time, an essay on the wider historical context, and an incisive reflection on the writing of this book—and of history more broadly. Kim Wünschmann is Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews and teaches at the University of Hamburg. She obtained her Ph.D. from Birkbeck, University of London. Her research centers on German Jewish history, Holocaust Studies, and legal history. She held fellowships at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. She was DAAD Lecturer at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex and Research Associate at the Department of History at LMU Munich. Her Publications include Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. She is also the co-editor of Living the German Revolution 1918–19: Expectations, Experiences, Responses (Oxford University Press, 2023) and together with Stefanie Fischer co-author of the Graphic History Oberbrechen: A German Village Confronts Its Nazi Past, illustrated by Liz Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2024) . Stefanie Fischer a Senior Lecturer at the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Her fields of scholarly research are German Jewish history and Holocaust Studies. Fischer is the author of Jewish Cattle Traders in the German Countryside, 1919-1939. Economic Trust and Antisemitic Violence (Indiana University Press, 2024) and with Kim Wünschmann of Oberbrechen. A German Village Confronts its Nazi Past (Oxford University Press, 2025). She is also co-editor of the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book (Oxford University Press, since 2024).

Daniel Solove has just published a new book, On Privacy and Technology. We went through a few key concepts from it, and also had a chance to revisit other core ideas in the author's work.  Professor Solove is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor of Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the George Washington University Law School. One of the world's leading experts in privacy law, Solove is the author of more than 10 books and 100 articles about privacy. He has also written a children's fiction book about privacy. He is one of the most cited law professors in the law and technology field. Professor Solove has been interviewed and quoted in hundreds of media articles and broadcasts and has been a consultant for many Fortune 500 companies and celebrities. It is to him that we owe the famous taxonomy of privacy harms, as well as very recent papers on Privacy and AI or Privacy and Data Scraping. References: Daniel J. Solove on Bluesky Daniel J. Solove on LinkedIn Daniel J. Solove's personal page On Privacy and Technology: Oxford University Press, Amazon.  The Great Scrape: The Clash Between Scraping and Privacy Artificial Intelligence and Privacy  

20th February 2025Dr. Lex Takkenberg will spell out the basic facts about the Agency's mandate, history and work on behalf of Palestinian refugees. A Dutch National, he is Senior Advisor on the Question of Palestine at ARDD, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development, in Amman. From 1989 until 2019, he worked in various field and headquarters positions with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, most recently at its Amman headquarters as the agency's first Chief Ethics Officer. He was previously UNRWA's General Counsel, Director of Operations, and (Deputy) Field Director in Gaza and Syria. Before joining UNRWA, he was the Legal Officer of the Dutch Refugee Council, from 1983 until 1989. A law graduate from the University of Amsterdam, where he also worked as an Academic Assistant from 1987-1989, he obtained a Doctorate in International Law from the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1997 after having successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law. Oxford University Press (OUP) published a commercial edition of the dissertation in 1998; an integral Arabic translation was published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in 2003. A new version of the book – co-authored with Francesca Albanese – was published, also with OUP, in 2020.

Amber joins me for a discussion of some words which reflect various cultural movements of the last 12 months or more. Learn some trending words and listen to discussions of topics such as the influence of online content on mental health, the Oasis concert ticket scandal, an exploration of the 'lore' of LEP, romantic fantasy books, the rise of AI and more. Includes a PDF with my episode notes and vocabulary lists.The Oxford Words of the Year is a shortlist of words chosen by OUP because they saw a significant increase in usage in 2024 and because they represent certain cultural moments of recent times.

Oh Thursday 6th February 2025 Professor Campbell McLachlan KC delivered his 1973 Professor Inaugural Lecture: 'On the Interface between Public and Private International Law'.The lecture begins at 05:18Abstract: Our understanding of the operation of law beyond the nation State has been deeply shaped by two great disciplines: public and private international law. Yet surprisingly little systematic attention has been devoted to the relationship between the two. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of International Dispute Resolution in the University of Cambridge, McLachlan argues that the neglect of this interface is highly consequential for our understanding of law's capacity to control the State and the corporation, which are, respectively, the principal holders of public/political and private/economic power in the world.Campbell McLachlan is elected as Professor of Law (1973) in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall. He took up his chair in July 2024, specialising in International Dispute Resolution. A New Zealander, his career has spanned scholarship and practice in private and public international law. His principal works include: Foreign Relations Law (CUP 2014), International Investment Arbitration: Substantive Principles (2nd ed, OUP 2017) and The Principle of Systemic Integration in International Law (2024). He is a Specialist Editor of Dicey, Morris & Collins on the Conflict of Laws. He gave the General Course at The Hague Academy of International Law in January 2024. He is a member of the Institut de Droit International and of the Permanent Court of Arbitration.Photographs of the event are available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cambridgelawfaculty/albums/72177720323668326

Speaker: Arman Sarvarian, University of SurreyDate: Friday Lunchtime Lecture: Friday 31 January 2025Dr Arman Sarvarian will speak about his forthcoming monograph The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice to be published by Oxford University Press in April. The product of seven years' labour of approximately 170,000 words, the work includes a foreword by Professor August Reinisch of the University of Vienna and International Law Commission. The following is the summary of Oxford University Press:'The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice provides a comprehensive, practical, and empirical overview of the topic, establishing State succession as a distinct field with a cohesive set of rules.From the secession of the United States of America in 1784 to that of South Sudan in 2011, the book digests and analyses State practice spanning more than two centuries. It is based on research into a wide and diverse range of case studies, including archival and previously unpublished data. Reconstructing the intellectual foundation of the field, the book offers a vision for its progressive development - one that is rooted in an interpretation of State practice that transcends the politics of the codification projects in the decolonization and desovietization eras.The book examines international law on State succession with respect to territorial rights and obligations, State property (including archives) and debt, treaties, international claims and responsibility, as well as nationality and private property (including concessions and investments). Its central focus is identifying the general rules of international law in order to guide States in the negotiation of succession agreements, the interpretation of ambiguous or incomplete provisions, and the regulation of succession in default of specific agreement.A highly relevant work, The Law of State Succession offers governments, judges, legal practitioners, and scholars an authoritative account of the current law. It enables negotiators to identify different legal paths within succession and assists adjudicators in interpreting provisions of succession agreements and regulating questions omitted from such agreements.' The book is available for pre-order at the OUP website.Dr Arman Sarvarian a public international lawyer in academia and private practice. A Reader in Public International Law at the University of Surrey, he regularly acts as legal adviser and counsel to States, companies and individuals. He is counsel to the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire in the pending Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change advisory proceedings of the International Court of Justice and counsel in two pending investor-State arbitrations. Since 2019, he has served as legal adviser to the Republic of Armenia at the Legal Committee of the UN General Assembly for the annual reports of the International Law Commission and International Court of Justice as well as multilateral negotiations on reform of investor-State arbitration in Working Group III of the UN Commission on International Trade Law. He served as judge ad hoc in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in 2020.A generalist of broad interests and expertise, his first monograph Professional Ethics at the International Bar (Oxford University Press, International Courts and Tribunals Series, 19 September 2013) was the first comprehensive work on the subject and has been widely cited, including in proceedings before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, investment arbitrations and the International Court of Justice. His second monograph The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice will be published by Oxford University Press in April 2025. He is a Humboldt Research Fellow in Climate Change Law at the University of Kiel from 2024 to 2026. Chair: Dr Jamie Trinidad, Centre Fellow

Speaker: Arman Sarvarian, University of SurreyDate: Friday Lunchtime Lecture: Friday 31 January 2025Dr Arman Sarvarian will speak about his forthcoming monograph The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice to be published by Oxford University Press in April. The product of seven years' labour of approximately 170,000 words, the work includes a foreword by Professor August Reinisch of the University of Vienna and International Law Commission. The following is the summary of Oxford University Press:'The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice provides a comprehensive, practical, and empirical overview of the topic, establishing State succession as a distinct field with a cohesive set of rules.From the secession of the United States of America in 1784 to that of South Sudan in 2011, the book digests and analyses State practice spanning more than two centuries. It is based on research into a wide and diverse range of case studies, including archival and previously unpublished data. Reconstructing the intellectual foundation of the field, the book offers a vision for its progressive development - one that is rooted in an interpretation of State practice that transcends the politics of the codification projects in the decolonization and desovietization eras.The book examines international law on State succession with respect to territorial rights and obligations, State property (including archives) and debt, treaties, international claims and responsibility, as well as nationality and private property (including concessions and investments). Its central focus is identifying the general rules of international law in order to guide States in the negotiation of succession agreements, the interpretation of ambiguous or incomplete provisions, and the regulation of succession in default of specific agreement.A highly relevant work, The Law of State Succession offers governments, judges, legal practitioners, and scholars an authoritative account of the current law. It enables negotiators to identify different legal paths within succession and assists adjudicators in interpreting provisions of succession agreements and regulating questions omitted from such agreements.' The book is available for pre-order at the OUP website.Dr Arman Sarvarian a public international lawyer in academia and private practice. A Reader in Public International Law at the University of Surrey, he regularly acts as legal adviser and counsel to States, companies and individuals. He is counsel to the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire in the pending Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change advisory proceedings of the International Court of Justice and counsel in two pending investor-State arbitrations. Since 2019, he has served as legal adviser to the Republic of Armenia at the Legal Committee of the UN General Assembly for the annual reports of the International Law Commission and International Court of Justice as well as multilateral negotiations on reform of investor-State arbitration in Working Group III of the UN Commission on International Trade Law. He served as judge ad hoc in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in 2020.A generalist of broad interests and expertise, his first monograph Professional Ethics at the International Bar (Oxford University Press, International Courts and Tribunals Series, 19 September 2013) was the first comprehensive work on the subject and has been widely cited, including in proceedings before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, investment arbitrations and the International Court of Justice. His second monograph The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice will be published by Oxford University Press in April 2025. He is a Humboldt Research Fellow in Climate Change Law at the University of Kiel from 2024 to 2026. Chair: Dr Jamie Trinidad, Centre Fellow

In this podcast, Aristotelian Society officers Dr Jess Leech and Dr Ellie Robson talk to Peter Momtchiloff - commissioning editor for philosophy at Oxford University Press from 1993-2023. Following three decades in this role, we get Peter's thoughts on what he has seen and learned from his time at OUP including questions like: What are some of your most memorable encounters in the job? What are some of the biggest changes you've witnessed over 30 years – for good and for bad – in philosophy? Are there any common struggles for first time authors? How should you approach publishers? This podcast is an audio recording of an interview with Peter Momtchiloff - at the Aristotelian Society on 23rd July 2024.

In this podcast, Aristotelian Society officers Dr Jess Leech and Dr Ellie Robson talk to Peter Momtchiloff - commissioning editor for philosophy at Oxford University Press from 1993-2023. Following three decades in this role, we get Peter's thoughts on what he has seen and learned from his time at OUP including questions like: What are some of your most memorable encounters in the job? What are some of the biggest changes you've witnessed over 30 years – for good and for bad – in philosophy? Are there any common struggles for first time authors? How should you approach publishers? This podcast is an audio recording of an interview with Peter Momtchiloff - at the Aristotelian Society on 23rd July 2024.

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence. About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010). Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha 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

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence. About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010). Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence. About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010). Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/islamic-studies

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence. About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010). Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/film

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence. About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010). Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/south-asian-studies

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence. About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010). Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence. About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010). Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha

Today's guests are Marc Singer and Bill Harrington, co-Managing Partners at OUP, a venture fund that solely invests in startups emerging from university research labs. With over $800M under management and over 130 investments in university startups since 2011, Marc and Bill share their unique insights into the opportunities and challenges in bringing university innovations to the market; why fundraising strategy matters; what they look for when considering an investment (hint: teams matter); when is the right time to spin your startup out of the university; and the most frequent self-inflicted wounds they see from university entrepreneurs. Bill and Marc also share their own VC origin stories, why they have stayed in venture for so long, and advice for people looking to break into the industry.

Recorded November 18, 2024. Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow Dr Shreya Atrey (Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Oxford) in conversation with Prof Mark Bell (School of Law, TCD). Shreya Atrey is an Associate Professor in International Human Rights Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, and is based at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights. She is an associate member of the Oxford Human Rights Hub, an Official Fellow and Racial Justice and Equality Fellow at Kellogg College, and a Senior Teaching Fellow at New College. Shreya is the Editor of the Human Rights Law Review (OUP). Previously, she was based at the University of Bristol Law School and has been a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, and a Hauser Postdoctoral Global Fellow at the NYU School of Law, New York. She completed BCL with distinction and DPhil in Law on the Rhodes Scholarship from Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Shreya works on equality and human rights issues in comparative and international law. Her first monograph, Intersectional Discrimination (OUP 2019) won the runner-up Peter Birks Book Prize in 2020. Learn more at https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/

In this ITEST webinar, Dr. Rob Koons and Dr. Terrence Lagerlund deliver talks on Brain and Artificial Intelligence: A Tale of Two Computers, but Only One Made in the Image of God (October 12, 2024)AI and Aristotle: Why No Artifact could ever be ConsciousRobert C. (“Rob”) Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds an M. A. from Oxford and a Ph.D. from UCLA. He is the author or co-author of five books, including The Atlas of Reality with Timothy H. Pickavance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and Is Thomas Aquinas's Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? (St. Augustine Press, 2022). He is the co-editor of four anthologies, including The Waning of Materialism (OUP, 2010) and Classical Theism (Routledge 2023).  He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, and on defending and articulating hylomorphism in contemporary terms.AbstractThe ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle developed a comprehensive philosophy of nature that laid the foundations for all subsequent scientific inquiry. A central notion of Aristotle's notion is that of a substance (ousia in Greek)—an essentially independent entity that has the highest possible degree of unity (what Thomas Aquinas called ‘per se unity'). Living organisms have this kind of unity, which explains their possession of essentially unified causal powers, like nutrition, growth, and sensation. Simple, homogeneous inorganic substances also exist, like drops of water or quartz crystals. However, all human artifacts, including all robots and computers, are mere “heaps” of inorganic components, lacking the sort of unity required for life, sensation, and consciousness. AI programs can emulate the behavior of conscious organisms, but there is an irreducible gap between appearance and reality.Terrence Lagerlund, MD, PhDBrain, Soul, Artificial Intelligence, and Quantum MysteryDr. Terrence Lagerlund has been a neurologist in the Division of Epilepsy at Mayo Clinic for 35 years, treating patients with epilepsy and interpreting their electroencephalograms. He also lectures to residents and fellows on electroencephalography including basic principles of electricity and neurophysiology. He has published papers and authored book chapters on electroencephalography and epilepsy, particularly regarding quantitative analysis of electroencephalograms. Prior to becoming a neurologist, he obtained a Ph.D. in physics and worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (doing research at Brookhaven National Laboratory and CERN) and as a term physicist at Fermilab.AbstractSome computer scientists claim that artificial general intelligence systems will soon be created which can duplicate and eventually far exceed the intellectual abilities of humans. In this presentation we will compare the architecture and learning ability of artificial neural networks implemented on an electronic digital machine and the neural networks of the human brain (of which Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT once pronounced that “the brain is merely a meat machine”). We will demonstrate by philosophical arguments and a mathematical theorem involving Turing machines that understanding abstract concepts, abstract reasoning to ascertain truth, and making free decisions are powers of the human mind that exceed the capabilities of any physical system whether made of electronic circuits or of biological neurons; rather, these capabilities require a nonphysical soul that tightly integrates with the human brain, because of which we can truly say that humans are made in the image and likeness of God.  We will also discuss a new theory of how the soul may interact with the brain by influencing the outcome of quantum processes involving passage of ions through neuronal ion channels within the brain's neural networks synchronized by the 40-70 Hz oscillation, and thereby continually influence retrieval of memories and behavioral choices occurring in these networks so as to allow the soul's choice based on rational deliberation to cause a neuronal network undergoing chaotic behavior to converge upon a different final state (attractor), thereby allowing the soul's choice to be implemented in the brain and body.Brain and Artificial Intelligence—A Tale of Two Computers—But Only One Made in the Image of God - Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology (faithscience.org)

In this episode of The International Risk Podcast, Dr. Elizabeth and Dominic discuss the decision of the British government to make 'extreme' misogyny extremism. They dive into misogyny and its consequences., as well as into extremism. Furthermore, they discuss ways to tackle both issues, and what you and I can do to combat the rise of both extremism and misogyny.Dr. Elizabeth Pearson is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead for the MSc in Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London, and co-director of the Conflict, Violence and Terrorism Research Centre (CVTRC). She is an Associate Fellow with the London-based think tank RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, and with the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) in the Hague. Her research interests are gender, extremism, and counter-extremism. Elizabeth's 2023 book, Extreme Britain: Gender Masculinity and Radicalisation is published with Hurst and OUP and explores gender in UK Islamist and radical right networks. She is also a co-author of Countering Violent Extremism: Making Gender Matter (Palgrave, 2021). Before academia Elizabeth was a radio journalist at the BBC, mainly for Radio 4.The International Risk Podcast is a weekly podcast for senior executives, board members, and risk advisors. In these podcasts, we speak with experts in a variety of fields to explore international relations. Our host is Dominic Bowen, Head of Strategic Advisory at one of Europe's leading risk consulting firms. Dominic is a regular public and corporate event speaker, and visiting lecturer at several universities. Having spent the last 20 years successfully establishing large and complex operations in the world's highest-risk areas and conflict zones, Dominic now joins you to speak with exciting guests around the world to discuss international risk.The International Risk Podcast – Reducing risk by increasing knowledge.Follow us on LinkedIn for all our great updates.

Audio from the 2023 Charleston Conference from the session titled: Stewarding Electronic Resources During Challenging Times presented by Denise Branch, Head Electronic and Continuing Resources at Virginia Commonwealth University, Beth Bernhardt, Consortia Account Manager, Oxford University Press, and Tamar Ganor, Content Product Manager, Ex Libris, a Clarivate Company.  Libraries rely heavily on electronic resources to fulfill users' research needs. They are constantly faced with limited staffing, increasing volume of electronic resources, and a complicated mix of systems, standards, platforms, vendors, and authentication models. The tools that are used to manage these resources are constantly evolving, along with users' needs and expectations. The staff who manage electronic resources are expected to be skilled and possess up-to-date knowledge of trends. Successful work plans are put in place to identify, define, and establish goals for tracking and managing electronic resources and help libraries to handle unforeseen challenges. Collaboration with internal and external stakeholders is essential when libraries want to deliver enhanced discovery and access and expert troubleshooting. All of these techniques open up a window for outstanding customer service. We'll hear what the library at Virginia Commonwealth University is doing to effectively steward electronic resources to reduce the bumps in the road and give users what they want. Video of the presentation available at: https://youtu.be/jqFZTQMnEts Social Media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denise-branch-36012510/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/beth-bernhardt-16096b9/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamar-ganor-%D7%AA%D7%9E%D7%A8-%D7%92%D7%A0%D7%90%D7%95%D7%A8-151581103/ Twitter: Keywords: #VCULibraries, #OUP, #ExLibris, #Libraries, #ElectronicResources, #EResourceManagement, #LibraryServices, #LibraryTrends, #LibraryStaff, #LibraryTech, #InformationAccess, #ResearchSupport, #Resources, #Researchers, #scholcomm, #books, #printing, #collaboration, #engagement, #problemsolvers, #academics, #publishing, #ScholarlyPublishing, #AcademicLibraries, #AcademicPublishing, #libraries, #librarians, #information, #2023ChsConf,  #LibrariesAndVendors, #LibrariesAndPublishers, #libraryissues, #libraryneeds,#librarylove, #librarychallenges, #libraryconference #podcast  

1014. This week, we debunk misconceptions about gendered language, tracing the etymology of words like "cockamamie" and "gynecology." We also look at the flexibility of English grammar, examining how common words like "that" and "up" can function as different parts of speech in various contexts.The "gendered words" segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at dragonflyeditorial.com.The "grammar leaks" segment was written by Edwin Battistella, who taught linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he served as a dean and as interim provost. His books include Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others?, Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology, and Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, from Washington to Trump. It originally appeared on the OUP blog and is included here with permission.

As our centennial series continues, and on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Richard English, professor of politics at Queen's University Belfast where he directs the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute, the editor of the Cambridge History of Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and the author of Does Terrorism Work?: A History (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Does Counter-Terrorism Work? (OUP, 2024), reviews 100 years of the use of terrorism to achieve political aims. 

Stand Up is a daily podcast. I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 700 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous souls Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future Hardcover by Jason Stanley The human race finds itself again under threat of a rising global fascist movement. In the United States, democracy is under attack by an authoritarian movement that has found fertile ground among the country's conservative politicians and voters, but similar movements have found homes in the hearts and minds of people all across the globe. To understand the shape, form, and stakes of this assault, we must go back to extract lessons from our past. Democracy requires a common understanding of reality, a shared view of what has happened, that informs ordinary citizens' decisions about what should happen, now and in the future. Authoritarians target this shared understanding, seeking to separate us from our own history to destroy our self-understanding and leave us unmoored, resentful, and confused. By setting us against each other, authoritarians represent themselves as the sole solution. In authoritarian countries, critical examination of those nations' history and traditions is discouraged if not an outright danger to those who do it. And it is no accident that local and global institutions of education have become a battleground, the authoritarian right's tip of the spear, where learning and efforts to upend a hierarchal status quo can be put to end by coercion and threats of violence. Democracies entrust schools and universities to preserve a common memory of positive change, generated by protests, social movements, and rebellions. The authoritarian right must erase this history, and, along with it, the very practice of critical inquiry that has so often been the engine of future progress. In Erasing History, Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley exposes the true danger of the authoritarian right's attacks on education, identifies their key tactics and funders, and traces their intellectual roots. He illustrates how fears of a fascist future have metastasized, from hypothetical threat to present reality. And he shows that hearts and minds are won in our schools and universities—places, he explains, that democratic societies across the world are now ill-prepared to defend against the fascist assault currently underway. Deeply informed and urgently needed, Erasing History is a global call to action for those who wish to preserve democracy—in America and abroad—before it is too late. I am the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. I am also an honorary professor at the Kyiv School of Economics, where I use my salary to support the Come Back Alive Foundation. Before coming to Yale in 2013, I was Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. I have also been a Professor at the University of Michigan (2000-4) and Cornell University (1995-2000). My PhD was earned in 1995 at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT (Robert Stalnaker, chair), and I received my BA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1990. My first book is Knowledge and Practical Interests published in 2005 by Oxford University Press. It was the winner of the 2007 American Philosophical Association book prize. My second book, Language in Context, also OUP, was published in 2007. This is a collection of my papers in semantics published between 2000 and 2007 on the topic of linguistic communication and context. My third book, Know How, was published in 2011, also with OUP. My fourth book, How Propaganda Works, was published by Princeton University Press in May, 2015. It was the winner of the 2016 PROSE award for the subject area of philosophy. The proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Prison Policy Initiative. My fifth book is How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Penguin Random House, 2018). My last book, published in November, 2023, is The Politics of Language, co-authored with David Beaver, with Princeton University Press .  My newest book is Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, published in September, 2024 with One Signal Publishers, a division of Simon and Schuster. Pete on Threads Pete on Tik Tok Pete on YouTube  Pete on Twitter Pete On Instagram Pete Personal FB page Stand Up with Pete FB page All things Jon Carroll  Follow and Support Pete Coe Buy Ava's Art  Hire DJ Monzyk to build your website or help you with Marketing

Richard Charkin has held senior posts at many major, and some minor, publishing houses in the U.K. over the past 50 years, including: Harrap, OUP, Pergamon Press, Reed Elsevier, Macmillan, Bloomsbury, and Mensch Publishing. He is former President of The Book Society, the International Publishers Association and the UK Publishers Association. His book My Back Pages, An Undeniably Personal History of Publishing 1972-2022 came out in 2023. The book has sold more than 3,000 copies, and is being translated into four languages. It took me a year to figure out what questions to ask him.  Just so you know, Richard has been very good to The Biblio File podcast over the years. Thanks to him I've landed all sorts of great publishing guests.  And John Banville! I'm grateful to him for this, and for his being so generous with his time and knowledge, sharing them as he has with me on multiple occasions during episodes that have dealt with, among other things, great publishers, the challenges facing the book business, and how to set up a small publishing house. I wrote this about him a while back: Richard does what all great publishers do. He pays attention to what's going on both in the world, and in the world of books. He pays attention to what people are doing and reaches out to them to learn more. He takes an interest. It's pretty simple. And pretty important. He also lets people know what he's up to. I got to know him through his blog. It gave me a wonderful glimpse into the daily life of a high-powered publisher - the workings of business, but also the workings of his mind, and occasionally his emotions… His writing invited and welcomed a human response.  I'm happy to have been able to re-connect with Richard again recently, this time via Zoom, to talk about the changes he's seen, and lessons he's learned, over more than 50 years in the book publishing business, something, more than incidentally, that he's been rewarded for recently in the form of an OBE.  It's good to see that his exemplary work in, and on behalf of, the publishing business - his “service to literature,” has been recognized.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI, published by J. Birch on August 7, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum. My new book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI is available online for free at https://academic.oup.com/book/57949. Please download it! Just click on PDF to get a PDF of the whole book. Individual chapters are also available as PDFs - just click on whichever chapters you want. The book is completely free to everyone and I'm grateful for all shares and forwards. The print book will be released on 15 August in the UK and at some later time in the US, so please consider pre-ordering it. If you pre-order directly from the OUP website, you can get 30% off by using the code AAFLYG6. With the code, it's £21/$28 (and they can deliver to other countries, as I understand it). Here is an abstract: Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI? These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. The stakes are immense, and neglecting the risks can have terrible costs. We need to err on the side of caution, yet it's often far from clear what 'erring on the side of caution' should mean in practice. When are we going too far? When are we not doing enough? The Edge of Sentience presents a comprehensive precautionary framework designed to help us reach ethically sound, evidence-based decisions despite our uncertainty. On a more personal note: in many books about consciousness/sentience, the importance of the questions for policy, ethics and law is mentioned at the beginning (as motivation) then put to one side. Four years ago I set out to write a book that would be "inside out": it would put the practical challenges at the centre and try to show how science and philosophy can be marshalled to help with them. This is that book. It's in the nature of the project that the release is just the beginning. The book is not a digest of past results but a book of proposals about the future - 26 proposals, 26 ways we could do better to manage risk - and it will succeed to the extent that its proposals are taken seriously and discussed. So, I'm very grateful indeed to anyone who reads the book in that spirit and gives the proposals some thought. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Giuseppe Castellano talks to Kate Kunac-Tabinor, Creative Director at Oxford University Press, about what part illustrators play in OUP's diverse body of work; why creatives should avoid working in isolation; what simple career advice illustrators should follow; and more.

999. This week, we look at what shaped early American English, from Native American words to Noah Webster's spelling reforms. Then, we explore phrasal verbs, looking at their grammatical peculiarities and some tips to distinguish them from other types of verbs.The "American English" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.The "phrasal verbs" segment was written by Edwin L. Battistella, who taught linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he served as a dean and as interim provost. His books include Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others?, Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology, and Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, from Washington to Trump. It originally appeared on the OUP blog and is included here with permission.| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/early-american/transcript| Please take our advertising survey. It helps! https://podsurvey.com/GRAMMAR| Grammarpalooza (Get texts from Mignon!): https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text "hello" to (917) 540-0876.| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.| Peeve Wars card game. | Grammar Girl books. | HOST: Mignon Fogarty| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475).| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.Audio Engineer: Nathan SemesDirector of Podcast: Brannan GoetschiusAdvertising Operations Specialist: Morgan ChristiansonMarketing and Publicity Assistant: Davina TomlinDigital Operations Specialist: Holly Hutchings| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.| Grammar Girl Social Media Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon.

On June 4, 1411, Charles VI of France granted the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon a monopoly to ripen his favourite cheese. Noted for its sharp, tangy, salty flavor and its rich, creamy texture, Roquefort is still under designation protected by French law, and sometimes called ‘le fromage des rois et des papes' (“the cheese of kings and popes”). In this episode, The Retrospectors reveal Casanova's weird kink for this blue-veined cheese in the bedroom; discover the folksy origin story that has perpetuated for centuries; and consider whether the death of the cheese plate is killing off this King of Cheeses… Further Reading: • ‘The Oxford Companion to Cheese' (OUP, 2016): https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Oxford_Companion_to_Cheese/qRg1DQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=roquefort+1411&pg=PA130&printsec=frontcover • ‘How Much Longer Will Roquefort Reign as the King of Cheese?' (Smithsonian Magazine, 2021): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/how-much-longer-roquefort-reign-king-cheese-180978999/ • ‘Roquefort French Cheese' (Phil Vickery, 2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKKahpKQCSQ This episode first premiered in 2023, for members of

This episode is all about the different modes of communication that we use beyond the 4 linguistic skills of reading, writing, listening speaking. My guest is Nik Peachy who has helped to write a new paper published by OUP called "Multimodality in ELT: Communication Skills for Today's Generation". Listen to Nik and me chatting about the importance of multimodal literacy in our social interactions and in the ways we consume and produce media online.

941. Whether you've been betrayed by autocorrect or your own fingers, almost everyone has made embarrassing typos. Even the Bible isn't immune: typos led to an old version called the "Sinners Bible"! We have more hilarious examples and, better yet, some tips to help you catch those terrible typos in the future.. Plus, we explore the fascinating world of "light verb" and why we say we "take" a walk and "give" a presentation, even though we aren't really taking or giving anything.The light verbs segment was written by Edwin L. Battistella, who taught linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he served as a dean and as interim provost. His books include Bad Language: Are Some Words Better than Others?, Sorry About That: The Language of Public Apology, and Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels: Insulting the President, from Washington to Trump. It originally appeared on the OUP blog and is included here with permission. Read the original. | Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/proofreading-tips/transcript| Grammar Girl's editing checklist| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.| Peeve Wars card game. | Grammar Girl books. | HOST: Mignon Fogarty| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) or https://sayhi.chat/grammargirl| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.Audio Engineer: Nathan SemesDirector of Podcasts: Adam CecilAdvertising Operations Specialist: Morgan ChristiansonMarketing Associate: Davina TomlinDigital Operations Specialist: Holly Hutchings| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.| Grammar Girl Social Media Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon.