British poet and Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland (1809-1892)
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Solvonis Therapeutics PLC (LSE:SVNS) CEO Anthony Tennyson tells Proactive's Stephen Gunnion that 2025 was a transformational year, marked by the acquisition of Awakn Life Sciences, a strategic rebrand, and a sharp refocus on high-burden CNS disorders. The centrepiece of the conversation is lead programme SVN-001 and the decision to take it through phase III rather than pursue an early licensing deal. Tennyson is direct about the rationale: shareholder value is greater at the end of a successful phase III than before it. Phase II data for SVN-001 in severe alcohol use disorder showed meaningfully improved sobriety outcomes, and the broader pipeline — including SVN-002 and early-stage asset SVN-015 — continues to advance across addiction and psychiatry. Tennyson also flags improving conditions in the US, with growing regulatory and investor support providing a useful tailwind for the sector. For more insights and updates on emerging biotech companies, visit Proactive's YouTube channel, like this video, subscribe, and enable notifications so you never miss future content. #SolvonisTherapeutics #BiotechPipeline #CNSDisorders #DrugDevelopment #SVN001 #AlcoholUseDisorder #BiotechInvesting #PharmaInnovation #ClinicalTrials #HealthcareInnovation #AddictionTreatment #BiotechNews
We shouldn't have to settle for good enough and neither should God. Pastor Joe Tennyson teaches us what are the "Good Enoughs" that we need to focus on to follow God.
Who Should Have Been Poet Laureate? Collected and edited by Evan Blackmore Narrated by Evan Blackmore In 1892, Alfred Tennyson, the official Poet Laureate of Great Britain, died. According to custom, a new Laureate now had to be chosen by the Prime Minister. But on this occasion, uniquely, there was a problem. Many different candidates for the position were suggested, but for several years, none were chosen. In this recording, we listen to selected poems by Tennyson himself and by ten writers nominated to succeed him: A. C. Swinburne, William Morris, John Ruskin, Austin Dobson, Rudyard Kipling, Alice Meynell, Edwin Arnold, Lewis Morris, Alfred Austin, and Robert Bridges. If you had been Prime Minister, whom would you have chosen? The complete audiobook is available for purchase at Audible.com: https://www.audible.com/pd/Who-Should-Have-Been-Poet-Laureate-Audiobook/B0G5BCZ868
Denver home prices are flat and condo values are still sliding — here is your March 2026 Denver real estate market update. In Q1, homes across the metro held steady while condos dropped 6% year over year for the fourth consecutive quarter. As a result, that spread is creating two very different conversations for Colorado investors right now. Because the data tells such different stories depending on what you own, this episode breaks both of them down in detail. Chris Lopez is joined by Brandon Scholten of Keyrenter Property Management and Troy Howell of Nova Home Loans for this month’s Denver real estate update. Brandon manages properties across the Front Range and, as a result, brings a ground-level read on where rents are moving. Meanwhile, Troy closes investment loans daily and tracks rate trends in real time — including a recent 3-plex deal that closed at 5.875% with $17,500 in seller credits. Since the buyer had a free-and-clear home to leverage, the deal was effectively 100% financed using a HELOC. Beyond the price data, the March 2026 market update also covers stadium development along the Santa Fe corridor — the Broncos’ Burnham Yards, Denver Summit’s Santa Fe Yards, and Ball Arena’s 20-year mixed-use buildout. If those projects play out as planned, nearby property values could see a material impact. In addition, the episode includes a look at a distressed Aurora multi-family that sold for $12.4 million in 2019, yet currently carries a $10.5 million mortgage. Even though it was under contract at $6.4 million, the buyer still walked away after inspection. In This Episode We Cover: Q1 2026 Denver real estate price data — homes flat, condos down 6% and what each trend signals How Fannie and Freddie are loosening condo insurance requirements and whether it moves the needle The $865K Westminster fourplex from the monthly property walk, with projected $20K year two cash flow A creative 3-plex closing in Aurora — HELOC-funded, 5.875% rate, zero cash out of pocket Why the $12.4M distressed Aurora building couldn’t sell at $6.4M — and what it says about the broader Denver market Brandon’s take on whether the rental market’s worst softness is finally in the rearview And So Much More! This March 2026 Denver real estate market update gives you the data, the deals, and the ground-level perspective to make a more informed decision on your next move. So whether you’re watching the Denver condo market or looking for your next rental property, this episode has something for you. Finally, make sure you subscribe to the Denver Real Estate Investing Podcast for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, and sign up for our deals list and property walk emails below. Watch the Youtube Video https://youtu.be/0qnj5nNy2lU Timestamps 00:00 — Welcome and Panel Introductions — Brandon Scholten (Keyrenter Property Management) and Troy Howell (Nova Home Loans) join Chris for the Q1 2026 Denver market update 01:09 — Q1 2026 Denver Price Data — Homes up 2% year over year and generally flat; condos down 6% four quarters running, now flattening 03:07 — Colorado Springs Price Breakdown — More volatile quarter to quarter, similar overall trend with homes flat and condos negative 03:58 — Fannie and Freddie Loosen Condo Requirements — Insurance underwriting changes and what it may mean for the condo market 04:59 — Stadium Development Recap — Burnham Yards (Broncos), Santa Fe Yards (Denver Summit), and Ball Arena’s 20-year buildout plan 09:24 — What Record Attendance at Denver Summit Signals for the Area — And why Chris sees short-term rental and co-living opportunity near these corridors 11:41 — Property Walk Recap — $865K Westminster fourplex near 72nd and Tennyson, projected $8K year one and $20K year two cash flow with 25% down 18:24 — Aurora 3-Plex Closes at 5.875% — How a roofing contractor used a HELOC on a free-and-clear home to effectively 100% finance a $582K triplex 20:47— Distressed Deal Watch — Aurora multi-family bought at $12.4M in 2019, mortgage at $10.5M, under contract at $6.4M, buyer still walked 23:22 — Rate Outlook for 2026 — 52-week range of 5.98% to 6.89%, currently at 6.3%, and what employment data suggests about where rates head next 26:14— Rental Market Trends from Keyrenter — Why Brandon believes the worst of the softness is likely behind us, and where it lingered longest Links in Podcast Troy Howell: troy.howell@novahomeloans.com LinkedIn: Troy Howell Website: https://www.novahomeloans.com/loan-officer/troy-howell/ Brandon Scholten: brandon@keyrenterdenver.com Website: https://keyrenterdenver.com/ The National Observer: Office conversions surge as workplace dynamics shift Baby boomers have an emerging rival in the housing market Mortgage Rates Aurora apartment complex at center of national controversy is for sale View the Aurora 3-plex deal underwriting Sign up for the deals list Who is Keyrenter? Keyrenter Property Management Denver provides rental solutions for homeowners and real estate investors in the metro area who are interested in transforming their properties into passive income. It offers various services, from property marketing and thorough applicant screening to tenant placement and 24/7 maintenance services. Keyrenter Denver's team of experts can take the clients' burden of managing their rental off their hands so they can get back to what matters to them. Who is Nova Home Loans? For over 40 years, we've been focused on helping homeowners find the perfect loan to fit their financial needs and personal goals. Working with NOVA is a personalized experience from initial application to final loan closing and beyond. We will be with you every step of the way toward successful homeownership. Start working with NOVA & Troy Howell today! NOVA FINANCIAL & INVESTMENT CORPORATION, DBA NOVA HOME LOANS NMLS 3087/ EQUAL HOUSING OPPORTUNITY/8055 EAST TUFTS AVENUE, SUITE 101/DENVER, CO
Spoiler alert: this week we're analyzing the Twilight Zone episode “The Silence.” Colonel Archie Taylor can no longer stand the sound of the voice of Jamie Tennyson as he sits in the corner trying to read his newspaper. Not only that, Tennyson is not even worthy of being a part of this special club for refined gentlemen, and so, when he has the opportunity to make a rather odd wager with Tennyson regarding staying silent for one full year, things do not quite go as planned for both men. On this episode of KOI: A Twilight Zone Show, we're going to be discussing how Anton Chekhov's short story “The Bet” is similar and yet quite different from “The Silence”; we'll try and work through how much responsibility the other club members have to support Tennyson; and I'll reveal my moment of awe, a look at how shame can be a positive thing for us. So, grab your keys, and let's open up this door to the fifth dimension. Want to support the KOI show, get extra content, and give money to two awesome charities at the same time? Consider becoming a member in one of our tiers. 50% of every dollar, after the platforms take their fees, will go to charity: 25% to the Rod Serling Memorial Foundation and 25% to the Gary Sinise Foundation. Our goal is to preserve a way of life that Rod Serling himself would be proud of. However, even by just watching the show, subscribing, commenting, giving it a thumbs up, and sharing it with friends, you are doing your part. Thank you. You can learn more about the monetization plan for this channel from this video, which I recorded live from Serlingfest 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efhcWe1dK-8&t=89sPatreon account: https://patreon.com/TheKeyofImaginationShow?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkYouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@thekeyofimagination/joinWe're walking through Rod Serling's class Twilight Zone series and asking difficult questions about life. So, if you love The Twilight Zone, science fiction, or even just philosophizing about life, consider joining us on this journey. There's always room for more. Google form to rate this Twilight Zone episode: https://forms.gle/waLu2Pmr5CGCn4mf7Patreon: https://patreon.com/TheKeyofImaginationShow?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLinkDiscord: discord.gg/QjNY9jcyFZX Handle: x.com/keyofishowYouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@thekeyofimaginationHead over to thekeyofimagination.com to learn more about me, check out my Twilight Zone trinkets and collectibles, and to to continue the conversation. Episode outline:00:00 - Introduction00:43 - Plot03:06 - Episode Details03:39 - Episode Tidbits04:17 - Question 113:27 - Question 220:48 - Question 323:36 - Episode rating24:20 - Next episode and questions24:46 - Announcements and comments26:03 - How to support the showNo show did a better job than The Twilight Zone at generating awe and wonder within its audience. It just so happens that awe is exactly what we need in these difficult, divisive times. So, join me, Joe Meyer, and let's walk through the fifth dimension with Rod Serling. Along the way, we'll discuss big questions and relate them back to our Twilight Zone episodes.Background artwork by James Seehafer: https://pixels.com/profiles/j-mark?tab=artworkOpening and Ending theme: by Jacob Williams @jakeproduces on FiverrPictures not belonging to the Twilight Zone show generally come from Pixabay and are under the free use license.#twilightzone #rodserling #scifi #zone #outerlimits #sciencefiction
Solvonis Therapeutics PLC (LSE:SVNS) CEO Anthony Tennyson talked with Proactive's Stephen Gunnion about the company securing two US patents that significantly strengthen its PTSD treatment program. Tennyson explained that the patents cover two distinct chemical series, reinforcing the company's intellectual property position and demonstrating that Solvonis is building “a novel chemistry platform and not just a single asset story.” He highlighted that having multiple chemically distinct approaches is critical in CNS drug discovery, increasing the likelihood of identifying compounds with the right balance of efficacy, safety, and translational potential. This strategy enhances optionality and flexibility as the program advances. The company has identified SVN-114 as its lead candidate and is now focused on progressing toward clinical development. Tennyson said Solvonis plans to pursue non-dilutive grant funding in both the UK and the US to support preclinical optimisation, with the goal of moving into IND-enabling studies and ultimately entering the clinic as efficiently as possible. Discussing the broader market, Tennyson pointed out that post-traumatic stress disorder affects around 20 million people across key markets, yet there are currently no approved treatments. He noted, “we see the granting of these patents as a validation of our science,” adding that the company aims to bring hope to patients and families impacted by PTSD. He also referenced growing interest from large pharmaceutical companies, signalling increasing commercial attention on the space. For more videos like this, visit Proactive's YouTube channel, like this video, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you never miss an update. #Solvonis #Biotech #PTSD #DrugDevelopment #PharmaNews #ClinicalTrials #CNS #HealthcareInnovation #Biopharma #Investing #IP #Patents #SVN114 #MentalHealth #LifeSciences
Learn how to fix your pain with our “Centralization Process” here! https://rebrand.ly/ytpainfreeSubmit an application to work with us 1:1 and learn how to fix your low back! www.therehabfix.com/low-back-programTo view hundreds of free low back videos please follow us on instagram at @rehabfix www.instagram.com/rehabfixIf you saw Will Tennyson injure his back while squatting, you probably thought the same thing as everyone else…
By David Chornomaz - This sermon, Not to Yield, calls believers to steadfast faith and perseverance despite trials, loneliness, opposition, or age. Drawing from Tennyson's Ulysses, historical exploration, and powerful biblical examples such as Noah, Caleb, the Apostle Paul, and Jesus Christ, the message emphasizes that
What a delight to talk to laura thompson about Agatha Christie. Above all, this episode was fun. Laura really does know more than anyone about Agatha and we covered a lot. What did Agatha Christie read? What did she love about Shakespeare? Was she pro-hanging? Why so much more Poirot than Marple? Why was she so productive during the war? We also talked Wagner, modern art, the other Golden Age writers, nursery rhymes, TV adaptations, poshness, nostalgia, Mary Westmacott, and plenty more. TranscriptHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to the very splendid Laura Thompson. All of you will know Laura's Substack. She has also written books about the Mitfords, heiresses, Lord Lucan, many other subjects, and most importantly today, Agatha Christie, who died 50 years ago. And there's a new book coming from Laura about Agatha Christie's 1926 disappearance.Laura, welcome.LAURA THOMPSON: So lovely to be here, Henry. I'm such a fan of your Substack, as you know.OLIVER: Well, same. Same. This is a mutual admiration call.THOMPSON: Well, thank you. Well, that's what we like.Christie's Favorite WritersOLIVER: Now tell me, what did Agatha Christie like to read?THOMPSON: Oh, a lot the same as us. I discovered she was a huge fan of Elizabeth Bowen, as we are. And Nancy Mitford, Muriel Spark. But her big love really was Dickens. She absolutely adored Dickens. I mean, she grew up in a house full of books, you know, and she wrote a screenplay of Bleak House for which she was handsomely paid. And it was never—I know, don't you long to know what that was like? Can you imagine—OLIVER: We've lost it? We don't have the typescript?THOMPSON: I've never seen it. I mean, maybe—I don't know whether it exists somewhere. But I just wonder how she tackled it, what she did. But yes, so that happened. And of course, Shakespeare, as we know from her books, which are full of subliminal and—I mean, you kind of notice them, but you don't have to.OLIVER: Yes. There's Shakespeare in every book?THOMPSON: No, but it's there, particularly Macbeth, which I suppose figures.OLIVER: Yeah.THOMPSON: Like The Pale Horse is completely Macbeth themed. And when I was a kid reading them, I think she really—Tennyson she uses a lot—she affected my reading in a good way.OLIVER: She sent you back to Shakespeare and the poets?THOMPSON: Well, sent me to them as a kid, probably. And also, there's a lot of Bible in her books, as I'm sure you've noticed.OLIVER: Yes. Yes.THOMPSON: Very easy facility with quoting the Bible.Christie and ShakespeareOLIVER: Now, what did she learn from Shakespeare? Because she clearly knows the plays in detail. She sees them a lot. She reads them. She and he are, I think, quite good plotters.THOMPSON: Is she even better than he is?OLIVER: Well, let's not get into that. But there is a sort of, in a funny way, a kind of affinity between them as writers.THOMPSON: That's so interesting.OLIVER: What do you think she learned from him?THOMPSON: Tell me how you—how you see that.OLIVER: Well, do you know that Margaret Rutherford adaptation, which probably you don't like and I do—THOMPSON: Go on.OLIVER: It's called Murder Most Foul, isn't it?THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And there's something about the way that they can both walk the line between the sort of dark and deadly and the histrionic. Margaret Rutherford can't walk that line, but Agatha Christie can, right?THOMPSON: That's really interesting.OLIVER: And Miss Marple could come onstage in a couple of the plays. She's not so far off from being a Queen Margaret or some—in her angry moments maybe, do you think?THOMPSON: More rational, maybe.OLIVER: Much more rational.THOMPSON: Not so mad. Well, she's not mad, Margaret, is she? But she's upset.OLIVER: She starts off as a much sort of nastier character—Murder at the Vicarage, right?THOMPSON: Yes, she does. She was more acidic and then gradually—OLIVER: Waspish.THOMPSON: Waspish, and sort of mellowed. I see what you mean. And almost in the way that she calls herself—although that's obviously not Shakespeare—calls herself Nemesis.OLIVER: And the sense of atmosphere.THOMPSON: Yes, and the way they're structured. That's not necessarily just true of Shakespeare, but there is this sort of act three entanglement and this beautiful act five resolution that goes on with a soliloquy, I suppose.OLIVER: And some people think they both get confused in act four, but that's obviously not true, that this is the real mess of the plot. I think she might have learned quite a lot from Shakespeare, right?THOMPSON: That's really interesting. But, you know, the way she writes about Shakespeare in her letters to her second husband, Max, because when she was living in London during the war and almost at her most productive—I mean, her productivity levels are insane. And hitting every ball for six, really, you know: Towards Zero, Five Little Pigs, a couple of Westmacotts, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But she spent a lot of time going on her own to see Shakespeare.She's very—I hope I'm right in saying this—she's very sort of Ernest Jones [CB1] in her approach. She doesn't regard them so much as the products of words on a page; she regards them as rounded characters. Why were Goneril and Regan the way they were? What's wrong with Ophelia? You feel like saying, “Well, whatever Shakespeare wanted it to be,” but she sees them in that way. And Iago particularly—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —is the one that gets her. Yes. In one of her, I better not say which, but a major, major novel.And the book that she wrote under the name Mary Westmacott, The Rose and the Yew Tree, which I think might well be her best book of all. I think—well, I'll just say she wrote these six books under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. People call them romantic novels; that's sort of the last thing they are. And they're very, very interesting mid-20th-century human condition novels, and they're full of lots of stuff that she had to distill for the detective fiction. And she talks a lot about Iago in The Rose and the Yew Tree really interestingly, I think.Christie on Shakespeare?OLIVER: Now, Max said she should just write a book about Shakespeare, all this Shakespeare all the time. But she didn't. Why?THOMPSON: No. I don't think she ever liked being told what to do.OLIVER: [laughs]THOMPSON: His letters to her are quite annoying, aren't they?OLIVER: Yes, yes. I've only read what's in your book, but yes, I didn't warm to him.THOMPSON: I'm glad because people do. He gets a really good press even though he was unfaithful. But it worked, the marriage, because they both got what they wanted from it. But he said that, yes, and she says, “Oh no, they're just thoughts for you.” I don't think she would've felt the need, somehow. I think she liked saying things in her own more oblique way.OLIVER: Save it for the novels.THOMPSON: Yes, she's a great mistress of the indirect, I think, really. The way she writes about Macbeth in The Pale Horse, which I think is a really underrated novel, including thoughts on how it should be staged, which are really interesting and very, very good. I think she would've preferred to do that and use it to her ends.And of course, she has an incredibly powerful sense of evil, which I suppose is also in Shakespeare. Hers is a Christian sensibility, I mean, no question. People never talk about that, but it really is.OLIVER: Was she pro hanging?THOMPSON: Well, I think she took a kind of utilitarian approach that the innocent must be protected. And she took a view that if you've killed once, it becomes very easy to kill again because something in you has shifted, so you become a danger to the community. So I suppose in that sense she was.I mean, Miss Marple was. She's quite—“I really feel quite glad to think of him being hanged.”OLIVER: It's one of her most striking lines.THOMPSON: It is, isn't it?OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: So I suppose she was. I mean, I suppose she was. You know, she's very modern, she's very subtle in her thinking, but at the same time, she is a late Victorian product of her society. Yes.Dickens and Christie's FamilyOLIVER: Now, you mentioned this Bleak House script. She loved Bleak House. Do we know what she loved about it? It's obviously the first detective novel. Are there other factors?THOMPSON: You are going to know—this is when I'm going to start coming across as an idiot. Is it written before The Moonstone? Yes, of course it is.OLIVER: I think so. Yes. Yes. It's the first time there's a police detective in a major English novel.THOMPSON: Okay. I think she—do you know, this is a really good question. I don't actually know why she loved Dickens so much. She grew up—she had that rather intriguing upbringing whereby she had two much older siblings, a sister who was 11 years older, a brother who was 10 years older. Father died when she was 11.So she grew up incredibly close with a really rather intriguing mother, Clara. This is in the house at Torquay. And her mother encouraged her in a way that, it seems to me, quite unusual for the time and for the class to which she belonged. Because it was never deemed that it would interfere with her marrying and leading a more conventional life. But she always wanted to express herself creatively. And I think her mother possibly was a frustrated creative. I don't know. She had a lot of go in her.And whether it was just something she read with—I think anything she did at an early age with her mother would've made a huge impression on her. I think what you read when you're that age, you never quite—I never read Dickens at that age, so I've never quite got the habit.OLIVER: But if she's born in 1890, presumably her mother is just about old enough to have been alive when Dickens was alive. And so she's got a somewhat direct—THOMPSON: Yes, she was.OLIVER: You know, it's sort of back to the original culture of it, as it were.THOMPSON: Yes. Isn't that extraordinary?OLIVER: Yes. Yes. It's crazy to think. So she must have taken it in maybe in a more original way, somehow?THOMPSON: Possibly. Certainly Tennyson, I get that feeling, because her mother wrote this rather leaden sub-Tennysonian poetry. [laughter] It's like Tennyson on the worst day he ever had, but worse than that.OLIVER: But worse, yes.THOMPSON: Yes. And she wrote poetry like that, the mother, which is really rather sweet and touching to read. And obviously she would've been alive at the same time as Tennyson. So, yes, I'd never, ever thought of that before. Isn't that extraordinary? I mean, they went to see Henry Irving.OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: Yes. And yet she feels—it just amazes me, this—so I'm leaping slightly here, but this 21st-century halo of cool that she has around her, Agatha Christie. [laughter] I know, it's awful in a way, but the way she can be reinterpreted—that is a bit Shakespearean, in a way.I don't mean to make extravagant claims, but there's a sort of translucent quality to what she writes that means that people can impose and pull it and twang it and know that she won't let them down, as we are seeing constantly at the moment.Art and MusicOLIVER: Yes. No, I agree. Other arts—we know about all this, she loves reading. What music did she enjoy, for example? Did she like paintings?THOMPSON: Yes, she loved paintings. She liked modern art. She was painted by Kokoschka. It's very good. And she writes about modern art. In Five Little Pigs, the painter in that is a modern artist.And then music was her grand passion. I mean, music was her original career choice, as you know, of course. She must have had a good voice. She thought she could make a career of it. And she could play the piano. Beautiful piano at Greenway, it's still there.And they used to do this thing—I think it's a lovely idea—as a family. They would fill in what they called the book of confessions, and it would be questions like, “What is your state of mind? If not yourself, who would you be?” And at the age of 63, which is the last time she filled it in, she wrote, “An opera singer.” So that was still what she would've dreamed of doing. She loved Wagner very, very deeply.OLIVER: Okay. Interesting.THOMPSON: And there's a Wagner theme in a very late book, Passenger to Frankfurt, the one that everybody hates except me. And music, I mean, as a girl when—so her voice wasn't strong enough for opera. I think her ultimate—same as I grew up wanting to be a ballet dancer, I think her ultimate would've been to sing Isolde at Covent Garden.And in some of her short stories and in her first Mary Westmacott, which is called Giant's Bread, which is about a musician—and she really inhabits this character, Vernon, and it's all about modern music. And somebody who knew about this stuff, which I don't, told me, “No, she knew. She knew what was going on. She knew about the trends.” This is in the late twenties.And she always went to Beirut, and that was her real, real, real passion. She was one of those restlessly creative people. And her mother, God bless her, encouraged it.Christie's UniquenessOLIVER: What is it that distinguishes her from the other detective fiction writers? Because she doesn't, to me, feel—she's obviously part of this whole generation, this whole golden age, whatever you want to call it, but she doesn't feel the same as them somehow.THOMPSON: No.OLIVER: What is that?THOMPSON: Do you think it's her simplicity, that distilled simplicity that she has? She doesn't write linear; she writes geometric, I always think.OLIVER: Tell me what you mean.THOMPSON: Well, if you think of a book, the one I admire the most, as I constantly go on about, which is Five Little Pigs—you think about the amount of stuff that's in that book. It's a meditation on art versus life. The solution is unbelievably intriguing, I think. There's a whole family psychodrama in there. And every move of the plot, she's also moving on a—every move of the plot is impelled by a revelation of character. So plot and character are utterly intertwined, distilled together.I don't think any of the others can do that. I think Dorothy Sayers would take twice as many pages. And she'd dot every i and cross every t, and she couldn't bear loose ends or anything, could she? And she liked to reveal her knowledge of other things, almost to—I think the others like you to know that they're a bit better than the genre, maybe. Their detectives are superhuman, almost; wish-fulfillment man, almost.She doesn't do that with Poirot. He's just pure omniscience, really, plus a few tics and traits and, you know, mustache. I think it's that distillation and simplicity and the way she inhabits the genre in a way that the others don't quite do. And at the same time, she's redefining it from within.OLIVER: There's something as well, I think, about—she gets past the kind of Sherlock Holmes model in a different way. They still all have a bit of an overreliance on that, maybe.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: Whereas Poirot in, what is it? In something like, is it Murder in the Mews? Very sort of Sherlock and Watson—THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: —kind of dynamic. But within, I don't know, two or three novels, that's gone, and he's Poirot as we know him, as it were.THOMPSON: Yes, yes.OLIVER: And she kind of, as you say, makes it her own thing and goes off in new directions.Christie and the TheaterTHOMPSON: Yes. She's sort of conceptual and the others aren't quite, I think. She doesn't do—she does something completely different with the whole concept of what a solution is, it seems to me. She doesn't—it's not Cluedo, is it? It's not, there's six of them, and eventually it has to be one of them; however many tergiversations or however you say that word, you sort of know that. Whereas with her, it's: it's nobody, or it's everybody, or it's the policeman, or it's a child, or there's something bigger and bolder going on.And she writes—I think she writes very theatrically. I think she writes scenically. I think she's incredibly good at character and action. That scene where you know the girl's a thief because Poirot leaves out 23 pairs of silk stockings, and he goes back in the room and there's 19 or something like that, tells you everything. It's all in there.OLIVER: The solution to 4.50 from Paddington, which we shan't reveal, but—THOMPSON: That's Cards on the Table. But what I mean is, she's given us a little scene that tells us all we need to know about that person, really: a sort of timid thief who can't resist—OLIVER: Yes, but that's what I'm saying. At the end of 4.50, the solution is staged.THOMPSON: Oh, sorry. Yes.OLIVER: It is literally a little re-creation of the drama, if you see what I mean.THOMPSON: Yes, I do. Sorry, Henry. Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: No, no. We're crossed wires.THOMPSON: Yes, yes, yes.OLIVER: But she is very theatrical, yes.THOMPSON: No, you are absolutely right. That's a reenactment.OLIVER: Of something that was seen almost like in a—you know, the whole thing is very—THOMPSON: Yes, yes. Well, she was a great—I mean, obviously Shakespeare, but she was a great lover of the theater as a medium. And of course, she wrote plays, as we know, which I think are far weaker than her books, myself.OLIVER: Even The Mousetrap?THOMPSON: Especially. [laughter] When did you last see it? Or have you not—OLIVER: I've seen it once. I've seen it—you know, I don't know, before I had children, a long time ago. And I thought it was great. It was a lot of fun. The ending of act one, when someone opens a door and they say, “Oh, it's you.” It's very dramatic moments. You don't like it?THOMPSON: No, I think you're right. I wouldn't mind seeing it done really, really well. There's something strong at the heart of it, that theme that haunts a lot of her books about what happens to children who are unwanted.OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: Which is in loads of her—no, not loads. It's in Ordeal by Innocence. It's in Mrs. McGinty. That's, I think, because that happened to her mother. Her mother was given away as a child. Her own mother was a poor widow and gave up her daughter to be raised by her rich sister, which is not—it's not abandonment, but I think—OLIVER: Well, yes.THOMPSON: — it's not great. And I think all these things were absorbed by Agatha as a child. She grew up in what we would today call a house of—I hate this—strong women. I hate that “strong woman” thing, but they were strong women. Her mother was very, you know, as we've said, a sort of driving little person. And the rich grandmother, the poor sister, the dynamic there, they both fed into Miss Marple.And then her older sister, Madge, who was a big personality and actually had a play on in the West End before Agatha did, which I've always thought was extraordinary, just to write a play and have it on in the West End in 1924.And the men were—the father was feckless and charming and a rather grand New Yorker, he grew up as, and then settled in Torquay. And the brother was the Branwell Brontë. [laughter] He ended up a drug addict, which is also a type that feeds into her fiction: the man who could have made something of his life and goes wrong.The TV AdaptationsOLIVER: So all this theatricality in the books is obviously why she adapts so well to TV, and again, a lot of the others don't.THOMPSON: Yes, that's true.OLIVER: How famous would she be now without the TV adaptations?THOMPSON: Well, by 1990, so the centenary, she was a hell of a lot less—and that's really when the Poirots got going, which she never wanted. She never wanted—she didn't really want Murder on the Orient Express. It was only because it came via Lord Mountbatten. I don't know. I don't know because I think they're mostly not very good. I don't know what you think about the adaptations. But maybe that's deliberate, that they're less—if they drove you back to the books, you'd probably get quite a pleasant surprise.OLIVER: It's hard for me to say because I saw them all more or less after I'd finished reading her.THOMPSON: What did you think?OLIVER: I love Joan Aiken—not Joan Aiken, what's she called?THOMPSON: Yes, Joan Hickson is marvelous. Yes, absolutely.OLIVER: Hickson. I think she's just perfect because as you say, the simplicity, the not overstating. The “Pocketful of Rye” episode where she turns up and quotes the Bible, and the vicious older sister is there, and they have that moment. It's all so cleanly done.THOMPSON: Yes, I agree.OLIVER: David Suchet, I quite like him. I think he has those wonderful moments. “I cannot eat these eggs. They are not the same.” I think that's very good. It's very funny, you know, he gets it.THOMPSON: You prefer him in spats and art deco mode to when he became—he became like a de facto member of the House of Atreus by the end, hadn't he? It had gone very, very—OLIVER: I mean, I certainly didn't watch them all, no, no.THOMPSON: No. Well, I sort of had to.OLIVER: Yes, you did.THOMPSON: But I could never get through those short story ones. I don't think I've ever got—OLIVER: The moral sort of doom of it all, yes.THOMPSON: Well, the early ones, when they always had—you could see they'd hired a car for the day. [laughter] And I don't think I've ever got to the end of one of those.But I think—sorry, going back to your question, I think they probably did make a massive difference. You know, they're really, really popular. And whether she would have—what you think her—she might be read as much as somebody like Sayers if it weren't for all those adaptations. But then the fact of all those adaptations tells its own story in a way, because that wouldn't happen to one of the others, as you rightly said.Resurgence and PopularityOLIVER: No, they don't have that quality. And also, she was bigger than them. That's why they picked her, because she was bigger than them anyway.THOMPSON: And simpler. Because when I used to read them at university between the pages of Beowulf or whatever, like porn, [laughter] it was a bit mal vu. You read her for entertainment. But you certainly—I don't think—she's always been admired by a certain kind of French intellectual, hasn't she, for that subtextual quality that she has, that sort of fathomless quality that she has.But when I researched that biography, which I started in 2003, I can remember going on the radio. And names will not be named, but I was like a figure of fun with a couple of other detective writers, quite well known, who just sort of openly mocked me for taking her seriously and more or less said, “Oh yeah, we love her, but she's terrible” kind of thing. “Why are you taking her seriously?” I mean, it was regarded as a bit of a joke to take her seriously.I'm not saying I changed the game or anything like that, but I think there must have been a movement around that time in the early twenty-naughties—whatever the damn thing, decade's called—to start seeing that she is an interplay of text and subtext, facade and undercurrents, and these powerful foundations that underpin her books. Murder on the Orient Express is, you know, “Does human justice have the right to exert itself when legal justice has let it down?”There are these very strong—I think this is part of why she's survived the way she has. We intuit powerful truths underneath the Christie construct, if you like. I always say she's not real, she's true. I think she's incredibly wise about human nature, possibly more than any of them.You take a book like Evil Under the Sun, and there's a femme fatale who's murdered. “Oh, the femme fatale. No man can resist her.” Turns out she can't resist men. She's prey; she's not a predator. And of course, women who are so dependent on their looks and so on, that is what they are. They are prey. They're not predators. They're very, very vulnerable. Just a really small thing like that. And I just think, oh, you're very—there's so much easy wisdom in there somehow.And she deploys it perhaps differently—I mean, Ruth Rendell is wise, but it's very, “I am wise and you're going to pay attention to me.” You know what I mean? It's all very, “I'm very dark and very wise and very,” you know. I love her, but everything's so easy with Agatha. It's so, to coin a phrase, two tier. You can read them and have fun with them. You can read them and there's so much stuff going on underneath, and yet she presents this smooth face. I don't think any of the others are quite that resolved, if you like.Self-AdaptationsOLIVER: Now, you wrote that her own stage adaptations of The Hollow and Five Little Pigs lack the subtlety of the original books, quote, “almost as if Agatha herself did not realize what made them such good books.” How much of her talent do you think was unconscious in that way?THOMPSON: Yes. That's such a good question. I do think that, about those plays, it could have been that she just thought, “That's not what my audiences are going to want from me. They're just going to want to be entertained by”—we know she can do the other thing because of her Mary Westmacott books, where everything is laid out. They're not distilled at all; they're quite the opposite.I think they must have been such a pleasure for her to write because she didn't have to constantly—they're unresolved; they ask questions that don't have to be answered. She could have done that with those plays, I'm sure, but I think she would've thought people aren't coming to see them for that. I think she had a very good opinion of herself, in the best possible way.OLIVER: Hmm.THOMPSON: Like I said to you earlier, she didn't take a lot of notice of anything anybody said to her. Because it is like writing this other little book, the one I've just done about 1926. She was very acclaimed right from the start. I didn't emphasize that enough in the biography. And she was really recognized as very special right from the start.And I think it's extraordinary to me how—it's so difficult for us today, isn't it? We're so at the mercy of “That won't sell, don't do that, blah, blah, blah.” She really did not just plow her own furrow, but create that furrow in a way that you can only compare with, like, Lennon and McCartney. Or whether the time was absolutely right that they let her run, they trusted her to do what she wanted, and because she had the gift of pleasing readers . . .You do really feel, although those books are very tight and taut, you do feel an instinctive ease in what she's doing, an instinctive sort of—there's a kind of liberated—which sounds perverse because they are so controlled, the books. But I always feel she's doing exactly what she wants to do because she knows what it is and she knows how to do it. Because I think, would she be amazed that you and I are having this conversation now? I don't know that she would be, really. What do you think?OLIVER: No, I agree with you. I think she had what Johnson said, the felicity of rating herself properly. I think she knew she was really good.THOMPSON: You might know he'd say it right.OLIVER: Yes. [laughs] But there's a—I think there must have been something about—I think it's in Poirot's Christmas, one of those, where someone gets killed in the night in their bedroom, and they go up. And one of the women says, “Who would've thought the old man had so much blood in him?”And the quotation just sort of occurs to—I think there's quite a lot of that in Christie, right? Things are coming up and it fits. And she's good enough to run on instinct at times.THOMPSON: That's right. That's it. Exactly. That's absolutely right. Like the way she quotes from the—yes, I love the bit when she quotes from the Book of Saul in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which is really quite a profound novel about whether—I mean, it's terribly timely—whether it's better to be run by a corrupt capitalist or to let in the radicals. And as I said in the biography, the corrupt capitalist wins on points. But then another element enters, which is what power does to people. And that's when she quotes from the Book of Saul.And it's just like you said, this—an instinctive that she—I do always feel her as an instinctive writer, even though—her notebooks are intriguing because obviously some plots she really has to work away at. And yet they feel felicitous. A coup like The ABC Murders, and she's really—that went through lots and lots of iterations. But what she'll often do is scribble down a line of dialogue, a line of “There they are.” It's the whole—it's not bullet points, which is a loathsome concept. It reminds me of a bee going from flower to flower and knowing exactly which—and she's got this gift of knowing what flowers we're going to need.I sometimes fear I overdo it. I don't want be like one of those people who's writing a PhD on, what was the thing I said on Substack, gynocracy in St. Mary Mead or whatever. It's not—I do think that's a bit overdone these days, the rummaging in the subtext, because she's an interplay. And that's why I write that chapter in the book called “English Murder,” which is about the facade, you know, “smile and smile and be a villain.” And there's nothing more interesting. There's nothing more interesting than murder among classes who are trying to cover things up.And she does that—that's at the heart of golden age murder, I suppose. And I just think she does that better than anybody because she's so all the things we've been talking about. She's so distilled, she's so simple, she's so smooth, she's so instinctive. And she's doing it the way she wanted to do it because of your wonderful Dr. Johnson quote. She knew not to take notice of other people, including her—Quick Opinions on ChristieOLIVER: Should we have—THOMPSON: Yes. Go on.OLIVER: Sorry, sorry. Should we have a quick-fire round?THOMPSON: Please.OLIVER: I will say the name first of a few of her books—THOMPSON: Oh, god.OLIVER: —and then a few other detective writers, and you will just give us your unfiltered opinion: good, bad, ugly, indifferent.THOMPSON: Okay. What fun.OLIVER: You can “nothing” them if you want to.THOMPSON: Okay. [laughter]OLIVER: Hallowe'en Party.THOMPSON: Underrated. Very interesting on sixties counterculture and the effects of societal breakdown, et cetera. What do you think?OLIVER: I think it's a real page turner. I remember reading that for the first time. I loved it. Yes. Nemesis.THOMPSON: I can't keep saying the same thing. Underrated. [laughter] Very interesting philosophy of love in that book, I think. I think it harks back to her first marriage. However badly it turns out, it's better to have experienced it. It's quite a mournful novel.OLIVER: The Mr. Quin—THOMPSON: Oh.OLIVER: Oh, sorry.THOMPSON: No, no. Sorry. You carry on. Marvelous. So inventive, don't you think? Such a clever character.OLIVER: Why didn't she do more of him?THOMPSON: Yes, that would've been good. And she was always interested in the commedia dell'arte. She wrote poems about it as a girl. And the concept of Mr. Quin, yes, as this sort of evanescent figure who's also a moral force, isn't he really? Or—yes, I wish she'd done more. They're marvelous.OLIVER: Towards Zero.THOMPSON: Oh, top notch, don't you think?OLIVER: One of the best.THOMPSON: Yes, I agree. Frightening motive. Very Ruth Rendell.OLIVER: It's very distinct in her. I haven't read all of her novels, but it's very distinct.THOMPSON: But the plot is, again, typical of her because it redefines the word contingent. [laughs] I mean, Dorothy Sayers would be having palpitations. She's very bold and grand like that. “Oh, there's a loose end. Oh, who cares?” You know, I mean, it's so—it just drives along that book, doesn't it? Yes. But I agree with you, one of her best.OLIVER: Death on the Nile.THOMPSON: Quite moving, I think. I think it's one of those ones from the thirties that, again, is talking about love in a way that—I think it just strikes a personal note to me because she was very in love with her first husband, Archie Christie. And he did fall in love with another woman, and it did cause her extreme pain that some people said to me she never quite got over.And I feel that a little bit in that book. There's a shadow of something quite powerful in that book, I think. Again, very, very loose and lovely plot, but powerful. Would you agree? Very good on the place as well, I think, Egypt.OLIVER: I love it. I think the solution is great.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And it makes a really good film.THOMPSON: It's a great film, yes. Wonderful film.Other Mystery WritersOLIVER: Yes. Okay. A few other detective writers: Michael Innes.THOMPSON: You've got me. I haven't read him. Should I?OLIVER: Oh, I think you will like him. Yes. Try Hamlet, Revenge!THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Oh, I like it already.OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. Oh, this is exciting. Gladys Mitchell.THOMPSON: Can't get into her.OLIVER: No.THOMPSON: What do you think? Should I try a bit harder?OLIVER: I read two. I thought they were good. I was not intrigued.THOMPSON: No, somebody told—OLIVER: The ones I read—Spotted Hemlock is a wonderful, like, wow, that's great.THOMPSON: Okay. Okay. Somebody said to me, I know she really—no, I didn't—I read it in a book that she really hadn't liked Agatha Christie, but you know, who knows? All that Detection Club rivalry, you can imagine. But okay, Spotted Hemlock—if I'm going to read one, try that, yes?OLIVER: Yes, that's a great book. Margery Allingham.THOMPSON: Kind of love her, but I never understand her plots. I always feel I'm in a bit of a fog, but she's quite a good writer. Do you think? Or what do you think?OLIVER: She's good at the fog. She's good at that sort of whirligig sense that there's a lot going on—THOMPSON: Yes, whirligig.OLIVER: —and you've got to get to the end before they do, kind of thing.THOMPSON: Also, she had a pub in her sitting room. Now, I like a woman who has a pub in their sitting room.OLIVER: [laughs] E. C. Bentley.THOMPSON: You've got me again, Henry.OLIVER: Oh, The Blotting Book mystery. You'll like this.THOMPSON: Okay. Okay.OLIVER: The other one is not so good, but you'll like that a lot.THOMPSON: Okay.OLIVER: Edmund Crispin.THOMPSON: Didn't get on with him.OLIVER: Why not?THOMPSON: Don't know. Don't know. It sounds like I don't read the men, doesn't it? Which is not the truth at all.OLIVER: I think that's fair enough, isn't it?THOMPSON: Well, I don't know. I don't think anyone's ever come up with a really good reason why women have shone so brightly in this genre. I don't know. Why didn't I—I read that one, the toyshop one [The Moving Toyshop] or whatever. I don't know. I just didn't get on with it.OLIVER: Too glib?THOMPSON: Possibly.OLIVER: Bit flippant, bit sort of funny-funny?THOMPSON: Possibly. I just couldn't quite get hold of it in some way. I don't know.OLIVER: I quite like Edmund Crispin, but I do think he's got a bit of a “he's a very clever boy” about him.THOMPSON: Maybe that's what it was. Maybe that.OLIVER: Something, yes. G. K. Chesterton.THOMPSON: I haven't read Father Brown. Oh, this is awful, isn't it? I'm starting to sound like a radical feminist by accident.OLIVER: [laughs] Maybe that's what you are, Laura. Maybe you just need to admit it. [laughs]THOMPSON: No, it does. It sounds really bad because I do really love almost all the women. I just, I don't know why I haven't read him.Christie and NostalgiaOLIVER: Was Agatha a nostalgia writer?THOMPSON: No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't think anyone who was a nostalgia writer would've written At Bertram's Hotel, which is an entire spin on the riff of nostalgia. Really clever. I think that's such a clever book. The way she traps us in her golden age, you know, this phantasmagoria of the re-created golden age. And then she says, “Ha, really fooled you.”I've written about this. I think she moved with the 20th century far more than is realized. I love those Cold War novels she writes about her dislike of ideologies. I love her postwar books about the fragmentation of the hierarchical society. I think she's—well, she's an incidental social historian, as are, I think, P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, but they're much more underlined about it. Again, I'm intrigued what you think. Do you think she is?OLIVER: I think there's definitely some quality, particularly to the Miss Marple stories—as you say, the social history sort of becomes a way of preserving something that's disappearing. One of them, written in the sixties—you can tell me which one—it opens with that description of all the new houses in the village and the mothers who give their children cereal for breakfast. And what sort of a thing is that to give a child? They should have bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs is a real—you know, and she does have a real something heartfelt and real sense that this part of England is going, and this new thing is coming in.THOMPSON: That's true. That's absolutely true. That's The Mirror Crack'd. And it's—OLIVER: The Mirror, yes, yes.THOMPSON: Yes, and that whole thing of Mrs. Bantry's house has now been bought by a film star and blah, blah, blah. Yes, no, you are absolutely right. I didn't think hard enough before I answered your question.OLIVER: But no, what you said is also true. I can't sort of work out to what extent she regrets it, to what extent it's just useful material for her, you know?THOMPSON: Both. I mean, some of her late books, including Endless Night, I think, which is an incredibly modern book—that whole “me, me, me” culture of “I want, therefore I will have now,” which is written when she was quite an old lady. And then a book like Passenger to Frankfurt, which is—it's a bit sub–Brave New World, but it's very honest and pessimistic about a future—well, the one we are living in, really—full of fear and uncertainty and almost dystopian.She was a realist. You know, she is Miss Marple in a lot of ways. She was a realist in a way that I think a lot of us would find it difficult to be. And her American publishers were often—would sort of say, can she tone this down? Can she not have a young person who's completely evil? Readers want to know, is she going get any therapy? [laughter] And it's so true. There's quite a lot of that going on.She's very clear-eyed. So if she—I'm a bit nostalgic for Blur, do you know what I mean? I mean, you can't help it, in a way, like that brilliant example you give at the start of The Mirror Crack'd. But I would say her image is quite at odds with the reality of her in that way. But the image—OLIVER: And the adaptations don't help with that.THOMPSON: No. No. But at the same time, that Christie image, you know, the gentlewoman, the tea or the eternal bridge party, blah, blah, blah, that has a huge power of its own. So just being too iconoclastic about her, I think, is also a lie. Because I think, again, it's that interplay. She used the image, and the image—I hate the word cozy. I loathe the word cozy, but there's no denying that any book of that kind does have that quality. So I suppose even that's nostalgic in a way.Christie's PoshnessOLIVER: In a way, yes. How posh was she?THOMPSON: Good question. I've been thinking about that a lot. Quite, I would say. Quite grand, with that confidence. Her father really was—as I said, he was a young blade in New York dancing with Jennie Jerome and blah, blah, blah. And then it so happened that he ended up in Torquay, which of course then was very posh. And the fact that when she disappears, she disappears to Harrogate, [laughs] which is like the Torquay of the north.I remember her grandson saying to me, “She dealt with her literary agent. To her, he was staff.” You know, that kind of thing. Her sister, there is a—well, her sister ended up very grand indeed with a huge house up in Cheshire.I think she just had that internal confidence, really. She wasn't—and that there wasn't much money. I mean, there was very little money when she was growing up, as of course you know, but that didn't matter. I mean, her voice is insane. Her voice is, [affecting a posh voice] “Oh, it's lucky it just happens.” [laughter] But yes, there's a part of her that is real late Victorian upper middle class that, again, underpins her books.It's amazing really how broad-minded and cosmopolitan she was. But possibly, I mean, possibly that does—she was—you know, when she disappeared, she was described in foreign newspapers as an Anglo-American, the embodiment of Englishness, and that's how she was described. And then of course she was genuinely cosmopolitan in her love of travel and her love of other cultures and all that obvious stuff. Yes.Inspirations for Miss MarpleOLIVER: How much of her grandmothers is in Miss Marple?THOMPSON: Quite a lot, I would say, particularly the—OLIVER: Drawn from life?THOMPSON: Well, in an essential way not, because Miss Marple has no real experience of life in that way. We're occasionally told about some chap who came calling who wasn't suitable or whatever, but she's almost defined by nonexperience of life in a sense, but observation of life. She's an observer. She's not an outsider in the way that Poirot is. She has a place within the social hierarchy and whatever, and that village has a reality to it. And the way it changes has a reality to it. But she is defined by being an observer, I would say.But Margaret Miller, who was the rich grandmother, who is the one who had the big house at Ealing and was—you know, she's the one who would go to the Army and Navy stores and all that stuff that's in At Bertram's Hotel. She was—there's a lot of her in Miss—I think, as I say in the book, she grew up with the sound of female wisdom in her ears. You know, her grandmother was the sort of—if she'd seen her up in Harrogate, she would've known exactly what was going on. You know, one of those kind of women who could spot an affair at a hundred paces, just a wise sort of woman, worldly, worldly woman.And Miss Marple is worldly in her thinking, but not in her experience, particularly in a book like A Caribbean Mystery, which I think is—she's a real sophisticate, Agatha. I mean, I'm reading The Hollow again at the moment. And it's really astounding to me how there's a love affair at the center of it with a young woman who's kind of a self-portrait and this married man. And not only, there's not—it's not only nonjudgmental; there's literally no concept of judgment being in the vicinity. It's really, really sophisticated, grown-up stuff, I think. And again, I think that's maybe not recognized about her that much.Nursery RhymesOLIVER: What are the importance of nursery rhymes to her?THOMPSON: Yes, that's interesting. They're part of that distilled quality she had, I suppose, that really simple ability to catch hold of something that is simple and familiar in itself and then subvert it. There's books where she—I don't think she needs it in Five Little Pigs. I think the book is almost too good for that.But is it not to do with that—like her titles, which are really, really simple with a faint frisson of the sinister about them. Is it not that ability she has to catch, to take something really, really simple and subvert it for her own ends? What do you think? Do you think that's right? Or do you think it's something more than that?OLIVER: No, I think the simplicity is the point, and I think it probably gives her a way of talking, of showing how fundamental the wickedness is. And as you say, the children can be evil, and it's part of the darkness in a way, but it gives the appearance of innocence and, oh, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe? You know, children do this. And so it leads you through and makes it worse somehow. [laughs]THOMPSON: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. But I know I've—how many times have I said the word simple? But I really do feel that's the heart of her. And I also feel it's the heart of why she was misunderstood when I was growing up reading her because it was mistaken for simplistic.Wartime ProductivityOLIVER: Why was she so productive during the war? I mean, there were four books one year.THOMPSON: Yes.OLIVER: And as you say, they're some of the best. I mean, what is it about the war that gets her so busy?THOMPSON: Well, she was on her own, which she had never been, really. Well, obviously she divorced her first husband in 1928. So there's a couple of very bleak, dead years before she met her second husband and married him in 1930. But she wasn't completely on her own because she had her friend Charlotte Fisher, who was a sort of secretary-companion, but much more than that—really, really good friend.But in the war, Max Mallowan was abroad. Her daughter—she had one child—her daughter was married and living in Wales. And she was living in the Isokon building in North London, which I love because that's like, “You think I'm chintzy and old fashioned. And here I am socializing with the sort of left-wing intelligentsia at the Isokon building.” And there's something about being in that adorable little flat—they're so fabulous, those flats—and being alone but not feeling abandoned, as she had after her first marriage.And I suppose also, you know, war is, you either cower in despair or you think, “Right, well, better get on with it.” War is stimulating in that way. I think it was to quite a few writers, maybe, or quite a few creatives. The shadow of death. But there was something about that solitude but not abandonment, plus the stimulation of not knowing whether it was your last day on earth that did—it did. I mean, it's absolutely insane how productive she is.And then she wrote—she had a week off. She was also working as a dispenser at a London hospital, and she had a week off. And she wrote a Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring, which is one of her best Westmacotts, I think. I mean, she's got a week off and she writes a book. I mean, Jesus, there's a challenge to us, Henry. [laughter]The Mary Westmacott NovelsOLIVER: What are those Mary Westmacotts like? Because I've never read them, but you seem very—THOMPSON: Oh, have you not?OLIVER: You're very up on them. You like them?THOMPSON: I am. I really am. Well, for a biographer, they were a treasure trove because they're very revealing. Unfinished Portrait is, I think, as close as you are ever going to come to a true autobiography, as opposed to the actual autobiography, which is charmingly disingenuous.OLIVER: And also dull. No? I mean, it's just so dull.THOMPSON: Do you think? It is a bit.OLIVER: I couldn't read it. I couldn't read it. No, it was so long and so leaden. I felt like she didn't really want to tell me the story of her life. Just couldn't.THOMPSON: Well, I think that's probably right. It was very heavily edited after her death. And her daughter was very, very protective of her. So, Max Mallowan as well. So maybe there was a much better book in there somewhere. Who knows?OLIVER: So we should read Mary Westmacott if we want the unfiltered Agatha?THOMPSON: I would say Unfinished Portrait. It really fascinates me because the worst time you've ever gone through in your life—so in 1926, she lost her mother and her husband in the space of four months. And I think an awful lot of people, even writers, would think, “I'm going to put that behind me and get on.” But she had to reopen the wound. She had to go through it all again eight years later. I find that really, in itself, incredibly revealing about her.Poirot vs. MarpleOLIVER: Why is there so much more Poirot than Marple?THOMPSON: Yes, I've wondered that because there is this little thing that she hated him, which I don't really think she did. It's just something people say, isn't it?OLIVER: Well, it's a common thing about artists. They're supposed to hate their most successful work, but—THOMPSON: Yes. Yes. All I could come up with was that he was easier to put in different places. He could conceivably be on the Nile or in Mesopotamia or—I mean, it would be a—she does manage to get Miss Marple to the West Indies, but it's certainly—OLIVER: There are only so many holidays your nephew can send you on.THOMPSON: He was really successful, that nephew, wasn't he? Who do you think he was like? Sort of Ian McEwan or—OLIVER: [laughs] I know. It was sort of crazy, isn't it?THOMPSON: And very kind to her.OLIVER: It might be to her credit that she doesn't do a Midsomer Murders thing and just sort of wave away and say, “Oh, we can just have as many of these murders as we want.” She says, “No, we can only fit—” Do you think maybe that's it?THOMPSON: I think there might be a bit of that. I mean, her notebooks sort of—some of the books were originally Marples, like Cat Among the Pigeons and Death on the Nile, in fact. And then they became Poirots. I just wonder whether he's a bit more malleable because she is a more rooted, fixed entity.And he is—I don't mean to denigrate David Suchet because he's a fantastic actor, but he does root him more than I think the written version. I think he is a sketch on the page. And one of her great skills, I think, is how she can sketch, and they've got that quality of aliveness on the page, which you just can't analyze, really. I don't—well, I can't. And that's how I see Poirot. So he was more movable in that sense.And she's incredibly good at certain—like Sleeping Murder, there's no way you could have him in that. And Miss Marple is—her qualities are so perfect for a book like that, which has suddenly reminded me of how she got me into John Webster. I never read John Webster until—OLIVER: [laughs] That's great.THOMPSON: The way she uses The Duchess of Malfi is so clever. Do you think that's right about Poirot? Do you think there's something more . . .Reader Preferences and SalesOLIVER: I can see that. I wondered if there was some reader's prejudice involved.THOMPSON: Oh.OLIVER: Poirot is the sort of exotic—Sherlock Holmes, one thing that makes him popular is that he's a bit wacky, you know. And Poirot—he's always talking about, “You English are so xenophobic. Excuse me, I am Belgian.” And with the eggs and all the little—whereas Miss Marple's just the kind of old lady that we all wish there were more of. And how much of that will readers take? I don't know.THOMPSON: Yes. Although, as I say, she, she did—I mean, I think her publishers did like her to do Poirot, but I don't know that she would've been influenced by that necessarily. I mean, maybe she was—maybe I'm overdoing her—OLIVER: Well, she had these terrible money problems. Didn't she have to be a little bit focused on the dollar?THOMPSON: She did. She did, but she didn't—well, I mean, the money problems are insane because they were absolutely no fault of her own. They were to do with test cases, and it was just this sort of accumulation of horror that put her in tax problems during the war. And she really never could dig her way out of them and was advised to go bankrupt twice, which is unbelievable, just as a way of clearing it. I mean, it's terrible.But I don't know that she—I think her attitude was a bit more, “Well, why should I even bother if they're just going to take it away from me?” In 1948 she didn't write anything at all because I think she thought, “What's the point?” But then, that wasn't her way. But I don't know that she thought of writing as a way of digging out of it necessarily. But I could be—OLIVER: The Marples, did they make less money? Were they, did they sell less?THOMPSON: Not really. I think they all sold. Even poor old Passenger to Frankfurt sold hugely, absolutely hugely. I think people—I mean, my parents would—it was like people just wanted them, the Christie for Christmas.Rereading ChristieOLIVER: How many times have you read these books? Do you ever get bored?THOMPSON: No.OLIVER: Really?THOMPSON: Well, I have them on rotation, and I don't—as you know, I do interleave them with our beloved Elizabeth Bowen, who's my passion at the moment, and other people. But they are consolatory, I suppose. They are—there's bits of—there is this kind of—there's bits of them that I just know completely off by heart, like the gramophone record in And Then There Were None and all that.But there's something—and maybe I should have said this earlier, when I say—I've said it on Substack—that they're fairy tales for adults. There's something about that. There's an almost physical sensation of pleasure, really, when the resolution comes. It is a bit like act five of Shakespeare. I'm not going to say she's quite on that level. Not even I am going to say that.But there is—and it is like being a child again and reading the end toward the happy-ever-after, even though her happy-ever-afters are sometimes compromised. And there is something almost primal in that pleasure. And it almost sounds borderline mad, me saying it like that, but I do think there's something in it because the resolution is so—because it's character based, and at her best, she's character and plot as one, as in Five Little Pigs or The Hollow or Murder on the Orient Express or blah, blah, blah.Her resolutions do tell you something about human nature. You do think, “Oh, yes, that is what that would be. Yes, it would be all about money. Yes. Yes, doctors are untrustworthy,” or something on a more profound level than that. There's something that is a satisfaction, both childlike and I'm experiencing it as an adult. In my defense, P. G. Wodehouse said you can never read them too many times. [laughs] It doesn't matter if you know who did it. There's so much pleasure in them.Thompson's CareerOLIVER: Now, I want to ask a little bit about your career.THOMPSON: Mm-hmm.OLIVER: You were at a sort of stage school, then you studied at Merton, and then you worked at The Times.THOMPSON: Yes. Very briefly. Yes.OLIVER: How does one therefore go from all of this to being the biographer?THOMPSON: Well, I did always think I would have a career in—I wanted to direct plays. I directed Hamlet after university, which is probably the thing I'm still proudest of. But what it was, was that I wrote a couple of books. I won an award when I was quite young.And then I had an agent who—I said to him, “I want to write a biography of Nancy Mitford.” And he wasn't very keen on the idea, but I must have written an okay proposal. Again, because I thought Nancy Mitford was a little bit undervalued, that she's a lot more than just a posh girl. And at the time her reputation was quite low. And so somebody bought into that idea, and it sort of went from there, really.But it's a bit—I sometimes look back at the books I've written, including a memoir of my publican grandmother, and I think, gosh, this is all quite scatter-gun, but maybe that's okay. Maybe you should just write the books you really want to write. But it was a passion for Nancy Mitford that sort of started that particular ball rolling.And then I had the idea of—oh, no. I was down in Devon with a boyfriend, and he said, “You never stop talking about Agatha Christie. Why don't you try and write her biography?” And that was just a luck of timing because her daughter was still alive. So I met her, and she liked me because I knew the Mary Westmacotts so well, and that sort of happened. I mean, quite often these things are very fortuitous, don't you think? Did you not find that with your book?OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, I did. I did. I think some writers, as you say—I don't think of it as scatter-gun. I think of it, it's sort of an emergent thing, and you happen to have these different interests, and you just follow your nose, and that's fine.THOMPSON: Yes, exactly.OLIVER: Tell us about this production of Hamlet.THOMPSON: Oh. Do you know, I think it was not bad. I had a very good Hamlet. I think if you've—well, you're in trouble without—who is now quite a successful actor. And we were all really young, but he was—I saw him in something and said, “Do you want to play Hamlet for me?” And he said, “Okay then.” And it was a room above a pub in Chelsea, and it was very spare and very quick.And it was about—I can't bear when people overanalyze the character of Hamlet, and why does he delay? He delays because Shakespeare wants him to, so that he can write all those incredible speeches. That's a bit simplified, but it was—he was so, he so understood the translucent power of those soliloquies, this actor. So it just sort of worked because we didn't do too much to it. And it was, yes, it was good. I think it was good. But then I did Macbeth, and that was much less good.Secretly Reading ChristieOLIVER: And you've said here, and I think you said it in your book, that when you were at Merton, you were reading Agatha Christie between the covers of what you were supposed to be reading.THOMPSON: Yes, yes, I was.OLIVER: That can't be—is that a slight exaggeration, or did you really not get on with the syllabus?THOMPSON: Well, hang on. I was a bit stuck in the first term. Can you imagine coming from a performing arts school—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —and then being told, “Read that bloody, you know.OLIVER: Yes, yes. No, it's intense.THOMPSON: All I knew was French. How I got in is a minor mystery, but there it was. I've tried to do it honor ever since by writing as best books I possibly can. But I was okay once I got over that bit. Once I got into my beloved Tennyson and all the people we've been talking about, Hardy and blah, blah, blah. Larkin, about whom the best thing I've ever read—the best thing I've ever read about Larkin is your Substack about him, without a shadow of a doubt.OLIVER: Oh, thank you.THOMPSON: Just wonderful. So I sort of winged it a bit, but I had a very nice don. And the autodidact side of me, which is very like Agatha Christie, who barely went to school, and Nancy Mitford—I think it can be a good thing in a way, because you have such a respect for learning and truth. I always try to be truthful in my biographies, which as we know, not everybody is. [laughter]And I think you carry on wanting to learn and carry on wanting to fill all the gaps because I only had half an education, because in the morning you would do ballet and drama and all that kind of thing. So it is a bit odd, but in some ways I think it's been a good thing.OLIVER: Now, the new book is about the 1926 disappearance. When can we expect it to be published?THOMPSON: It's only a short book—OLIVER: Yes.THOMPSON: —because obviously I covered it a lot in the biography, and it doesn't—but I have found out a couple of new things. And that will be out in August here and in November in America. And I have come up with a slightly different slant on it, but mainly—and I treat it a little bit like a cold case. And it was—I had to write—I wrote it in five weeks, but it was incredibly good fun. Oh, and I reenacted her journey, which was very interesting, to Harrogate.But mainly it's such a pleasure because I, you know, on Substack, and I think, “Oh, you can't write about Agatha Christie again.” There always seems to be quite a lot to say. I'm intrigued by how you, who I think of as a true intellectual, how you have clear regard for her.Henry on Agatha ChristieOLIVER: I started reading her when I was about 12, and I just thought she was great, and I went through most of them. But I read them at intervals. So I was reading her into my twenties, thirties. And before this interview I tried to—I thought, “Laura's always saying Five Little Pigs is the best one. I'm going to read it.” And I just sort of found that I've lost the taste, in a way.THOMPSON: Okay.OLIVER: Which I was quite, I don't know, just maybe—I feel like this is my failing. Maybe I should take a week off and sit by the pool and read it properly. But I've always thought she's really, really great, and very few people can do that many very compelling stories without you sort of thinking, “Oh, I've read this one. I know. Yes. It's the same as the other one, isn't it? Yes. Yes, it was the”—as you say, it's not Cluedo. Even Dorothy L. Sayers, I don't think I could read much more by her, frankly. Great, she's great, but it's enough. [laughs]THOMPSON: Well, I quite like her. The whole—most girls who went to Oxford are quite keen on Gaudy Night, and the character of Harriet Vane is quite satisfying, I think.OLIVER: Indeed, indeed. And Strong Poison is great. And there—but I just mean if she'd written as many books as Agatha, you can't imagine it would've sustained the level of quality.THOMPSON: No, no. There is that lightness in Agatha and that terrible cliché of, “I wrote a long book because it was too—I didn't have enough time to write a short book,” and all that kind of thing. The brevity amazes me. When I said at the start, most writers would take twice as many pages to get all that in.She has style—I don't know if you can call it a style, but there is something blindingly effective about it that nobody can imitate. And it does—there's something so fathomless about her, and that's what continues to compel me. But I think it's very lovely of you to do this if you are no longer an admirer because you've let me sort of—OLIVER: Well, it's not that I'm not an admirer. It's just that I don't—I had this with P. G. Wodehouse. I read quite a lot of it, and now, I don't know, somehow I've reached a point where it's—I sort of get it, but it's just not that funny anymore. I don't know, just need some time away.THOMPSON: Well, maybe. Maybe, but you know, I'm a bit—she's part of my life now. It's like if somebody said, “You can't read her anymore,” it would be like, “You can't listen to the Rolling Stones anymore.” I mean, it'd be like a kind of death. She's part of my life the same way they're part of my life. She's now inseparable from just the way I go on, as is Shakespeare. And if I had to lose one of them, trust me, it would be her, you'll be reassured to know. [laughter]OLIVER: Very good. Laura, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you very much.THOMPSON: Oh, I've really enjoyed it. I really have. And I was really looking forward to it, and it's been even nicer than I thought it would be. So thank you.OLIVER: Oh, it's been delightful.THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Henry.OLIVER: Thank you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk
Saddle up and join the Round Table as Mythmakers embarks on a journey through some of the most famous retellings of King Arthur in celebration of Tolkien Reading Day. Which author started the ball rolling, and who poetically kicked it on into the 19th century? Where do the traces of these tales become most apparent in the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis? And who has continued the Arthurian tradition into modern times?Finally, we turn to the screen—what is the most successful adaptation of them all? Tune in to see if you agree with our pick!(00:00) Tolkien Reading Day and the Power of Arthur(03:09) Malory and the Rise of Arthur in Print(05:26) Arthur Pulls the Sword from the Stone(09:24) Keats and the Melancholy of Arthur(12:08) Tennyson, Avalon, and Echoes in Tolkien(15:15) William Morris and Arthur’s Expanding World(16:52) T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams, and the Modern Grail(22:22) Film, Comedy, and Reinventing Arthur(23:00) Tolkien and Lewis Through an Arthurian Lens(27:02) Modern Retellings and Julia Golding’s Own Arthur Stories(29:12) Why BBC’s Merlin Works So Well(30:43) Reading Arthur to Better Understand TolkienFor more information on the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, our writing courses, and to check out our awesome social media content visit: Website: https://centre4fantasy.com/website Instagram: https://centre4fantasy.com/Instagram Facebook: https://centre4fantasy.com/Facebook TikTok: https://centre4fantasy.com/tiktok
"Pray without ceasing" 1 Thessalonians 5:17In our lives, prayer acts as the water that carves a path through solid rock. Just as a steady stream can shape a mountain over time, our unwavering prayers can create breakthroughs in ways we might not foresee. Remember the story of Elijah, who sent his servant seven times to look for a sign of rain. On that seventh journey, a small cloud appeared, signaling the end of a long drought. This is a perfect reminder that persistence in prayer can lead to remarkable answers.As we navigate through our spiritual journey, it's essential to track those prayers that feel unanswered. Revisit them with a fresh heart, just as Elijah kept returning to his watchtower. “Persevering Prayer” is crucial; it reminds us that faithfulness in seeking can reap immense reward. As Hudson Taylor said, “When we work, we work; when we pray, God works.” So, I encourage you as Jesus encourages us In Luke 18:1 to always pray and not lose heart. James 5:16-18 says, "Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit."Remember, "Prayer is the quiet thread that stitches every moment to God, therefore, tug it gently and the whole day holds together." That's why 1 Thessalonians 5:17 says, “pray without ceasing.” In other words, it is an endless approach to our communication with God that can strengthens our faith and deepens our connection with Him. Just as a gardener tends to plants, nurturing them until they flourish, our prayers cultivate relationships with God, allowing His plans to blossom in our lives.Tennyson said, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of," and indeed, every whispered prayer has the potential to change our circumstances and touch others' lives. Picture the water hammering at a rock — persistent, relentless. That's how our prayers can act: continually pressing until the barrier is broken. So, let us commit to enduring in our intercession, believing that visible breakthroughs are on the horizon. Amen. Colossians 4:2 says, "Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful."Prayer for the Day!Heavenly Father, we thank You for the power of prayer. Grant us the endurance to continue seeking Your presence and the wisdom to recognize Your answers. May our hearts remain steadfast, trusting in Your perfect timing. In Jesus' name. Amen.
It's been less than a week since the New York Times reported on allegations of sexual assault against labor movement icon César Chávez, and the City of Denver is already moving to rename the holiday, park, and federal building that carries his name. But what's next? And what can labor organizers and activists learn from the story of Dolores Huerta? Former City Council president Ramona Martinez and our green chile correspondent Justine Sandoval join host Bree Davies to discuss the JBS strike, the role of Chicano and Latino women in these movements, and their advice for people holding on to open secrets. What do you think Denver should rename the park on Tennyson? We want to hear from you! Text or leave us a voicemail with your name and neighborhood, and you might hear it on the show: 720-500-5418 For even more news from around the city, subscribe to our morning newsletter at denver.citycast.fm. Follow us on Instagram: @citycastdenver Chat with other listeners on reddit: r/CityCastDenver Support City Cast Denver by becoming a member: membership.citycast.fm Learn more about the sponsors of this March 23rd episode: Arvada Center Looking to advertise on City Cast Denver? Check out our options for podcast and newsletter ads at citycast.fm/advertise
We kick off Season Nine of the podcast by meeting a woman who could be called the godmother of true crime. Producer/host Susan Stone tells the story of F. Tennyson Jesse, an English journalist, criminologist, and writer. The daughter of a vicar who dragged the family around the British empire, she trained as a painter before moving to London in 1911. Journalism beckoned, but she was not put off by losing the use of her right hand in a plane accident, learning to type left-handed. Known as Fryn to her friends, she reported from the ground during World War I and published fiction, before moving into criminology and true crime writing. Her 1924 book Murder and its Motives set out six basic motivations for killing, a very influential theory, and she wrote about several of the most notorious crimes in the first half of the 20th century. Fryn also had a rather dramatic private life thanks to her doctor-turned-playwright husband Totty, who kept their marriage secret for several years. DLS co-founder Katy Derbyshire joins Susan to introduce our new season. To find out more about Fryn, visit our episode notes at https://deadladiesshow.com/podcast/ If you are in New York, you can see a live Dead Ladies Show on March 26th at the KGB Bar's Private Curtain — get more info on instagram via @deadladiesnyc or from their newsletter here: https://deadladiesshow.substack.com/ For our friends in Berlin, write this date on your calendar — June 7th! We will have our classic bilingual show on a Sunday night, so save the date. Follow us on social media @deadladiesshow, or sign up to our newsletter at this link: https://deadladiesshowberlin.beehiiv.com/ You can get even more Dead Lady content, and help support us, by becoming a Patreon member at patreon.com/deadladiesshowpodcast ! Our members get access to our premium audio and written content where we talk about Dead Lady books, music, and more, and sometimes we offer a sneak preview of Dead Ladies we're going to feature in the future — Fryn Jesse and her book A Pin to See the Peepshow were featured there back in 2020. Memberships starting at 2 euros or 2 dollars and it really gives us moral as well as a little financial support. You can also follow our content there for free! Thanks to all our existing supporters and free members! The Dead Ladies Show was founded by Florian Duijsens and Katy Derbyshire. The podcast is created, produced and edited by Susan Stone. Our theme tune is Little Lily Swing by Tri-Tachyon. We will be back again next month with another fabulous Dead Lady.
Pastor Joe continues our "Psalms" series by refreshing our love and perspective on one of the most well known psalms in the Bible.
Tennyson wrote that in springtime a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. Spring has a way of stirring things up, awakening things whether we like it or not. Sometimes people decide it's safer to protect their peace and keep life small — Mitch isn't so sure that's wisdom. This week's Field Manual entry is simple: maybe let that baggage go… we ain't dead yet.From pondering AI and the “new normal,” to ghost stories in the Grand Canyon, to wondering what “living your best life” really means, Mitch invites guests and listeners alike to sit down, swap stories, and wrestle with the questions we all think about but don't always say out loud. Catch up on all episodes, see pics. of each weekly guest, YouTube clips, subscribe, and visit the Merch Store at https://mitchwonders.com/ . Got feedback? Hit Mitch up at https://tinyurl.com/kc2e4wu3 and...Thank You!
Solvonis Therapeutics PLC (LSE:SVNS) CEO Anthony Tennyson talked with Proactive's Stephen Gunnion about the company's decision to select SVN-114 as the lead candidate in its post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) discovery programme and the opportunity the therapy could present if successfully developed. Tennyson explained that the decision followed pharmacological studies conducted by Evotec, which showed that SVN-114 provides balanced modulation across several important neurological systems. According to Tennyson, the compound influences serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline receptors, which are all associated with mood, emotional processing and social behaviour. These systems play a significant role in the brain mechanisms involved in PTSD. He said the results were reviewed by the company's scientific advisory committee, led by Professor David Nutt, which agreed that SVN-114 should be progressed as the lead candidate in the program. Tennyson explained that PTSD is a complex disorder involving multiple interconnected brain systems rather than a single pathway. The CEO highlighted the scale of the market opportunity, noting that PTSD affects more than 20 million people across the US, the UK and key European markets, while treatment options remain limited. Tennyson said: “If compounds like SVN-114 can demonstrate meaningful clinical benefits, then there's obviously a substantial opportunity to improve outcomes for patients and also to create value for the company and very importantly, for shareholders.” SVN-114 comes from a novel chemical series discovered by Solvonis and is supported by composition-of-matter patents, providing a strong intellectual property foundation for future development. The company is now focused on completing the remaining preclinical work required to support clinical development while pursuing non-dilutive grant funding in the UK and US. For more videos like this, visit the Proactive YouTube channel, give the video a like, subscribe to the channel and enable notifications so you never miss future updates. #SolvonisTherapeutics #AnthonyTennyson #SVN114 #PTSDTreatment #MentalHealthInnovation #DrugDevelopment #BiotechNews #Neuroscience #ClinicalDevelopment #PharmaInnovation
durée : 00:55:18 - Very Good Trip - par : Michka Assayas - Au menu de ce Very Good Trip, la voix d'une femme qui ne ressemblait à aucune autre. Michka Assayas consacrait cette émission à Marianne Faithfull à l'occasion de la sortie d'un album ou elle ne chantait pas mais récitait ses poèmes anglais préférés, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Keats et Byron. Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.
As we continue our series "Living By My Creator's Intent" Pastor Joe teaches us that just like how we need to train our bodies we need to stop trying and start training our relationship with God.
How did Julia Margaret Cameron - Virginia Woolf's great aunt - become one of the most influential photography artists of her time? Who were the Anglo-Indian Pattle Sisters who charmed Victorian society in India and London? How did the family create a warm artistic oasis where celebrities like Tennyson and Watts loved spending time? William is joined by art historian Emily Burns to discuss the life of his relative, the pioneering photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: empire@goalhanger.com Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Producer: Anouska Lewis Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Have you ever wondered why the book of Matthew starts off with the ancestry of Jesus? As we get closer to Christmas, Pastor Joe breaks down a huge part of Jesus' ancestry and explains that we need to know who Jesus came FROM so we can know who Jesus came FOR.
Episode 87 Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/87_Dover_Beach_by_Matthew_Arnold.mp3 Poet Matthew Arnold Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness Dover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. Podcast Transcript This is a magnificent and haunting poem by Matthew Arnold, an eminent Victorian poet. Written and published at the mid-point of the nineteenth century – it was probably written around 1851 and published in 1867 – it is not only a shining example of Victorian poetry at its best, but it also, and not coincidentally, embodies some of the central preoccupations of the Victorian age. The basic scenario is very simple: a man is looking out at the sea at night and thinking deep thoughts. It's something that we've all done, isn't it? The two tend to go hand-in-hand. When you're looking out into the darkness, listening to the sound of the sea, it's hard not to be thinking deep thoughts. If you've been a long time listener to this podcast, it may remind you of another poet who wrote about standing on the shore thinking deep thoughts, looking at the sea, Shakespeare, in his Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,So do our minutes hasten to their end; Arnold's poem is not a sonnet but a poem in four verse paragraphs. They're not stanzas, because they're not regular, but if you look at the text on the website, you can clearly see it's divided into four sections. The first part is a description of the sea, as seen from Dover Beach, which is on the shore of the narrowest part of the English channel, making it the closest part of England to France: The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; – on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. And as you can hear, the poem has a pretty regular and conventional rhythm, based on iambic metre, ti TUM, with the second syllable taking the stress in every metrical unit. But what's slightly unusual is that the lines have varying lengths. By the time we get to the third line: Upon the straits; – on the French coast the light There are five beats. There's a bit of variation in the middle of the line, but it's very recognisable as classic iambic pentameter, which has a baseline pattern going ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM, ti TUM. But before we get to the pentameter, we get two short lines: The sea is calm tonight.Only three beats; andThe tide is full, the moon lies fair – four beats. We also start to notice the rhymes: ‘tonight' and ‘light'. And we have an absolutely delightful enjambment, where a phrase spills over the end of one line into the next one: On the French coast the light,Gleams and is gone. Isn't that just fantastic? The light flashes out like a little surprise at the start of the line, just as it's a little surprise for the speaker looking out to sea. OK, once he's set the scene, he makes an invitation: Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! So if there's a window, he must be in a room. There's somebody in the room with him, and given that it's night it could well be a bedroom. So this person could be a lover. It's quite likely that this poem was written on Arnold's honeymoon, which would obviously fit this scenario. But anyway, he's inviting this person to come to the window and listen. And what does this person hear? Well, helpfully, the speaker tells us: Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in. Isn't that just great? The iambic metre is continuing with some more variations, which we needn't go into. And the rhyme is coming more and more to the fore. Just about every line in this section rhymes with another line, but it doesn't have a regular pattern. Some of the rhymes are close together, some are further apart. There's only one line in this paragraph that doesn't rhyme, and that's ‘Listen! You hear the grating roar'. If this kind of shifting rhyme pattern reminds you of something you've heard before, you may be thinking all the way back to Episode 34 where we looked at Coleridge's use of floating rhymes in his magical poem ‘Kubla Khan'. And it's pretty evident that Arnold is also casting a spell, in this case to mimic the rhythm of the waves coming in and going out, as they ‘Begin, and cease, and then again begin,'. And then the wonderful last line of the paragraph, as the waves ‘bring / The eternal note of sadness in'. You know, in the heart of the Victorian Age, when the Romantics were still within living memory, poets were still allowed to do that kind of thing. Try it nowadays of course, and the Poetry Police will be round to kick your front door in at 5am and arrest you. Anyway. The next paragraph is a bit of a jump cut: Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; So Arnold, a classical scholar, is letting us know he knows who Sophocles, the ancient Greek playwright was. And he's establishing a continuity across time of people looking out at the sea and thinking these deep thoughts. At this point, Arnold explicitly links the sea and the thinking: weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea. And the thought that we hear when we listen to the waves is what Arnold announces in the next verse paragraph, and he announces it with capital letters: The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. And for a modern reader, I think this is the point of greatest peril for Arnold, where he's most at risk of losing us. We may be okay with ‘the eternal note of sadness', but as soon as he starts giving us the Sea of Faith, we start to brace ourselves. Is this going to turn into a horrible religious allegory, like The Pilgrim's Progress? I mean, it's a short step from the Sea of Faith to the Slough of Despond and the City of Destruction. And it doesn't help that Arnold uses the awkwardly rhyming phrase ‘a bright girdle furled' – that's not going to get past the Poetry Police, is it? But fear not; Arnold doesn't go there. What comes next is, I think, the best bit of the poem. So he says the Sea of Faith ‘was once, too, at the full', and then: But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world. Well, if you thought the eternal note of sadness was great, this tops it! It's absolutely fantastic. That line, ‘Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,' where the ‘it' is faith, the Sea of Faith. And the significance of the line is underlined by the fact that the word ‘roar' is a repetition – remember, that one line in the first section that didn't rhyme? Listen! you hear the grating roar See what Arnold did there? He left that sound hovering at the back of the mind, without a rhyme, until it came back in this section, a subtle but unmistakeable link between the ‘grating roar' of the actual sea at Dover Beach, and the ‘withdrawing roar' of the Sea of Faith: Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Isn't that the most Victorian line ever? It encapsulates the despair that accompanied the crisis of faith in 19th century England. This crisis was triggered by the advance of modern science – including the discoveries of fossils, evidence of mass extinction of previous species, and the theory of evolution, with Darwin's Origin of Species published in 1859, in between the writing and publication of ‘Dover Beach'. Richard Holmes, in his wonderful new biography of the young Tennyson, compares this growing awareness of the nature of life on Earth to the modern anxiety over climate change. For the Victorians, he writes, it created a ‘deep and existential terror'. One thing that makes this passage so effective is that Arnold has already cast the spell in the first verse paragraph, hypnotising us with the rhythm and rhyme, and linking it to the movement of the waves. In the second paragraph, he says, ‘we find also in the sound a thought'. And then in the third paragraph, he tells us the thought. And the thought that he attaches to this movement, which we are by now emotionally invested in, is a thought of such horror and profundity – certainly for his Victorian readers – that the retreat of the sea of faith really does feel devastating. It leaves us gazing down at the naked shingles of the world. The speaker is now imaginatively out of the bedroom and down on the beach. This is very relatable; we've all stood on the beach and watched the waves withdrawing beneath our feet and the shingle being left there. It's an incredibly vivid evocation of a pretty abstract concept. Then, in the fourth and final verse paragraph, comes a bit of a surprise: Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! Well, I for one was not expecting that! From existential despair to an appeal to his beloved. What a delightful, romantic (with a small ‘r') response to the big-picture, existential catastrophe. And for me, it's another little echo of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60, which opens with a poet contemplating the sea and the passing of time and feeling the temptation to despair, yet also ends with an appeal to the consolation of love: And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,blockquotePraising thy worth, despite his cruel hand. Turning back to Arnold. He says ‘let us be true / To one another'. And then he links their situation to the existential catastrophe, and says this is precisely why they should be true to each other: for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; It sounds, on the face of it, a pretty unlikely justification for being true to one another in a romantic sense. But actually, this is a very modern stance towards romantic love. It's like the gleam of light that just flashed across the Channel from France – the idea of you and me against an unfeeling world, of love as redemption, or at least consolation, in a meaningless universe. In a world with ‘neither joy, nor love, nor light,' our love becomes all the more poignant and important. Of course, we could easily object that, regardless of religious faith, the world does have joy and love and light. His very declaration of love is evidence of this. But let's face it, we don't always come to poets for logical consistency, do we? And we don't have to agree with Matthew Arnold to find this passage moving; most of us have felt like this at some time when we've looked at the world in what feels like the cold light of reality. He evokes it so vividly and dramatically that I, for one, am quite prepared to go with him on this. Then we get the final three lines of the poem:We are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. I don't know about you, but I find this a little jarring in the light of what we've just heard. We've had the magnificent description of the sea and its effect on human thought, extending that into the idea of faith receding into illusion, and settling on human love as some kind of consolation for the loss of faith. So why do we need to be transported to a windswept plain where armies are clashing and struggling? It turns out to be another classical reference, to the Greek historian Thucydides' account of the night battle of Epipolae, where the two armies were running around in the dark and some of them ended up fighting their own side in the confusion. I mean, fine, he's a classical scholar. And obviously, it's deeply meaningful to him. But to me, this feels a little bit bolted on. A lot of people love that ending, but to me, it's is not as good as some of the earlier bits, or at least it doesn't quite feel all of a piece with the imagery of the sea. But overall, it is a magnificent poem, and this is a small quibble. Stepping back, I want to have another look at the poem's form, specifically the meter, and even more specifically, the irregularity of the meter, which is quite unusual and actually quite innovative for its time. As I've said, it's in iambic meter, but it's not strictly iambic pentameter. You may recall I did a mini series on the podcast a while ago looking at the evolution of blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, from Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare's dramatic verse, then Milton's Paradise Lost and finally Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. ‘Dover Beach' is rhymed, so it's not blank verse, but most of the techniques Arnold uses here are familiar from those other poets, with variations on the basic rhythm, sometimes switching the beats around, and using enjambment and caesura (a break or pause in the middle of the line). But, and – this is quite a big but – not every line has five beats. The lines get longer and shorter in an irregular pattern, apparently according to Arnold's instinct. And this is pretty unusual, certainly for 1851. It's not unique, we could point to bits of Tennyson or Arthur Hugh Clough for metrical experiments in a similar vein, but it's certainly not common practice. And I looked into this, to see what the critics have said about it. And it turns out the scholars are divided. In one camp, the critics say that what Arnold is doing is firmly in the iambic pentameter tradition – it's just one more variation on the pattern. But in the other camp are people who say, ‘No, this is something new; this is freer verse,' and it is anticipating free verse, the non-metrical poetry with no set line lengths that came to be the dominant verse form of the 20th century. Personally, I think you can look back to Wordsworth and see a continuity with his poetic practice. But you could equally look forward, to a link with T. S. Eliot's innovations in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and The Waste Land. Eliot is often described as an innovator in free verse, which is true up to a point, but a lot of his writing in that early period isn't strictly free verse; it's a kind of broken up metrical verse, where he often uses an iambic metre with long and short lines, which he varies with great intuitive skill – in a similar manner to Arnold's ‘Dover Beach'. Interestingly, when ‘Dover Beach' was first published, the reviews didn't really talk about the metre, which is ammunition for the people who say, ‘Well, this is just a kind of iambic pentameter'. Personally, I think what we have here is something like the well-known Duck-Rabbit illusion, where you can look at the same drawing and either see a duck or a rabbit, depending how you look at it. So from one angle, ‘Dover Beach' is clearly continuing the iambic pentameter tradition; from another angle, it anticipates the innovations of free verse. We can draw a line from the regular iambic pentameter of Wordsworth (writing at the turn of the 18th and 19th century) to the fractured iambic verse of Eliot at the start of the 20th century. ‘Dover Beach' is pretty well halfway between them, historically and poetically. And I don't think this is just a dry technical development. There is something going on here in terms of the poet's sense of order and disorder, faith and doubt. Wordsworth, in the regular unfolding of his blank verse, conveys his basic trust in an ordered and meaningful universe. Matthew Arnold is writing very explicitly about the breakup of faith, and we can start to see it in the breakup of the ordered iambic pentameter. By the time we get to the existential despair of Eliot's Waste Land, the meter is really falling apart, like the Waste Land Eliot describes. So overall, I think we can appreciate what a finely balanced poem Arnold has written. It's hard to categorise. You read it the first time and think, ‘Oh, right, another conventional Victorian melancholy lament'. But just when we think he's about to go overboard with the Sea of Faith, he surprises us and with that magnificent central passage. And just as he's about to give in to despair, we get that glimmering spark of love lighting up, and we think, ‘Well, maybe this is a romantic poem after all'. And maybe Arnold might look at me over his spectacles and patiently explain that actually, this is why that final metaphor of the clashing armies is exactly right. Friend and foe are running in first one direction, then another, inadvertently killing the people on the wrong side. So the simile gives us that sense of being caught in the cross-currents of a larger sweep of history. With all of that hovering in our mind, let's go over to the window once more and heed his call to listen to the sound of the Victorian sea at Dover Beach. Dover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched land,Listen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in. Sophocles long agoHeard it on the Aegean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought,Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of FaithWas once, too, at the full, and round earth's shoreLay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.But now I only hearIts melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,Retreating, to the breathOf the night-wind, down the vast edges drearAnd naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be trueTo one another! for the world, which seemsTo lie before us like a land of dreams,So various, so beautiful, so new,Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;And we are here as on a darkling plainSwept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,Where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold Matthew Arnold was a British poet, critic, and public intellectual who was born in 1822 and died in 1888. His father was Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School. Arnold studied Classics at Oxford and first became known for lyrical, melancholic poems such as ‘Dover Beach', ‘The Scholar-Gipsy', and ‘Thyrsis', that explore the loss of faith in the modern world. Appointed an inspector of schools, he travelled widely and developed strong views on culture, education, and society. His critical essays, especially Culture and Anarchy, shaped debates about the role of culture in public life. Arnold remains a central figure bridging Romanticism and early modern thought. A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Episode 87 Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold.Poet Matthew ArnoldReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies... Recalling Brigid by Orna Ross Orna Ross reads and discusses ‘Recalling Brigid’ from Poet Town. 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John Granger in September 2022, weeks after the publication of Ink Black Heart, tackled the tangle of 108 poetic epigraphs in Strike 6 from twenty-two Anglo-American Victorian women poets in search of a common theme, of a prevalent meaning, or, the Holy Grail, a work among the many works that acted to Heart as Rosmersholm did to Lethal White and Faerie Queene did to Troubled Blood. This effort involved listing the poets, the epigraphs (citing poems by each woman), and, without reading each poem, noting simply what each brief excerpt included. You can read the results of those surveys at ‘Ink Black Heart: Intro to Epigraphs 101.'The anticipated result of those tabulations was that the poetic epigraphs in Heart, in tandem with the cardiac Part headings from Grey's Anatomy, were consistently about the heart as spiritual faculty rather than bodily pump. The surprise finding was that 13% of the epigraphs were from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. John speculated in conclusion that it was the heart of Rowling's sixth Strike-Ellacott novel:Again, this is not the place to write at any length about the relevance of ‘Aurora Leigh' as a mirroring text within Ink Black Heart. Like you, I look forward to Beatrice Groves' exegesis to complement her Cuckoo's Calling work with Rossetti's ‘Dirge' and Tennyson's ‘Ulysses.' The two important things to note here are only that ‘Aurora Leigh' is the poem most deployed in Strike6 epigraphs and that it is a melange of “Biblical and classical history and mythology, as well as modern novels.” That it would work as something of a template or touchstone for Ink Black Heart, a novel with mythological and hermetic backdrops and archetypal symbols used to reinvent the depth and range of the most modern of genres, the murder mystery, as psychomachian allegory, seems almost a no-brainer. If you can only read one book or poem to buttress your understanding of Strike6, it has to be Durkheim's Suicide, Evola's Ride the Tiger, or Browning's ‘Aurora Leigh,' and I think the epic poem is your best bet.When Rowling agreed to a live interview with Serious Strikers on Twitter the month after Ink Black Heart's publication, one hosted by the Barmy Army, John listed the first question he would ask her to be about the importance if any of Aurora Leigh for understanding Strike 6: “Is Barret Browning's Aurora Leigh the backdrop story to Ink Black Heart the way Rosmersholm and Faerie Queen were to the fourth and fifth Strike mysteries?”Nick Jeffery included this question in a veritable barrage of questions he launched during the Barmy Army interview, and, incredibly, Rowling responded:John concluded in his write up of the Barmy Army interview:If I get “all credit” for the spotting, I must take the blame as well for misspelling Browning's name and for Nick's saying there were thirteen rather than fourteen Leigh epigraphs. All credit to @gbjeffen for succeeding in getting Rowling to answer a question, something I have not succeeding in doing in more than two decades of reading her work and writing about its artistry and meaning. Look for the seven point Ink Black Heart: Aurora Leigh post in the coming week.John, however, never wrote up that '“seven point Ink Black Heart Aurora Leigh post” and his expectation of a Beatrice Groves exegesis also never materialized. That project was delayed until Nick Jeffery, in his years long effort to read everything Rowling has admitted to reading and liking (see this list of those books, a list that predates the 2022 revelations in re Aurora Leigh), arrived at the 1856 epic novel in blank verse. Last week Nick wrote up his findings here as ‘A Rowling Reading of Aurora Leigh: The Influence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh on J.K. Rowling.'John and Nick put Hallmarked Man aside, consequently, in this week's conversation to talk about this poem, Nick's essay, and the place of this work in Fourth Generation Rowling Studies. Enjoy!Next week they'll chart Part Three of Hallmarked Man, discuss the astrological symbols and meaning embedded in Strike 8's names and plot points, and review with a Generation Hex special guest the long anticipated full-cast audio book of Harry Potter. and the Philosopher's Stone. Stay tuned — and please join the Paid Subscribers club to keep the HogPro lights on and restore heat and power to John's home! Many thanks to all subscribers around the world with a special shout-out this week to the six listeners in Norway: Tussen Takk!The Ten Questions and Promised Links:Little Women and Harry Potter: Jo Rowling is Jo March The Seven Points of CorrespondenceYou see, I was a plain — and that is relevant! you know that is relevant, that isn't a trivial thing, especially when you're a kid — I was a very plain, bookish, freckly, bright, little girl. I was a massive book worm and I spent a significant part of my reading looking for people like me.Now I didn't come up with nothing. Y'know, I remember Jo March who had a temper and wanted to be a writer so that was a lifeline. There's a heroine in a book called Little White Horse that I've spoken about publicly who was plain and that was fabulous. “Wow! You get to be a heroine and get not to be a raving beauty..”But y'know these were pretty slim pickings. J. K. Rowling: Deathly Hallows, Part 2, DVD extras, ‘The Women of Harry Potter‘ Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for AmericaA fascinating look at the cultural roots, political impact, and enduring legacy of Harriet Beecher Stowe's revolutionary bestseller.Uncle Tom's Cabin is likely the most influential novel ever written by an American. In a fitting tribute to the two hundredth anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's birth, Bancroft Prize-winning historian David S. Reynolds reveals her book's impact not only on the abolitionist movement and the American Civil War but also on worldwide events, including the end of serfdom in Russia, down to its influence in the twentieth century. He explores how both Stowe's background as the daughter in a famously intellectual family of preachers and her religious visions were fundamental to the novel. And he demonstrates why the book was beloved by millions―and won over even some southerners―while fueling lasting conflicts over the meaning of America. Although vilified over the years as often as praised, it has remained a cultural landmark, proliferating in the form of plays, songs, films, and merchandise―a rich legacy that has both fed and contested American racial stereotypes. Interview Questions1. [Nick] I wrote the essay, John, but the reason I read Aurora Leigh late 2025 dates back to September 2022 and a discovery you made while sorting through the 108 poetic epigraphs of Rowling's Ink Black Heart. Before we jump into the Elizabeth Barrett Browning epic poem, can you run us through that effort and finding?2. [John] 13% of course is nothing like the 100% epigraphical backdrops of Lethal White and Troubled Blood but, just reading the Wikipedia summary of Aurora Leigh, I thought it a very strong possibility that it might have served a similar function for Ink Black Heart. Which is where you enter the picture, Nick. I've never managed to get Rowling to answer even one of my questions in a quarter century of asking; you pried three answers out of her in one go! And on your first effort? Please tell us that story and what Rowling revealed about Aurora Leigh.3. [Nick] And so we had almost immediate confirmation of your highly speculative conclusion from the epigraphs, John. And you promised a seven point essay of compare and contrast criticism vis a vis Aurora Leigh and Ink Black Heart. What happened to that post?4. [John] So my notes for that were put aside, literally folded and stuffed in my Norton Critical edition of Aurora Leigh, waiting for the leisure time post dissertation to read the verse-novel and write up the seven points. But you revived that long forgotten project with your essay, Nick, so let's skip to that work. I'm confident few of our listeners are familiar with Elizabeth Barrett Browning or her most important and final poem; can you introduce us to both subjects?5. [John] How easy or hard was it to enter into the story, visualize the surroundings, and empathize with the characters?6. [John] And you charted the ring of Aurora Leigh's nine parts in your post! How hard was that? You didn't discuss it at any length in your post; how important do you think that is for understanding the work? Was it largely a hat-tip to the great epic poets?7. [John] If I had one complaint about your exegesis it's that you only spent two sentences on what I thought were profound findings, namely the ‘meaning in the middle' and the turtle-back correspondences between parts two and eight. Those are the giant take-aways, I think, of Leigh's influence on Rowling the Re-Reader and Magpie Borrower-Writer, no? Say some more about that, please.8. [John] You wrote that Rowling's selections from Aurora Leigh for epigraphs “are not arbitrary; they serve as interpretive keys, inviting readers to draw connections between the 19th-century verse and Rowling's modern tale of online toxicity, anonymity, and justice.” Can you give us some examples of what you mean?9. [John] Rowling specifies a parallel between Heart's Zoe and Leigh's Marian. Can you explain that link and its importance and any other character parallels and inspirations?10. [John] You close with ‘Thematic Resonances and Broader Literary Influence,' which are probably the most important connections between EBB and JKR beyond the plot point parallels and character echoes in Ink Black Heart. Can you summarize those in a way to push Serious Strikers and Rowling Readers to make the effort to find a copy of Aurora Leigh and read it?*Optional [Nick] So how close did I come to your ‘seven points,' John? This is a public episode. 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In this episode of the Midweek Takeaway, Phil Carroll and Kevin Hornsby are joined by Anthony Tennyson, CEO of Solvonis Therapeutics (LSE: SVNS), to break down the major news that addiction candidate SVN-015 has been accepted into the US NIH/NIDA Addiction Treatment Discovery Program — opening the door to fully funded preclinical work and potentially up to $3m per year in non-dilutive grants. Anthony also discusses progress across Solvonis' CNS pipeline, the company's AI-powered discovery engine, and the widening valuation gap between UK and US biotech markets. Disclaimer & Declaration of Interest This podcast may contain paid promotions, including but not limited to sponsorships, endorsements, or affiliate partnerships. The information, investment views, and recommendations provided are for general informational purposes only and should not be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell any financial products related to the companies discussed. Any opinions or comments are made to the best of the knowledge and belief of the commentators; however, no responsibility is accepted for actions based on such opinions or comments. The commentators may or may not hold investments in the companies under discussion. Listeners are encouraged to perform their own research and consult with a licensed professional before making any financial decisions based on the content of this podcast.
In this episode, we sit down with Quincy Tennyson, who teaches an impressive four-year computer science pathway at Fern Creek High School. Quincy's background in the Marine Corps and as a network engineer brings a unique perspective to CS education. He discusses his curriculum progression from introductory courses through AP Computer Science Principles (heavily inspired by UC Berkeley's CS61A), AP Computer Science A (Java), and a culminating Project-Based Programming course. We dive deep into his philosophy of being a "warm demander" - setting high expectations while providing intensive coaching and support. The conversation touches on several compelling topics including teaching agile methodology to high school students, the importance of transparency about failure, and how behavioral economics concepts (from thinkers like Daniel Kahneman) inform his approach to helping students understand their own thinking processes. Quincy also shares insights on supporting underserved students, running a successful Girls Who Code chapter, and navigating the integration of AI tools in the classroom. His students' enthusiasm at PyCon 2024 was infectious, and this episode reveals the thoughtful pedagogy behind their success. Key resources mentioned include CS61A from UC Berkeley (https://cs61a.org/), CodeHS (https://codehs.com/), Code.org (https://code.org/), Sandra McGuire's book "Teach Students How to Learn," Eric Matthes' Python Crash Course (https://nostarch.com/python-crash-course-3rd-edition), and Al Sweigart's (https://alsweigart.com/) educational resources including his new Buttonpad library for Tkinter. Special Guest: Quincy Tennyson.
Join us for an inspiring and deeply honest conversation with transformational coach and nurse, Kyle Tennyson. Kyle shares his journey from a successful nursing career in Los Angeles to embracing his true calling as a transformational coach, helping others reconnect with themselves and live in alignment with their "True North."Kyle opens up about the challenges of people-pleasing, the importance of listening to your inner voice, and the courage it takes to make life-changing decisions—even when it means leaving behind comfort and certainty. We discuss the power of community in healing, the role of vulnerability, and practical tools for staying aligned and finding joy in everyday life. We discuss listening to your inner voice, building supportive community, and finding joy by living in alignment with your true self. Whether you're navigating your own transformation, seeking more fulfillment, or looking for wisdom on self-care and authentic living, this conversation is filled with gold nuggets and actionable insights. Plus, learn more about Kyle's "Mastery Mornings" community.Find Kyle and be inspired!Thank you for being here! Let me know what shifted for you after listening to this episode, and share it with others!Love and peace HeatherGO Be AMAZING Because YOU are ALREADY AMAZING!!!
Tune in to hear:How can southern author Flannery O'Conner's emphasis on the importance of truth be seen in both her writing and the way she lived her life?What did German-American psychoanalyst Erich Fromm have to say about the difference between the “having” and the “being” modes of existence? Also, what can Tennyson's and Basho's poems on flowers teach us about each mode of existence?How does contemporary advertising encourage us to confuse having and being?Why does a focus on having often come at the expense of being?LinksThe Soul of WealthOrion's Market Volatility PortalConnect with UsMeet Dr. Daniel CrosbyCheck Out All of Orion's PodcastsPower Your Growth with OrionCompliance Code: 2978-U-25303
Send us a textIn this episode of WTR Small-Cap Spotlight, Anthony Tennyson, CEO and Co-Founder of Solvonis Therapeutics (LSE: SVNS | OTC: SLVNF), joins host Tim Gerdeman, Vice Chair and Co-Founder of Water Tower Research, and analyst Robert Sassoon to discuss the company's mission to transform care for addiction and mental health disorders.Tennyson shares Solvonis' journey from inception to its Phase 3 lead program for alcohol use disorder (AUD), which achieved 86% patient sobriety in prior Phase 2 trials, and details how the company's **dual R&D strategy—repurposing existing molecules and discovering new small molecules—**has allowed it to progress with exceptional capital efficiency. The discussion also covers the SVN-001 and SVN-002 programs, commercialization strategy, and Solvonis' strong financial position and runway through 2027 as it works toward redefining treatment for one of the world's most pervasive unmet medical needs.
The pressure to “prove it” is something we all face just like when Jesus was tempted in the desert. Pastor Joe explains how we can take the pressure off and turn our identity and behavior for God.
Thursday, October 16, 2025 Today, our host is Kerby Anderson! In the first hour, he welcomes first time guest Tennyson Moreno into our studio. They'll discuss Tennyson's run for the Texas State legislature and Charlie Kirk's Legacy & Gen Z. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/pointofviewradio and on Twitter @PointofViewRTS with your opinions or […]
Michael & Ethan In A Room With Scotch - Tapestry Radio Network
For the month of October, we'll occasionally release some spooky stories and poems of classic literature, read by the hosts and friends. This episode:The poem “The Kraken,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Drawing on imagery of the Leviathan from Scripture and other legends and mysteries, Tennyson draws a picture of the mythical Kraken which will sleep at the ocean floor until the world ends in fire.We're in the midst of our “Year of Faust”: Join the discussion! Go to the Contact page and put "Scotch Talk" in the Subject line. We'd love to hear from you! And submit your homework at the Michael & Ethan in a Room with Scotch page. Join us on GoodReads!Get on our Substack!Donate to our Patreon! MUSIC & SFX: “Guardian Spirit” by Arcane Anthems. Used by permission"Kessy Swings Endless - (ID 349)" by Lobo Loco. Used by permission. (Links to books & products are affiliate links.)
What happens after you kill to survive?It was Mother's Day, 2013.Tennyson Jacobson was home with her newborn and her mom when a man slipped through an unlocked door. In seconds, her safe world vanished—he grabbed her by the ponytail, robbed her, and disappeared.The next night, he came back.There was a fight. A knife.And by the time it was over, the man who tried to destroy her family was dead on her floor.Most stories end here. But this is where Tennyson's begins.In this raw and deeply honest episode of the Crackin' Backs Podcast, we go beyond the headlines to ask the real question: How do you heal after surviving the unimaginable?What does it take to trust again when your nervous system never lets you forget?How do you reclaim safety in your own skin?And why did this terrifying night lead her to a journey of resilience, Internal Family Systems therapy, spiritual exploration, and ultimately… her book, Mother of All Days?This conversation is about what no one talks about: the years after. It's about the body keeping score, listening to whispers of intuition, and discovering strength you never knew you had.Do you think you know what happens after trauma? Think again.Learn more about Tennyson Jacobson and her work:Facebook Page: HEREBook: Mother of All Days – Buy on AmazonWe are two sports chiropractors, seeking knowledge from some of the best resources in the world of health. From our perspective, health is more than just “Crackin Backs” but a deep dive into physical, mental, and nutritional well-being philosophies. Join us as we talk to some of the greatest minds and discover some of the most incredible gems you can use to maintain a higher level of health. Crackin Backs Podcast
In today's poem, a young Tennyson begins the long wrestling with grief. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe
WATERLOGGED, 4min., USA, Action/Crime A cop gets under water with her CI's and needs to find a way out. Conversation with director Kent Lloyd on the making of the film. http://uvselfdefense.com/stunts https://www.instagram.com/spearheadstunts Director Statement Waterlogged is meant to be an auditory experience. I was inspired by all of my live dance music players from college and season 2 of Daredevil to help the audience experience what our hero goes through. This piece was a giant collaboration from my stunts class. Monica, Rayla and Tennyson did most of the heavy lifting in terms of choreography and costume design. But they asked me to help stunt coordinate and direct and help write the script since the action was developed without any specific dialogue at all. Subscribe to the podcast: https://twitter.com/wildsoundpod https://www.instagram.com/wildsoundpod/ https://www.facebook.com/wildsoundpod
Stefan Collini, FBA. Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature, University of Cambridge.The Donald Winch Lectures in Intellectual History.University of St Andrews. 11th, 12th & 13th October 2022.In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, universities expanded to include a wide range of what came to be regarded as academic ‘disciplines'. In Britain, the study of ‘English literature' was eventually to become one of the biggest and most popular of these subjects, yet it was in some ways an awkward fit: not obviously susceptible to the ‘scientific' treatment considered the hallmark of a scholarly discipline, it aroused a kind of existential commitment in many of those who taught and studied it. These lectures explore some of the ways in which these tensions worked themselves out in the last two hundred years, drawing on a wide range of sources to understand the aspirations invested in the subject, the resistance that it constantly encountered, and the distinctive forms of enquiry that came to define it. In so doing, they raise larger questions about the changing character of universities, the peculiar cultural standing of ‘literature', and the conflicting social expectations that societies have entertained towards higher education and specialized scholarship.Handout - Lecture 3: Syllabuses1. ‘“English”, including Anglo-Saxon and Middle English along with modern English, including what we ordinarily call the “dull” periods as well as the “great” ones, is an object more or less presented to us by nature.'2. ‘In the 1880s, an exciting duel between two great publishing houses brought the price of the rival National and World Libraries (Cassell's and Routledge's, respectively) down to 3d in paper and 6d in cloth. And not only were prices cut: the selection of titles was greatly enlarged, the old standbys - Milton, Pope, Cowper, Thomson, Burns, Goldsmith, and the rest - being joined by many other authors who had seldom or ever appeared in cheap editions.'3. ‘Sir John Denham (1615-1668) is familiar from the oft-quoted couplet in his poem of Cooper's Hill, the measured and stately versification of which has been highly praised. He died an old man in the reign of Charles II, with a mind clouded by the sudden loss of his young wife, whom he had married late in life. John Cleveland (1613-1659), author of the Rebel Scot and certain vigorous attacks on the Protector, was the earliest poetical champion of royalty. Butler is said to have adopted the style of his satires in Hudibras. Colonel Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) ....'4. ‘Poetry: More advanced poems from Chaucer (e.g. The Prologue), Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, or from selections such as The Golden Treasury; Shakespeare, (Histories, Comedies or easier Tragedies). Prose: Plutarch's Lives, Kinglake, Eothen, Borrow, Lavengro, Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, Frowde [sic; ?Froude], selected short studies, Modern prose Comedies (e.g. Goldsmith and Sheridan), Selections from British Essayists (e.g. Addison, Lamb, Goldsmith), Macaulay, Essays or selected chapters from The History.'5. ‘In the 1930s favourite Higher Certificate set books and authors among the various Boards include: The Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Faustus, Bacon's essays, Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie, Hakluyt, The New Atlantis, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Lamb, Carlyle, Pope, Dryden, Scott and the Romantic poets. These texts and authors changed hardly at all between 1930 and 1950 (and represent a very similar situation to that of 1900-1910).'6. ‘An Honours Degree in English Language and Literature at present entails, in every University in England, some knowledge both of Latin or Greek at the outset, and of Old English later.' This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit standrewsiih.substack.com
We are wrapping up our "You Can..." series with Pastor Joe telling us that we are continually in a fight against the enemy and we need to know how to fight back and win.
The convergence of things that takes place every year in the first week of August includes the seasonal cross quarter; the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration; and the anniversary of the birth of Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson, whose love of astronomy is a celebration of this starry season.
Half a league, half a league,Half a league onward,All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.“Forward, the Light Brigade!Charge for the guns!” he said.Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.What does that Tennyson bloke know about it anyway? He wouldn't know a pinched harmonic from a pinched nerve and I bet he's never had to synch up multiple ADATs to try to record a debut album now has he? IMPOSTER! But charge of the LOVE brigade? Now we're talking! It's none more Queen. It's none more Freddie. It's none more John, Bri, or Deacy. But is it a champon????If Randy were to title this episode, he'd probably call it "There's music and love everywhere" or possibly "It's a super fun Freddie tune"Today's episode looks at one of the greatest musical achievements in the history of rock. It's the gigantic, the self-impressed, the bombastic, fantastic, Michael J Smithstic, "Millionaire Waltz" from A Day at the Races.NOTE: Skip forward to 31:32 if wanna get straight into the manifestations and wheel spin.The music at the end of the episode is "One Man Dynamo", by the Randy Woods Band (featuring Captain Spreadsheet on interjections...) You can go find that here: https://youtu.be/OcPfTUAnyJA. It's none more Randy!If you want to get involved in the Kofi Klub, you can make a donation here: https://ko-fi.com/seasidepodreview and let us know which song you want us to add to the wheel! We also have a private channel in our Discord community for donors.Follow us onFacebook: @seasidepodreviewDiscord: https://discord.gg/nrzr2mQjBluesky: @seasidepodreview.bsky.socialKo-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/seasidepodreviewAlso, check out Kev's other podcastsThe Tom Petty Project: https://tompettyproject.comThe Ultimate Catalogue Clash: https://shows.acast.com/uccAnd if you want to check out Randy's music, you can find it here:https://randywoodsband.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this episode, Chris and Cristina talk with Anamika Nanda, a PhD student in the Department of Biological Sciences and a Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) Fellow at the University of Southern California. Anamika's research, conducted under the guidance of Dr. David Raichlen, examines how physical activity affects neurological health across various genotypes. Before beginning her doctoral work, Anamika earned her Bachelor's degree in Medical Anthropology and Global Health from the University of Washington. Her award-winning honors thesis examined the relationship between motivation, physical activity, and psychosocial stress, and its impact on telomere length in collegiate swimmers and non-collegiate athletes. We discuss her path into science, her interdisciplinary approach to understanding brain health, and how her work connects athletics, stress, and aging. Anamika's research has been recognized with an NSF-GRFP Honorable Mention, the UW Anthropology Department's Best Honors Thesis Award, and a Mary Gates Research Scholarship. Tune in for an insightful conversation on the biology of movement, the value of interdisciplinary research, and what it means to study sports from a holistic perspective. ------------------------------ Find the paper discussed in this episode: Nanda, A., Logan, A., & Tennyson, R. L. (2024). The influence of perceived stress and motivation on telomere length among NCAA swimmers. American Journal of Human Biology, 36(9), e24091. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.24091 ------------------------------ Contact Anamika: E-mail: anamikan@usc.edu; LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anamika-nanda-168b9b199 ------------------------------ Contact the Sausage of Science Podcast and Human Biology Association: Facebook: facebook.com/groups/humanbiologyassociation/, Website: humbio.org, Twitter: @HumBioAssoc Chris Lynn, Host Website: cdlynn.people.ua.edu/, E-mail: cdlynn@ua.edu, Twitter:@Chris_Ly Cristina Gildee, Co-host, SoS Co-Producer, HBA Junior Fellow Website: cristinagildee.org, E-mail: cgildee@uw.edu
Joined this week by none other than Chris Tennyson and it was an awesome conversation! We talked about accountability, and how not everyone is supposed to be a firefighter. Mental health and resilience and Chris's personal story of post traumatic growth. If you have not heard it you need to tune in live. Of course the best laid plans are always beautifully derailed by the amazing questions from the Scrap audience! Enjoy!!!
Sometimes we have to deal with difficult people and it can be so easy to treat them the wrong way, but Pastor Joe tells us why it's important that we choose the right way, the biblical way!
What would you do if your deepest intuition told you something no one else believed—and it ended up saving your life? In this gripping episode, Nicole is joined by Tennyson Jacobson, a 3/5 Pure Generator, entrepreneur, and author of The Mother of All Days. Tennyson recounts the harrowing true story of a home invasion that shook her world and how it became the catalyst for unraveling much more than just the trauma of that day. What follows is a powerful conversation about how our most difficult moments can reveal the hidden patterns we've carried all our lives—like achievement addiction, people-pleasing, and struggling to trust our inner voice. Together, they explore the messy, human process of healing—not just from a violent event, but from the quieter, chronic ways we abandon ourselves. Tennyson shares how Human Design, nervous system work, and Internal Family Systems helped her reconnect with her intuition and build a life that actually feels like hers. If you've ever felt stuck in your own patterns or questioned your ability to trust yourself, this episode offers a story of what it means to come home to who you really are—without needing permission. Learn more about your Human Design and get your full chart for free at https://www.nicolelaino.com/chart Connect with Tennyson: - Visit her website at https://heyitstenny.com/ - Follow Tennyson Jacobson on Instagram @tennysonjacobson - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tennyson-jacobson-a3996989/ Be sure to visit nicolelaino.com/podcastlinks for all of the current links to events, freebies, and more! If you enjoyed this week's episode, I'd so appreciate you doing a few things for me: Please subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen! Rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Tag me @nicolelainoofficial on your IG stories with a story of you listening to the podcast and I'll make sure to share your post! Interested in learning more about working with me? Click here to learn more about how we can work together.
Our relationship with Jesus was never supposed to be a come and go rhythm. Pastor Joe Tennyson teaches us how we can stay close to God and feel fully charged.
Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine', and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince Albert. Its subject is the death in 1833 of Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22, and in its 131 sections it explores the possibilities of elegy more extensively than any English poem before it, not least in its innovative, incantatory rhyme scheme, intended to numb the pain of grief. From its repeated dramatisations of the experience of private loss, 'In Memoriam' opens out to reflect on the intellectual turmoil running through Victorian society amid monumental advances in scientific thought. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the unique emotional power of Tennyson's style, and why his great elegy came to represent what mourning, and poetry, should be in the public imagination of his time.Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrldIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsldRead more in the LRB:Frank Kermode:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n09/frank-kermode/eliot-and-the-shudderSeamus Perry:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/seamus-perry/are-we-there-yet Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The queens boil down the essence of some favorite poems and poets in this game that decides what poetry is *really* about.Please Support Breaking Form!Review the show on Apple Podcasts here.Aaron's STOP LYING is available from the Pitt Poetry Series.James's ROMANTIC COMEDY is available from Four Way Books.NOTES:Read the NY Times review of Michael Schmidt's The Lives of the PoetsListen to James Merrill read his poem "For Proust" and while we're on the subject, here's a madeleine recipe. For an examination of Bishop's sensible sensibility, go here. Watch Anne Carson read from Nox (~24 min).Here is a Galway Kinnell tribute reading from May 2015 which included Marie Howe and Sharon Olds (among others).Watch Dorianne Laux read "Trying to Raise the Dead" published in her book SmokeIn a New Yorker profile interview, Natasha Trethewey discusses Native Guard, and says that we have to remember "the nearly two hundred thousand African American soldiers who fought in the Civil War, who fought for their own freedom, who fought to preserve the Union rather than destroy the Union, to whom there are very few monuments erected. Just think how different the landscape of the South would be, and how differently we would learn about our Southern history, our shared American history, if we had monuments to those soldiers who won the war—who didn't lose the war but won the war to save the Union. Those are the monuments we need to have." Read the whole conversation and profile here.Here's a BBC4 adaptation of Browning's The Ring and the Book (~1 hour)Go here for more about George Meredith's sonnet sequence Modern Love.If you were looking for a free audio full-text version of Tennyson's In Memoriam read by Elizabeth Klatt, today's your lucky day. (~2.5 hours).
What happens when your worst nightmare becomes your real life?Tennyson Jacobson lived through the unimaginable—fighting off a violent intruder in her home and ultimately killing him to protect her family. Her story made national headlines (CBS, NBC, Fox, CrossFit, Your Worst Nightmare) and now she's telling the full story for the first time in her memoir, The Mother of All Days: The True Story of A Fatal Breakin and the Unexpected Path To Healing.This conversation isn't just about the trauma—it's about the winding path of healing, how intuitive whispers saved her life (twice), and what happens when you stop ignoring the nudge to speak up. Tenny's approach to healing is personal, unexpected, and powerful—and we get into it all here.
CraftLit - Serialized Classic Literature for Busy Book Lovers
Ep. 682: Cranford | Chapter 4 Book talk begins at 10:00 A mysterious stranger stirs up gossip, secrets slip out over tea, and Miss Matty's world gets just a little more complicated. --------------------------------------------------------------- 00:00 Episode start 01:56 MAY RAFFLE - Sir Walter Scott Cross stitch from Rebecca S (Of Book it with Becca, who wrote the wonderful post: 2:42 The dimensions of the cross-stitch are 9”x11” (23cmx30cm) Also, Plum Deluxe's CraftLit tea collection is here: 03:55 - and and 06:12 07:18 - Thin Man Movie Watch Party, May 24, 2025. If you need to level-up to join us 09:54 - Re- hash Chapter 3: A Love Affair of Long Ago - Miss Matty Jenkyns reminisces about her past romance with Mr. Holbrook, which was thwarted by her family's disapproval. Miss J couldn't SUCK an orange (then by ch 3 she was gone from us) Martha, the new girl of all work trying to learn how to do her job and nudging Major Jenkyns when he didn't serve himself fast enough 11:00 Miss Matilda SATE bolt upright (not a typo) 11:16 Poetry today from George Herbert—selections from will be featured at the end of the episodes, Euan Bartlett is the reader 12:00 “Pudding before meat” and “no broth no ball; no ball, no beef” Suet Pudding: Spotted Dick pudding: Steak and Kidney pudding: Yorkshire Pudding 14:00 15:32 Old fashioned forks - like 16th Century/1500s - were two-tine forks. 16:44 “Aminé at her grains of rice after her previous feast with the Ghoul” - from “The Story of Sidi-Nouman” from One Thousand and One Nights (1765-8) Aminé is wife of Sidi Nouman who notices she only eats rice with a bodkin. He figures out she's a Ghoul who goes to cemeteries at night to feast on the newly-buried dead so rice was pretty ‘meh' for her. 17:48 “Unbecoming to put on over their caps” - threw me b/c of the Caleche's in Dracula - turns out they're related! Retractable hood to put over a cap! 19:34 Tennyson - a line about cedars from 1842's and in the original text It's missing from the published version so a conversation turn would have been less of an utter non-sequiter in the OG version. 20:30 Headsup for the crocheters in our midst. 20:48 - not included accidentally. 21:04 Visiting rules - more 49:40 ‘“My cousin might make a drive, I think,” said Miss Pole, who was afraid of ear-ache, and had only her cap on. '— spectacular set of non-sequiters (p41) 53:30 I saw, I imitated, I survived - Mary Smith as Cæsar - using rounded knife tip as a spoon-ish food delivery device Don't forget! George Herbert's poetry often draws on the natural world, gardens, and quiet reflection: 1. “The Flower” Theme: Renewal, the seasons of the soul, joy in growth Perfect for July because: It celebrates the resurgence of beauty and hope—after cold or darkness, flowers bloom again. “Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.” “Who would have thought my shriveled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite underground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown.” “Thy garden is not bare; And I shall find once more The sweet communion with thy saints.” 2. “Easter” Yes, it's tied to the holiday, but it also celebrates light and blooming. “Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise Without delays, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With him mayst rise.” Pair this with literal rising things—morning sun, lilies, tall foxgloves. 3. “The Pulley” Theme: Why God withholds perfect rest—so we seek Him. This works well in summer, when life feels abundant, but still leaves a twinge of longing. “When God at first made man, Having a glass of blessings standing by…” (and yet withheld rest, to draw man's soul back to God) A beautiful idea for a reflective pause among too-perfect blooms. 4. “Love (III)” Theme: Divine love, human unworthiness, and acceptance It's more theological, but gentle and moving—great for a quiet bench moment in a shady corner. “Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back…” “You must sit down,” says Love, “and taste my meat.” So I did sit and eat.” It pairs beautifully with the hum of bees and the hospitality of a garden. If you want a very short quote for your garden journal or bench-musing: • “Thou hast given me this herb of grace to smell and taste.” — from “Grace” • “Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave…” — from “Virtue” • “He that in mirth and youthful jollity keeps measure, is more temperate than he that lets his sorrow flow out without check.” — from his prose The Country Parson *CraftLit's Socials* • Find everything here: https://www.linktr.ee/craftlitchannel • Join the newsletter: http://eepurl.com/2raf9 • Podcast site: http://craftlit.com • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CraftLit/ • Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/craftlit • Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/craftlit/ • TikTok podcast: https://www.tiktok.com/@craftlit • Email: heather@craftlit.com • Previous CraftLit Classics can be found here: *SUPPORT THE SHOW!* • CraftLit App Premium feed bit.ly/libsynpremiumcraftlit (only one tier available) • PATREON: https://patreon.com/craftlit (all tiers, below) ——Walter Harright - $5/mo for the same audio as on App ——Jane Eyre - $10/mo for even-month Book Parties ——Mina Harker - $15/mo for odd-month Watch Parties *All tiers and benefits are also available as* —*YouTube Channel Memberships* —*Ko-Fi* https://ko-fi.com/craftlit —*NEW* at CraftLit.com — Premium Memberships https://craftlit.com/membership-levels/ *IF you want to join a particular Book or Watch Patry but you don't want to join any of the above membership options*, please use PayPal.me/craftlit or CraftLit @ Venmo and include what you want to attend in the message field. Please give us at least 24 hours to get your message and add you to the attendee list. • Download the FREE CraftLit App for iOS or Android (you can call or email feedback straight from within the app) • Call 1-206-350-1642
Today we are sharing the first of our Blister Summit 2025 panel sessions, and we've got a great one to kick things off. We're asking the pros — Hoji, Ted, Anne, and Jess — how they go about assessing and testing ski and snowboard gear, and what advice they have for the rest of us? Plus you'll hear Ted share one of his favorite (but questionable??) ways of testing skis.RELATED LINKS:Get Yourself Covered: BLISTER+ BLISTER YouTube ChannelTOPICS & TIMES:BLISTER+ Updates (00:00)Intros (5:34)Evaluating Prototypes (8:21)Assessing Gear for Yourself (11:35)Going in Blind vs Getting Info First (18:05)Gear You Liked but Didn't Expect to? (23:29)Advice on How to Evaluate (28:41)Trickiest Variables when Testing? (34:10)Ted's Favorite Testing Method (38:55)Audience Q&A:Evaluating Pow Skis Outside of Pow? (46:26)Intuitive Products vs. Adapting to Them (49:27)Personal Preference vs. Objective Performance (54:00)How to Rule Out a Bad Tune? (55:29)How Many Runs Should You Take? (56:48)What Notes Do You Take? (1:00:16)CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCASTS:Blister CinematicCRAFTEDBikes & Big IdeasBlister Podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The idea of the "swan song" recurs from Aesop to Ovid to Plato to Tennyson. Ovid described it, "There, she poured out her words of grief, tearfully, in faint tones, in harmony with sadness, just as the swan sings once, in dying, its own funeral song." But it's based on a sweet fallacy – that a swan sings only when it nears death. And calling the sounds that a swan makes a "song" might be a bit off, too!More info and transcript at BirdNote.org. Want more BirdNote? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter. Sign up for BirdNote+ to get ad-free listening and other perks. BirdNote is a nonprofit. Your tax-deductible gift makes these shows possible.
Will's channel and corresponding video: https://youtu.be/cuE5VHQYZoo?si=AcAU9Qxtqs-l-BS-
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