Podcasts about Thomas Hardy

Let's just start off by saying we love Thomas Hardy with an ardent fervor. The man can write landscapes that are at once transportive and captivating. Join us for this book club chat as we talk about Return of the Native with Hardy expert, and former BYU professor John Bennion. We discuss the role the landscape plays, how it can entrap the characters, or assist them, depending on how you look at it. We will talk about Hardy's tendancy to write with a fatalistic tone. We discuss the question of love, its many varieties, and whether one has choice or if one is fated. We delve into the character traits and flaws of Eustacia Vye, and discuss the ways in which Hardy breaks tradition in writing female characters that are anything but stereotypical. We are also on site in England for a blip of this podcast as we capture in real time the beauties of the british moors and tors.

Neste episódio, mergulhamos fundo em "Longe Deste Insensato Mundo" (Far From The Madding Crowd), a obra-prima de Thomas Hardy que continua a fascinar leitores séculos depois de sua publicação. Prepare-se para uma viagem à mística Wessex de Hardy, um cenário tão vívido e presente que se torna quase um personagem por si só.Exploramos como Hardy tece a tapeçaria da vida rural vitoriana, com suas belezas e brutalidades, em meio aos desafios e paixões que movem seus habitantes. Mas o grande destaque, sem dúvida, é a complexa e cativante Bathsheba Everdene. Longe de ser a donzela passiva e idealizada da literatura vitoriana, Bathsheba é uma força da natureza: ambiciosa, independente e muitas vezes impulsiva. Analisamos como sua jornada desafia as convenções de gênero da época, revelando as camadas de uma mulher que ousa tomar suas próprias decisões em um mundo que tenta limitá-la.Venha conosco desvendar as paixões, os erros e a força indomável de Bathsheba, e entender por que a Wessex de Hardy ainda ecoa em nossos corações.Apresentação:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@liviamulder⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Edição: Lívia LeãoEmail: lihnumlivro@hotmail.com

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 9, 2025 is: eloquent • EL-uh-kwunt • adjective An eloquent speaker or writer expresses ideas forcefully and fluently; an eloquent speech or piece of writing likewise expresses ideas in such a way. Eloquent can also describe something that is vividly or movingly expressive. // She received high marks for her eloquent essay about gardening with her grandmother. // Their success serves as an eloquent reminder of the value of hard work. See the entry > Examples: "Her [author Michelle Cusolito's] concise yet eloquent text immerses young people in the watery setting, letting them feel the whales' clicks as they 'tingle' and 'vibrate' and emphasizing the strength of these animals' social bonds." — Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025 Did you know? Words are powerful, especially when strung together in just the right sequence. A well-crafted sentence (or one who crafts it) might be described as eloquent, a word that comes from the Latin verb loquī, meaning "to talk or speak." (The adjective loquacious is another loquī descendent; it describes a person who is skilled at or has an affinity for talking.) Words are not alone in conveying emotion, and eloquent is also used to describe what we find vividly or movingly expressive, as when novelist and poet Thomas Hardy wrote of "a burst of applause, and a deep silence which was even more eloquent than the applause."

Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which poets have reflected on their own passing, is a small but eloquent one in the history of English poetry. In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider some of its most striking examples, including Chidiock Tichborne's laconic lament on the night of his execution in 1586, Jonathan Swift's breezy anticipation of his posthumous reception, and the more comfortless efforts of 20th-century poets confronting godless extinction.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:Jacqueline Rose on Plath:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n16/jacqueline-rose/this-is-not-a-biography⁠David Runciman on Larkin and his father:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n03/david-runciman/a-funny-feeling⁠John Bayley on Larkin⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n08/john-bayley/the-last-romantic⁠Matthew Bevis on Hardy:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Multi-award winning comedian and author Mark Watson continues his probably doomed, but luckily funny quest to make sense of the human experience.This series is about time - the days of the week, the stages of our existence - and the way we use it to make sense of things. We make our way through the working week, tonight considering 'hump day' - Wednesday. Wednesday's child, famously, is full of woe. Both Mark and Esther are in this category. Is the woe a real issue or merely a fairy tale? What is the bleakest joke ever told by a four-year-old? And what would Thomas Hardy make of this series?Expect jokes, observations and interactions galore as Mark is aided, and sometimes obstructed, by the sardonic musical excellence of Flo & Joan. There's also a hand-picked comedy colleague each week - here, we welcome Esther Manito.Producer: Lianne CoopAn Impatient production for BBC Radio 4

Clare Carlisle's biography of George Eliot, The Marriage Question, is one of my favourite modern biographies, so I was really pleased to interview Clare. We talked about George Eliot as a feminist, the imperfections of her “marriage” to George Henry Lewes, what she learned from Spinoza, having sympathy for Casaubon, contradictions in Eliot's narrative method, her use of negatives, psychoanalysis, Middlemarch, and more. We also talked about biographies of philosophers, Kierkegaard, and Somerset Maugham. I was especially pleased by Clare's answer about the reported decline in student attention spans. Overall I thought this was a great discussion. Many thanks to Clare! Full transcript below. Here is an extract from our discussion about Eliot's narrative ideas.Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.TranscriptHenry: Today I am talking to Clare Carlisle, a philosopher at King's College London and a biographer. I am a big fan of George Eliot's Double Life: The Marriage Question. I've said the title backwards, but I'm sure you'll find the book either way. Clare, welcome.Clare Carlisle: Hi, Henry. Nice to be here.Henry: Is George Eliot a disappointing feminist?Clare: Obviously disappointment is relative to expectations, isn't it? It depends on what we expect of feminism, and in particular, a 19th-century woman. I personally don't find her a disappointing feminist. Other readers have done, and I can understand why that's the case for all sorts of reasons. She took on a male identity in order to be an artist, be a philosopher in a way that she thought was to her advantage, and she's sometimes been criticized for creating heroines who have quite a conventional sort of fulfillment. Not all of them, but Dorothea in Middlemarch, for example, at the end of the novel, we look back on her life as a wife and a mother with some sort of poignancy.Yes, she's been criticized for, in a way, giving her heroines and therefore offering other women a more conventional feminine ideal than the life she managed to create and carve out for herself as obviously a very remarkable thinker and artist. I also think you can read in the novels a really bracing critique of patriarchy, actually, and a very nuanced exploration of power dynamics between men and women, which isn't simplistic. Eliot is aware that women can oppress men, just as men can oppress women. Particularly in Middlemarch, actually, there's an exploration of marital violence that overcomes the more gendered portrayal of it, perhaps in Eliot's own earlier works where, in a couple of her earlier stories, she portrayed abused wives who were victims of their husband's betrayal, violence, and so on.Whereas in Middlemarch, it's interestingly, the women are as controlling, not necessarily in a nasty way, but just that that's the way human beings navigate their relations with each other. It seems to be part of what she's exploring in Middlemarch. No, I don't find her a disappointing feminist. We should be careful about the kind of expectations we, in the 21st century project onto Eliot.Henry: Was George Henry Lewes too controlling?Clare: I think one of the claims of this book is that there was more darkness in that relationship than has been acknowledged by other biographers, let's put it that way. When I set out to write the book, I'd read two or three other biographies of Eliot by this point. One thing that's really striking is this very wonderfully supportive husbands that, in the form of Lewes, George Eliot has, and a very cheerful account of that relationship and how marvelous he was. A real celebration of this relationship where the husband is, in many ways, putting his wife's career before his own, supporting her.Lewes acted as her agent, as her editor informally. He opened her mail for her. He really put himself at the service of her work in ways that are undoubtedly admirable. Actually, when I embarked on writing this book, I just accepted that narrative myself and was interested in this very positive portrayal of the relationship, found it attractive, as other writers have obviously done. Then, as I wrote the book, I was obviously reading more of the primary sources, the letters Eliot was writing and diary entries. I started to just have a bit of a feeling about this relationship, that it was light and dark, it wasn't just light.The ambiguity there was what really interested me, of, how do you draw the line between a husband or a wife who's protective, even sheltering the spouse from things that might upset them and supportive of their career and helpful in practical ways. How do you draw the line between that and someone who's being controlling? I think there were points where Lewes crossed that line. In a way, what's more interesting is, how do you draw that line. How do partners draw that line together? Not only how would we draw the line as spectators on that relationship, obviously only seeing glimpses of the inner life between the two people, but how do the partners themselves both draw those lines and then navigate them?Yes, I do suggest in the book that Lewes could be controlling and in ways that I think Eliot herself felt ambivalent about. I think she partly enjoyed that feeling of being protected. Actually, there was something about the conventional gendered roles of that, that made her feel more feminine and wifely and submissive, In a way, to some extent, I think she bought into that ideal, but also she felt its difficulties and its tensions. I also think for Lewes, this is a man who is himself conditioned by patriarchal norms with the expectation that the husband should be the successful one, the husband should be the provider, the one who's earning the money.He had to navigate a situation. That was the situation when they first got together. When they first got together, he was more successful writer. He was the man of the world who was supporting Eliot, who was more at the beginning of her career to some extent and helping her make connections. He had that role at the beginning. Then, within a few years, it had shifted and suddenly he had this celebrated best-selling novelist on his hands, which was, even though he supported her success, partly for his own financial interests, it wasn't necessarily what he'd bargained for when he got into the relationship.I think we can also see Lewes navigating the difficulties of that role, of being, to some extent, maybe even disempowered in that relationship and possibly reacting to that vulnerability with some controlling behavior. It's maybe something we also see in the Dorothea-Casaubon relationship where they get together. Not that I think that at all Casaubon was modeled on Lewes, not at all, but something of the dynamic there where they get together and the young woman is in awe of this learned man and she's quite subservient to him and looking up to him and wanting him to help her make her way in the world and teach her things.Then it turns out that his insecurity about his own work starts to come through. He reacts, and the marriage brings out his own insecurity about his work. Then he becomes quite controlling of Dorothea, perhaps again as a reaction to his own sense of vulnerability and insecurity. The point of my interpretation is not to portray Lewes as some villain, but rather to see these dynamics and as I say, ambivalences, ambiguities that play themselves out in couples, between couples.Henry: I came away from the book feeling like it was a great study of talent management in a way, and that the both of them were very lucky to find someone who was so well-matched to their particular sorts of talents. There are very few literary marriages where that is the case, or where that is successfully the case. The other one, the closest parallel I came up with was the Woolfs. Leonard is often said he's too controlling, which I find a very unsympathetic reading of a man who looked after a woman who nearly died. I think he was doing what he felt she required. In a way, I agree, Lewes clearly steps over the line several times. In a way, he was doing what she required to become George Eliot, as it were.Clare: Yes, absolutely.Henry: Which is quite remarkable in a way.Clare: Yes. I don't think Mary Ann Evans would have become George Eliot without that partnership with Lewes. I think that's quite clear. That's not because he did the work, but just that there was something about that, the partnership between them, that enabled that creativity…Henry: He knew all the people and he knew the literary society and all the editors, and therefore he knew how to take her into that world without it overwhelming her, giving her crippling headaches, sending her into a depression.Clare: Yes.Henry: In a way, I came away more impressed with them from the traditional, isn't it angelic and blah, blah, blah.Clare: Oh, that's good.Henry: What did George Eliot learn from Spinoza?Clare: I think she learned an awful lot from Spinoza. She translated Spinoza in the 1850s. She translated Spinoza's Ethics, which is Spinoza's philosophical masterpiece. That's really the last major project that Eliot did before she started to write fiction. It has, I think, quite an important place in her career. It's there at that pivotal point, just before she becomes an artist, as she puts it, as a fiction writer. Because she didn't just read The Ethics, but she translated it, she read it very, very closely, and I think was really quite deeply formed by a particular Spinozist ethical vision.Spinoza thinks that human beings are not self-sufficient. He puts that in very metaphysical terms. A more traditional philosophical view is to say that individual things are substances. I'm a substance, you're a substance. What it means to be a substance is to be self-sufficient, independent. For example, I would be a substance, but my feeling of happiness on this sunny morning would be a more accidental feature of my being.Henry: Sure.Clare: Something that depends on my substance, and then these other features come and go. They're passing, they're just modes of substance, like a passing mood or whatever, or some kind of characteristic I might have. That's the more traditional view, whereas Spinoza said that there's only one substance, and that's God or nature, which is just this infinite totality. We're all modes of that one substance. That means that we don't have ontological independence, self-sufficiency. We're more like a wave on the ocean that's passing through. One ethical consequence of that way of thinking is that we are interconnected.We're all interconnected. We're not substances that then become connected and related to other substances, rather we emerge as beings through this, our place in this wider whole. That interconnectedness of all things and the idea that individuals are really constituted by their relations is, I think, a Spinoza's insight that George Eliot drew on very deeply and dramatized in her fiction. I think it's there all through her fiction, but it becomes quite explicit in Middlemarch where she talks about, she has this master metaphor of the web.Henry: The web. Right.Clare: In Middlemarch, where everything is part of a web. You put pressure on a bit of it and something changes in another part of the web. That interconnectedness can be understood on multiple levels. Biologically, the idea that tissues are formed in this organic holistic way, rather than we're not composed of parts, like machines, but we're these organic holes. There's a biological idea of the web, which she explores. Also, the economic system of exchange that holds a community together. Then I suppose, perhaps most interestingly, the more emotional and moral features of the web, the way one person's life is bound up with and shaped by their encounters with all the other lives that it comes into contact with.In a way, it's a way of thinking that really, it questions any idea of self-sufficiency, but it also questions traditional ideas of what it is to be an individual. You could see a counterpart to this way of thinking in a prominent 19th-century view of history, which sees history as made by heroic men, basically. There's this book by Carlyle, Thomas Carlyle, called The Heroic in History, or something like that.Henry: Sure. On heroes and the heroic, yes.Clare: Yes. That's a really great example of this way of thinking about history as made by heroes. Emerson wrote this book called Representative Men. These books were published, I think, in the early 1850s. Representative Men. Again, he identifies these certain men, these heroic figures, which represent history in a way. Then a final example of this is Auguste Comte's Positivist Calendar, which, he's a humanist, secularist thinker who wants to basically recreate culture and replace our calendar with this lunar calendar, which, anyway, it's a different calendar, has 13 months.Each month is named after a great man. There's Shakespeare, and there's Dante, and there's-- I don't know, I can't remember. Anyway, there's this parade of heroic men. Napoleon. Anyway, that's the view of history that Eliot grew up with. She was reading, she was really influenced by Carlisle and Emerson and Comte. In that landscape, she is creating this alternative Spinozist vision of what an exemplar can be like and who gets to be an exemplar. Dorothea was a really interesting exemplar because she's unhistoric. At the very end of Middlemarch, she describes Dorothea's unhistoric life that comes to rest in an unvisited tomb.She's obscure. She's not visible on the world stage. She's forgotten once she dies. She's obscure. She's ordinary. She's a provincial woman, upper middle-class provincial woman, who makes some bad choices. She has high ideals but ends up living a life that from the outside is not really an extraordinary life at all. Also, she is constituted by her relations with others in both directions. Her own life is really shaped by her milieu, by her relationships with the people. Also, at the end of the novel, Eliot leaves us with a vision of the way Dorothea's life has touched other lives and in ways that can't be calculated, can't really be recognized. Yet, she has these effects that are diffused.She uses this word, diffusion or diffuseness. The diffuseness of the effects of Dorothea's life, which seep into the world. Of course, she's a woman. She's not a great hero in this Carlyle or Emerson sense. In all these ways, I think this is a very different way of thinking about individuality, but also history and the way the world is made, that history and the world is made by, in this more Spinozist kind of way, rather than by these heroic representative men who stand on the world stage. That's not Spinoza's, that's Eliot's original thinking. She's taking a Spinozist ontology, a Spinozist metaphysics, but really she's creating her own vision with that, that's, of course, located in that 19th-century context.Henry: How sympathetic should we be to Mr. Casaubon?Clare: I feel very sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon because he is so vulnerable. He's a really very vulnerable person. Of course, in the novel, we are encouraged to look at it from Dorothea's point of view, and so when we look at it from Dorothea's point of view, Casaubon is a bad thing. The best way to think about it is the view of Dorothea's sister Celia, her younger sister, who is a very clear-eyed observer, who knows that Dorothea is making a terrible mistake in marrying this man. She's quite disdainful of Casaubon's, well, his unattractive looks.He's only about 40, but he's portrayed as this dried-up, pale-faced scholar, academic, who is incapable of genuine emotional connection with another person, which is quite tragic, really. The hints are that he's not able to have a sexual relationship. He's so buttoned up and repressed, in a way. When we look at it from Dorothea's perspective, we say, "No, he's terrible, he's bad for you, he's not going to be good for you," which of course is right. I think Eliot herself had a lot of sympathy for Casaubon. There's an anecdote which said that when someone asked who Casaubon was based on, she pointed to herself.I think she saw something of herself in him. On an emotional level, I think he's just a fascinating character, isn't he, in a way, from an aesthetic point of view? The point is not do we like Casaubon or do we not like him? I think we are encouraged to feel sympathy with him, even as, on the one, it's so clever because we're taken along, we're encouraged to feel as Celia feels, where we dislike him, we don't sympathize with him. Then Eliot is also showing us how that view is quite limited, I think, because we do occasionally see the world from Casaubon's point of view and see how fearful Casaubon is.Henry: She's also explicit and didactic about the need to sympathize with him, right? It's often in asides, but at one point, she gives over most of a chapter to saying, "Poor Mr. Casaubon. He didn't think he'd end up like this." Things have actually gone very badly for him as well.Clare: Yes, that's right. The didactic thing, George Eliot is sometimes criticized for this didacticism because what's most effective in the novel is not the narrator coming and telling us we should actually feel sorry for Casaubon and we should sympathize with him. We'd be better people if we sympathize with Casaubon. There's a moralizing lecture about, you should feel sympathy for this unlikable person. What is more effective is the subtle way she portrays this character and, as I say, lets us into his vulnerabilities in some obvious ways, as you say, by pointing things out, but also in some more subtle ways of drawing his character and hinting at, as I say, his vulnerabilities.Henry: Doesn't she know, though, that a lot of readers won't actually be very moved by the subtle things and that she does need to put in a lecture to say, "I should tell you that I am very personally sympathetic to Mr. Casaubon and that if you leave this novel hating him, that's not--"? Isn't that why she does it? Because she knows that a lot of readers will say, "I don't care. He's a baddie."Clare: Yes I don't know, that's a good question.Henry: I'm interested because, in The Natural History of German Life, she goes to all these efforts to say abstract arguments and philosophy and statistics and such, these things don't change the world. Stories change the world. A picture of life from a great artist. Then when she's doing her picture of life from a great artist she constantly butts in with her philosophical abstractions because it's, she can't quite trust that the reader will get it right as it were.Clare: Yes, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. You could say that or maybe does she have enough confidence in her ability to make us feel with these characters. That would be another way of looking at it. Whether her lack of confidence and lack of trust is in the reader or in her own power as an artist is probably an open question.Henry: There's a good book by Debra Gettelman about the way that novelists like Eliot knew what readers expected because they were all reading so many cheap romance novels and circulating library novels. There are a lot of negations and arguments with the reader to say, "I know what you want this story to do and I know how you want this character to turn out, but I'm not going to do that. You must go with me with what I'm doing.Clare: Yes. You mean this new book that's come out called Imagining Otherwise?Henry: That's right, yes.Clare: I've actually not read it yet, I've ordered it, but funnily enough, as you said at the beginning, I'm a philosopher so I'm not trained at all as a reader of literary texts or as a literary scholar by any means, and so I perhaps foolishly embarked on this book on George Eliot thinking, "Oh, next I'm going to write a book about George Eliot." Anyway, I ended up going to a couple of conferences on George Eliot, which was interestingly like stepping into a different world. The academic world of literary studies is really different from the world of academic philosophy, interestingly.It's run by women for a start. You go to a conference and it's very female-dominated. There's all these very eminent senior women or at least at this conference I went to there was these distinguished women who were running the show. Then there were a few men in that mix, which is the inverse of often what it can be like in a philosophy conference, which is still quite a male-dominated discipline. The etiquette is different. Philosophers like to criticize each other's arguments. That's the way we show love is to criticize and take down another philosopher's argument.Whereas the academics at this George Eliot conference were much more into acknowledging what they'd learned from other people's work and referencing. Anyway, it's really interestingly different. Debra Gettelman was at this conference.Henry: Oh, great.Clare: She had a book on Middlemarch. I think it was 2019 because it was the bicentenary of Eliot's birth, that's why there was this big conference. Debra, who I'd never met before or heard of, as I just didn't really know this world, gave this amazing talk on Middlemarch and on these negations in Middlemarch. It really influenced me, it really inspired me. The way she did these close readings of the sentences, this is what literary scholars are trained to do, but I haven't had that training and the close reading of the sentences, which didn't just yield interesting insights into the way George Eliot uses language but yielded this really interesting philosophical work where Eliot is using forms of the sentence to explore ontological questions about negation and possibility and modality.This was just so fascinating and really, it was a small paper in one of those parallel sessions. It wasn't one of the big presentations at the conference, but it was that talk that most inspired me at the conference. It's a lot of the insights that I got from Debra Gettelman I ended up drawing on in my own chapter on Middlemarch. I situated it a bit more in the history of philosophy and thinking about negation as a theme.Henry: This is where you link it to Hegel.Clare: Yes, to Hegel, exactly. I was so pleased to see that the book is out because I think I must have gone up to her after the talk and said, "Oh, it's really amazing." Was like, "Oh, thank you." I was like, "Is it published? Can I cite it?" She said, "No. I'm working on this project." It seemed like she felt like it was going to be a long time in the making. Then a few weeks ago, I saw a review of the book in the TLS. I thought, "Oh, amazing, the book is out. It just sounds brilliant." I can't wait to read that book. Yes, she talks about Eliot alongside, I think, Dickens and another.Henry: And Jane Austen.Clare: Jane Austen, amazing. Yes. I think it's to do with, as you say, writing in response to readerly expectation and forming readerly expectations. Partly thanks to Debra Gettelman, I can see how Eliot does that. It'd be really interesting to learn how she sees Jane Austen and Dickens also doing that.Henry: It's a brilliant book. You're in for a treat.Clare: Yes, I'm sure it is. That doesn't surprise me at all.Henry: Now, you say more than once in your book, that Eliot anticipates some of the insights of psychotherapy.Clare: Psychoanalysis.Henry: Yes. What do you think she would have made of Freud or of our general therapy culture? I think you're right, but she has very different aims and understandings of these things. What would she make of it now?Clare: It seems that Freud was probably influenced by Eliot. That's a historical question. He certainly read and admired Eliot. I suspect, yes, was influenced by some of her insights, which in turn, she's drawing on other stuff. What do you have in mind? Your question suggests that you think she might have disapproved of therapy culture.Henry: I think novelists in general are quite ambivalent about psychoanalysis and therapy. Yes.Clare: For what reason?Henry: If you read someone like Iris Murdoch, who's quite Eliotic in many ways, she would say, "Do these therapists ever actually help anyone?"Clare: Ah.Henry: A lot of her characters are sent on these slightly dizzying journeys. They're often given advice from therapists or priests or philosophers, and obviously, Murdoch Is a philosopher. The advice from the therapists and the philosophers always ends these characters up in appalling situations. It's art and literature. As you were saying before, a more diffusive understanding and a way of integrating yourself with other things rather than looking back into your head and dwelling on it.Clare: Of course. Yes.Henry: I see more continuity between Eliot and that kind of thinking. I wonder if you felt that the talking cure that you identified at the end of Middlemarch is quite sound common sense and no-nonsense. It's not lie on the couch and tell me how you feel, is it?Clare: I don't know. That's one way to look at it, I suppose. Another way to look at it would be to see Eliot and Freud is located in this broadly Socratic tradition of one, the idea that if you understand yourself better, then that is a route to a certain qualified kind of happiness or fulfillment or liberation. The best kind of human life there could be is one where we gain insight into our own natures. We bring to light what is hidden from us, whether those are desires that are hidden away in the shadows and they're actually motivating our behavior, but we don't realize it, and so we are therefore enslaved to them.That's a very old idea that you find in ancient philosophy. Then the question is, by what methods do we bring these things to light? Is it through Socratic questioning? Is it through art? Eliot's art is an art that I think encourages us to see ourselves in the characters. As we come to understand the characters, and in particular to go back to what I said before about Spinozism, to see their embeddedness and their interconnectedness in these wider webs, but also in a sense of that embeddedness in psychic forces that they're not fully aware of. Part of what you could argue is being exposed there, and this would be a Spinozist insight, is the delusion of free will.The idea that we act freely with these autonomous agents who have access to and control over our desires, and we pick the thing that's in our interest and we act on that. That's a view that I think Spinoza is very critical. He famously denies free will. He says we're determined, we just don't understand how we're determined. When we understand better how we're determined, then perhaps paradoxically we actually do become relatively empowered through our understanding. I think there's something of that in Eliot too, and arguably there's something of that in Freud as well. I know you weren't actually so much asking about Freud's theory and practice, and more about a therapy culture.Henry: All of it.Clare: You're also asking about that. As I say, the difference would be the method for accomplishing this process of a kind of enlightenment. Of course, Freud's techniques medicalizes that project basically. It's the patient and the doctor in dialogue, and depends a lot on the skills of the doctor, doesn't it? How successful, and who is also a human being, who is also another human being, who isn't of course outside of the web, but is themselves in it, and ideally has themselves already undergone this process of making themselves more transparent to their own understanding, but of course, is going to be liable to their own blind spots, and so on.Henry: Which of her novels do you love the most? Just on a personal level, it doesn't have to be which one you think is the most impressive or whatever.Clare: I'm trying to think how to answer that question. I was thinking if I had to reread one of them next week, which one would I choose? If I was going on holiday and I wanted a beach read for pure enjoyment, which of the novels would I pick up? Probably Middlemarch. I think it's probably the most enjoyable, the most fun to read of her novels, basically.Henry: Sure.Clare: There'd be other reasons for picking other books. I really think Daniel Deronda is amazing because of what she's trying to do in that book. Its ambition, it doesn't always succeed in giving us the reading experience that is the most enjoyable. In terms of just the staggering philosophical and artistic achievement, what she's attempting to do, and what she does to a large extent achieve in that book, I think is just incredible. As a friend of Eliot, I have a real love for Daniel Deronda because I just think that what an amazing thing she did in writing that book. Then I've got a soft spot for Silas Marner, which is short and sweet.Henry: I think I'd take The Mill on the Floss. That's my favorite.Clare: Oh, would you?Henry: I love that book.Clare: That also did pop into my mind as another contender. Yes, because it's so personal in a way, The Mill on the Floss. It's personal to her, it's also personal to me in that, it's the first book by Eliot I read because I studied it for A-Level. I remember thinking when we were at the beginning of that two-year period when I'd chosen my English literature A-Level and we got the list of texts we were going to read, I remember seeing The Mill on the Floss and thinking, "Oh God, that sounds so boring." The title, something about the title, it just sounded awful. I remember being a bit disappointed that it wasn't a Jane Austen or something more fun.I thought, "Oh, The Mill on the Floss." Then I don't have a very strong memory of the book, but I remember thinking, actually, it was better than I expected. I did think, actually, it wasn't as awful and boring as I thought it would be. It's a personal book to Eliot. I think that exploring the life of a mind of a young woman who has no access to proper education, very limited access to art and culture, she's stuck in this little village near a provincial town full of narrow-minded conservative people. That's Eliot's experience herself. It was a bit my experience, too, as, again, not that I even would have seen it this way at the time, but a girl with intellectual appetites and not finding those appetites very easily satisfied in, again, a provincial, ordinary family and the world and so on.Henry: What sort of reader were you at school?Clare: What sort of reader?Henry: Were you reading lots of Plato, lots of novels?Clare: No. I'm always really surprised when I meet people who say things like they were reading Kierkegaard and Plato when they were 15 or 16. No, not at all. No, I loved reading, so I just read lots and lots of novels. I loved Jane Eyre. That was probably one of the first proper novels, as with many people, that I remember reading that when I was about 12 and partly feeling quite proud of myself for having read this grown-up book, but also really loving the book. I reread that probably several times before I was 25. Jane Austen and just reading.Then also I used to go to the library, just completely gripped by some boredom and restlessness and finding something to read. I read a lot and scanning the shelves and picking things out. That way I read more contemporary fiction. Just things like, I don't know, Julian Barnes or, Armistead Maupin, or just finding stuff on the shelves of the library that looked interesting, or Anita Brookner or Somerset Maugham. I really love Somerset Maugham.Henry: Which ones do you like?Clare: I remember reading, I think I read The Razor's Edge first.Henry: That's a great book.Clare: Yes, and just knowing nothing about it, just picking it off the shelf and thinking, "Oh, this looks interesting." I've always liked a nice short, small paperback. That would always appeal. Then once I found a book I liked, I'd then obviously read other stuff by that writer. I then read, so The Razor's Edge and-- Oh, I can't remember.Henry: The Moon and Sixpence, maybe?Clare: Yes, The Moon and Sixpence, and-Henry: Painted Veils?Clare: -Human Bondage.Henry: Of Human Bondage, right.Clare: Human Bondage, which is, actually, he took the title from Spinoza's Ethics. That's the title. Cluelessly, as a teenager, I was like, "Ooh, this book is interesting." Actually, when I look back, I can see that those writers, like Maugham, for example, he was really interested in philosophy. He was really interested in art and philosophy, and travel, and culture, and religion, all the things I am actually interested in. I wouldn't have known that that was why I loved the book. I just liked the book and found it gripping. It spoke to me, and I wanted to just read more other stuff like that.I was the first person in my family to go to university, so we didn't have a lot of books in the house. We had one bookcase. There were a few decent things in there along with the Jeffrey Archers in there. I read everything on that bookshelf. I read the Jeffrey Archers, I read the True Crime, I read the In Cold Blood, just this somewhat random-- I think there was probably a couple of George Eliots on there. A few classics, I would, again, grip by boredom on a Sunday afternoon, just stare at this shelf and think, "Oh, is there anything?" Maybe I'll end up with a Thomas Hardy or something. It was quite limited. I didn't really know anything about philosophy. I didn't think of doing philosophy at university, for example. I actually decided to do history.I went to Cambridge to do history. Then, after a couple of weeks, just happened to meet someone who was doing philosophy. I was like, "Oh, that's what I want to do." I only recognized it when I saw it. I hadn't really seen it because I went to the local state school, it wasn't full of teachers who knew about philosophy and stuff like that.Henry: You graduated in theology and philosophy, is that right?Clare: Yes. Cambridge, the degrees are in two parts. I did Part 1, theology, and then I did Part 2, philosophy. I graduated in philosophy, but I studied theology in my first year at Cambridge.Henry: What are your favorite Victorian biographies?Clare: You mean biographies of Victorians?Henry: Of Victorians, by Victorians, whatever.Clare: I don't really read many biographies.Henry: Oh, really?Clare: [laughs] The first biography I wrote was a biography of Kierkegaard. I remember thinking, when I started to write the book, "I'd better read some biographies." I always tend to read fiction. I'm not a big reader of history, which is so ironic. I don't know what possessed me to go and study history at university. These are not books I read for pleasure. I suppose I am quite hedonistic in my choice of reading, I like to read for pleasure.Henry: Sure. Of course.Clare: I don't tend to read nonfiction. Obviously, I do sometimes read nonfiction for pleasure, but it's not the thing I'm most drawn to. Anyway. I remember asking my editor, I probably didn't mention that I didn't know very much about biography, but I did ask him to recommend some. I'd already got the book contract. I said, "What do you think is a really good biography that I should read?" He recommended, I think, who is it who wrote The Life of Gibbon? Really famous biography of Gibbon.Henry: I don't know.Clare: That one. I read it. It is really good. My mind is going blank. I read many biographies of George Eliot before I wrote mine.Henry: They're not all wonderful, are they?Clare: I really liked Catherine Hughes's book because it brought her down from her pedestal.Henry: Exactly. Yes.Clare: Talking about hedonism, I would read anything that Catherine Hughes writes just for enjoyment because she's such a good writer. She's a very intellectual woman, but she's also very entertaining. She writes to entertain, which I like and appreciate as a reader. There's a couple of big archival biographies of George Eliot by Gordon Haight and by Rosemary Ashton, for example, which are both just invaluable. One of the great things about that kind of book is that it frees you to write a different kind of biography that can be more interpretive and more selective. Once those kinds of books have been published, there's no point doing another one. You can do something more creative, potentially, or more partial.I really like Catherine Hughes's. She was good at seeing through Eliot sometimes, and making fun of her, even though it's still a very respectful book. There's also this brilliant book about Eliot by Rosemary Bodenheimer called The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans. It's a biographical book, but it's written through the letters. She sees Eliot's life through her letters. Again, it's really good at seeing through Eliot. What Eliot says is not always what she means. She can be quite defensive and boastful. These are things that really come out in her letters. Anyway, that's a brilliant book, which again, really helped me to read Eliot critically. Not unsympathetically, but critically, because I tend to fall in love with thinkers that I'm reading. I'm not instinctively critical. I want to just show how amazing they are, but of course, you also need to be critical. Those books were--Henry: Or realistic.Clare: Yes, realistic and just like, "This is a human being," and having a sense of humor about it as well. That's what's great about Catherine Hughes's book, is that she's got a really good sense of humor. That makes for a fun reading experience.Henry: Why do you think more philosophers don't write biographies? It's an unphilosophical activity, isn't it?Clare: That's a very interesting question. Just a week or so ago, I was talking to Clare Mac Cumhaill I'm not quite sure how you pronounce her name, but anyway, so there's--Henry: Oh, who did the four women in Oxford?Clare: Yes. Exactly.Henry: That was a great book.Clare: Yes. Clare MacCumhaill co-wrote this book with Rachael Wiseman. They're both philosophers. They wrote this group biography of Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley. I happened to be having dinner with a group of philosophers and sitting opposite her. Had never met her before. It was just a delight to talk to another philosopher who'd written biography. We both felt that there was a real philosophical potential in biography, that thinking about a shape of a human life, what it is to know another person, the connection between a person's life and their philosophy. Even to put it that way implies that philosophy is something that isn't part of life, that you've got philosophy over here and you've got life over there. Then you think about the connection between them.That, when you think about it, is quite a questionable way of looking at philosophy as if it's somehow separate from life or detachment life. We had a really interesting conversation about this. There's Ray Monk's brilliant biography of Wittgenstein, The Duty of Genius. He's another philosopher who's written biography, and then went on to reflect, interestingly, on the relationship between philosophy and biography.I think on the one hand, I'd want to question the idea that biography and philosophy are two different things or that a person's life and their thought are two separate questions. On the other hand, we've got these two different literary forms. One of them is a narrative form of writing, and one of them- I don't know what the technical term for it would be- but a more systematic writing where with systematic writing, it's not pinned to a location or a time, and the structure of the text is conceptual rather than narrative. It's not ordered according to events and chronology, and things happening, you've just got a more analytic style of writing.Those two styles of writing are very, very different ways of writing. They're two different literary forms. Contemporary academic philosophers tend to write, almost always-- probably are pretty much forced to write in the systematic analytic style because as soon as you would write a narrative, the critique will be, "Well, that's not philosophy. That's history," or "That's biography," or, "That's anecdote." You might get little bits of narrative in some thought experiment, but by definition, the thought experiment is never pinned to a particular time, place, or context. "Let's imagine a man standing on a bridge. There's a fat man tied to the railway line [crosstalk]." Those are like little narratives, but they're not pinned. There is a sequencing, so I suppose they are narratives. Anyway, as you can tell, they're quite abstracted little narratives.That interests me. Why is it that narrative is seen as unphilosophical? Particularly when you think about the history of philosophy, and we think about Plato's dialogues, which tend to have a narrative form, and the philosophical conversation is often situated within a narrative. The Phaedo, for example, at the beginning of the book, Socrates is sitting in prison, and he's about to drink his poisoned hemlock. He's awaiting execution. His friends, students, and disciples are gathered around him. They're talking about death and how Socrates feels about dying. Then, at the end of the book, he dies, and his friends are upset about it.Think about, I know, Descartes' Meditations, where we begin in the philosopher's study, and he's describing--Henry: With the fire.Clare: He's by the fire, but he's also saying, "I've reached a point in my life where I thought, actually, it's time to question some assumptions." He's sitting by the fire, but he's also locating the scene in his own life trajectory. He's reached a certain point in life. Of course, that may be a rhetorical device. Some readers might want to say, "Well, that's mere ornamentation. We extract the arguments from that. That's where the philosophy is." I think it's interesting to think about why philosophers might choose narrative as a form.Spinoza, certainly not in the Ethics, which is about as un-narrative as you can get, but in some of his other, he experimented with an earlier version of the Ethics, which is actually like Descartes' meditation. He begins by saying, "After experience had taught me to question all the values I'd been taught to pursue, I started to wonder whether there was some other genuine good that was eternal," and so on. He then goes on to narrate his experiments with a different kind of life, giving up certain things and pursuing other things.Then you come to George Eliot. I think these are philosophical books.Henry: Yes.Clare: The challenge lies in saying, "Well, how are they philosophical?" Are they philosophical because there are certain ideas in the books that you could pick out and say, "Oh, here, she's critiquing utilitarianism. These are her claims." You can do that with Eliot's books. There are arguments embedded in the books. I wouldn't want to say that that's where their philosophical interest is exhausted by the fact that you can extract non-narrative arguments from them, but rather there's also something philosophical in her exploration of what a human life is like and how choices get made and how those choices, whether they're free or unfree, shape a life, shape other lives. What human happiness can we realistically hope for? What does a good life look like? What does a bad life look like? Why is the virtue of humility important?These are also, I think, philosophical themes that can perhaps only be treated in a long-form, i.e., in a narrative that doesn't just set a particular scene from a person's life, but that follows the trajectory of a life. That was a very long answer to your question.Henry: No, it was a good answer. I like it.Clare: Just to come back to what you said about biography. When I wrote my first biography on Kierkegaard, I really enjoyed working in this medium of narrative for the first time. I like writing. I'd enjoyed writing my earlier books which were in that more analytic conceptual style where the structure was determined by themes and by concepts rather than by any chronology. I happily worked in that way. I had to learn how to do it. I had to learn how to write. How do you write a narrative?To come back to the Metaphysical Animals, the group biography, writing a narrative about one person's life is complicated enough, but writing a narrative of four lives, it's a real-- from a technical point of view-- Even if you only have one life, lives are not linear. If you think about a particular period in your subject's life, people have lots of different things going on at once that have different timeframes. You're going through a certain period in your relationship, you're working on a book, someone close to you dies, you're reading Hegel. All that stuff is going on. The narrative is not going to be, "Well, on Tuesday this happened, and then on Wednesday--" You can't use pure chronology to structure a narrative. It's not just one thing following another.It's not like, "Well, first I'll talk about the relationship," which is an issue that was maybe stretching over a three-month period. Then in this one week, she was reading Hegel and making these notes that were really important. Then, in the background to this is Carlisle's view of history. You've got these different temporal periods that are all bearing on a single narrative. The challenge to create a narrative from all that, that's difficult, as any biographer knows. To do that with four subjects at once is-- Anyway, they did an amazing job in that book.Henry: It never gets boring, that book.Clare: No. I guess the problem with a biography is often you're stuck with this one person through the whole--Henry: I think the problem with a biography of philosophers is that it can get very boring. They kept the interest for four thinkers. I thought that was very impressive, really.Clare: Yes, absolutely. Yes. There's a really nice balance between the philosophy and the-- I like to hear about Philippa Foot's taste in cushions. Maybe some readers would say, "Oh, no, that's frivolous." It's not the view I would take. For me, it's those apparently frivolous details that really help you to connect with a person. They will deliver a sense of the person that nothing else will. There's no substitute for that.In my book about Kierkegaard, it was reviewed by Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books. It was generally quite a positive review. He was a bit sneering about the fact that it had what he calls "domestic flourishes" in the book. I'd mentioned that Kierkegaard's favorite flower was the lily of the valley. He's like, "Huh." He saw these as frivolities, whereas for me, the fact that Kierkegaard had a favorite flower tells us something about the kind of man he was.Henry: Absolutely.Clare: Actually, his favorite flower had all sorts of symbolism attached to it, Kierkegaard, it had 10 different layers of meaning. It's never straightforward. There's interesting value judgments that get made. There's partly the view that anything biographical is not philosophical. It is in some way frivolous or incidental. That would be perhaps a very austere, purest philosophical on a certain conception of philosophy view.Then you might also have views about what is and isn't interesting, what is and isn't significant. Actually, that's a really interesting question. What is significant about a person's life, and what isn't? Actually, to come back to Eliot, that's a question she is, I think, absolutely preoccupied with, most of all in Middlemarch and in Daniel Deronda. This question about what is trivial and what is significant. Dorothea is frustrated because she feels that her life is trivial. She thinks that Casaubon is preoccupied with really significant questions, the key to all mythologies, and so on.Henry: [chuckles]Clare: There's really a deep irony there because that view of what's significant is really challenged in the novel. Casaubon's project comes to seem really futile, petty, and insignificant. In Daniel Deronda, you've got this amazing question where she shows her heroine, Gwendolyn, who's this selfish 20-year-old girl who's pursuing her own self-interest in a pretty narrow way, about flirting and thinking about her own romantic prospects.Henry: Her income.Clare: She's got this inner world, which is the average preoccupation of a silly 20-year-old girl.Henry: Yes. [laughs]Clare: Then Eliot's narrator asks, "Is there a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl who's preoccupied with how to make her own life pleasant?" The question she's asking is-- Well, I think she wants to tell us that slender thread of the girl's consciousness is part of the universe, basically. It's integral. It belongs to a great drama of the struggle between good and evil, which is this mythical, cosmic, religious, archetypal drama that gets played out on the scale of the universe, but also, in this silly girl's consciousness.I think she's got to a point where she was very explicitly thematizing that distinction between the significant and the insignificant and playing with that distinction. It comes back to Dorothea's unhistoric life. It's unhistoric, it's insignificant. Yet, by the end of Middlemarch, by the time we get to that description of Dorothea's unhistoric life, this life has become important to us. We care about Dorothea and how her life turned out. It has this grandeur to it that I think Eliot exposes. It's not the grandeur of historic importance, it's some other human grandeur that I think she wants to find in the silly girls as much as in the great men.Henry: I always find remarks like that quite extraordinary. One of the things I want a biography to tell me is, "How did they come to believe these things?" and, "How did they get the work done?" The flowers that he likes, that's part of that, right? It's like Bertrand Russell going off on his bicycle all the time. That's part of how it all happened. I remember Elizabeth Anscombe in the book about the four philosophers, this question of, "How does she do it all when she's got these six children?" There's this wonderful image of her standing in the doorway to her house smoking. The six children are tumbling around everywhere. The whole place is filthy. I think they don't own a Hoover or she doesn't use it. You just get this wonderful sense of, "This is how she gets it done."Clare: That's how you do it.Henry: Yes. The idea that this is some minor domestic trivial; no, this is very important to understanding Elizabeth Anscombe, right?Clare: Yes, of course.Henry: I want all of this.Clare: Yes. One of the things I really like about her is that she unashamedly brings that domesticity into her philosophical work. She'll use examples like, "I go to buy some potatoes from the grocer's." She'll use that example, whereas that's not the thing that-- Oxford dons don't need to buy any potatoes because they have these quasi-monastic lives where they get cooked for and cleaned for. I like the way she chooses those. Of course, she's not a housewife, but she chooses these housewifely examples to illustrate her philosophy.I don't know enough about Anscombe, but I can imagine that that's a deliberate choice. That's a choice she's making. There's so many different examples she could have thought of. She's choosing that example, which is an example, it shows a woman doing philosophy, basically. Of course, men can buy potatoes too, but in that culture, the buying of the potatoes would be the woman's work.Henry: Yes. She wasn't going to run into AJ Ayre at the grocer's.Clare: Probably not, no.Henry: No. Are you religious in any sense?Clare: I think I am in some sense. Yes, "religious," I think it's a really problematic concept. I've written a bit about this concept of religion and what it might mean. I wrote a book on Spinoza called Spinoza's Religion. Part of what I learned through writing the book was that in order to decide whether or not Spinoza was religious, we have to rethink the very concept of religion, or we have to see that that's what Spinoza was doing.I don't know. Some people are straightforwardly religious and I guess could answer that question, say, "Oh yes, I've always been a Christian," or whatever. My answer is a yes and no answer, where I didn't have a religious upbringing, and I don't have a strong religious affiliation. Sorry, I'm being very evasive.Henry: What do you think of the idea that we're about to live through or we are living through a religious revival? More people going to church, more young people interested in it. Do you see that, or do you think that's a blip?Clare: That's probably a question for the social scientists, isn't it? It just totally depends where you are and what community you're--Henry: Your students, you are not seeing students who are suddenly more religious?Clare: Well, no, but my students are students who've chosen to do philosophy. Some of them are religious and some of them are not. It will be too small a sample to be able to diagnose. I can say that my students are much more likely to be questioning. Many of them are questioning their gender, thinking about how to inhabit gender roles differently.That's something I perceive as a change from 20 years ago, just in the way that my students will dress and present themselves. That's a discernible difference. I can remark on that, but I can't remark on whether they're more religious.Just actually just been teaching a course on philosophy of religion at King's. Some students in the course of having discussions would mention that they were Muslim, Christian, or really into contemplative practices and meditation. Some of the students shared those interests. Others would say, "Oh, well, I'm an atheist, so this is--" There's just a range-Henry: A full range.Clare: -of different religious backgrounds and different interests. There's always been that range. I don't know whether there's an increased interest in religion among those students in particular, but I guess, yes, maybe on a national or global level, statistically-- I don't know. You tell me.Henry: What do you think about all these reports that undergraduates today-- "They have no attention span, they can't read a book, everything is TikTok," do you see this or are you just seeing like, "No, my students are fine actually. This is obviously happening somewhere else"?Clare: Again, it's difficult to say because I see them when they're in their classes, I see them in their seminars, I see them in the lectures. I don't know what their attention spans are like in their--Henry: Some of the other people I've interviewed will say things like, "I'll set reading, and they won't do it, even though it's just not very much reading,"-Clare: Oh, I see. Oh, yes.Henry: -or, "They're on the phone in the--" You know what I mean?Clare: Yes.Henry: The whole experience from 10, 20 years ago, these are just different.Clare: I'm also more distracted by my phone than I was 20 years ago. I didn't have a phone 20 years ago.Henry: Sure.Clare: Having a phone and being on the internet is constantly disrupting my reading and my writing. That's something that I think many of us battle with a bit. I'm sure most of us are addicted to our phones. I wouldn't draw a distinction between myself and my students in that respect. I've been really impressed by my students, pleasantly surprised by the fact they've done their reading because it can be difficult to do reading, I think.Henry: You're not one of these people who says, "Oh students today, it's really very different than it was 20 years ago. You can't get them to do anything. The whole thing is--" Some people are apocalyptic about-- Actually, you're saying no, your students are good?Clare: I like my students. Whether they do the reading or not, I'm not going to sit here and complain about them.Henry: No, sure, sure. I think that's good. What are you working on next?Clare: I've just written a book. It came out of a series of lectures I gave on life writing and philosophy, actually. Connected to what we were talking about earlier. Having written the biographies, I started to reflect a bit more on biography and how it may or may not be a philosophical enterprise, and questions about the shape of a life and what one life can transmit to another life. Something about the devotional labor of the biographer when you're living with this person and you're-- It's devotional, but it's also potentially exploitative because often you're using your subjects, of course, without their consent because they're dead. You're presenting their life to public view and you're selling books, so it's devotional and exploitative. I think that's an interesting pairing.Anyway, so I gave these lectures last year in St Andrews and they're going to be published in September.Henry: Great.Clare: I've finished those really.Henry: That's what's coming.Clare: That's what's coming. Then I've just been writing again about Kierkegaard, actually. I haven't really worked on Kierkegaard for quite a few years. As often happens with these things, I got invited to speak on Kierkegaard and death at a conference in New York in November. My initial thought was like, "Oh, I wish it was Spinoza, I don't want to--" I think I got to the point where I'd worked a lot on Kierkegaard and wanted to do other things. I was a bit like, "Oh, if only I was doing Spinoza, that would be more up my street." I wanted to go to the conference, so I said yes to this invitation. I was really glad I did because I went back and read what Kierkegaard has written about death, which is very interesting because Kierkegaard's this quintessentially death-fixated philosopher, that's his reputation. It's his reputation, he's really about death. His name means churchyard. He's doomy and gloomy. There's the caricature.Then, to actually look at what he says about death and how he approaches the subject, which I'd forgotten or hadn't even read closely in the first place, those particular texts. That turned out to be really interesting, so I'm writing-- It's not a book or anything, it's just an article.Henry: You're not going to do a George Eliot and produce a novel?Clare: No. I'm not a novelist or a writer of fiction. I don't think I have enough imagination to create characters. What I love about biography is that you get given the characters and you get given the plots. Then, of course, it is a creative task to then turn that into a narrative, as I said before. The kinds of biography I like to write are quite creative, they're not just purely about facts. I think facts can be quite boring. Well, they become interesting in the context of questions about meaning interpretations by themselves. Again, probably why I was right to give up on the history degree. For me, facts are not where my heart is.That amount of creativity I think suits me well, but to create a world as you do when you're a novelist and create characters and plots, and so, that doesn't come naturally to me. I guess I like thinking about philosophical questions through real-life stories. It's one way for philosophy to be connected to real life. Philosophy can also be connected to life through fiction, of course, but it's not my own thing. I like to read other people's fiction. I'm not so bothered about reading other biographies.Henry: No. No, no.[laughter]Clare: I'll write the biographies, and I'll read the fiction.Henry: That's probably the best way. Clare Carlisle, author of The Marriage Question, thank you very much.Clare: Oh, thanks, Henry. It's been very fun to talk to you.Henry: Yes. It was a real pleasure. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

Today's poem is about (not) getting the last word. Happy reading.Walter de la Mare, born on April 25, 1873 in London, is considered one of modern literature's chief exemplars of the romantic imagination. His complete works form a sustained treatment of romantic themes: dreams, death, rare states of mind and emotion, fantasy worlds of childhood, and the pursuit of the transcendent.As a youth he attended St. Paul's Cathedral School, and his formal education did not extend beyond this point. Upon graduation he went to work for the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company, remaining with the firm for 18 years. De la Mare began writing short stories and poetry while working as a bookkeeper in the company's London office during the 1890s. His first published short story, “Kismet,” appeared in the journal Sketch in 1895. In 1902 he published his first major work, the poetry collection Songs of Childhood, which was recognized as a significant example of children's literature for its creative imagery and variety of meters. Critics often assert that a childlike richness of imagination influenced everything de la Mare wrote, emphasizing his frequent depiction of childhood as a time of intuition, deep emotion, and closeness to spiritual truth. In 1908, following the publication of his novel Henry Brocken and the poetry collection titled Poems, de la Mare was granted a Civil List pension, enabling him to terminate his corporate employment and focus exclusively on writing.….As a poet de la Mare is often compared with Thomas Hardy and William Blake for their respective themes of mortality and visionary illumination. His greatest concern was the creation of a dreamlike tone implying a tangible but nonspecific transcendent reality. This characteristic of the poems has drawn many admirers, though also eliciting criticism that the poet indulged in an undefined sense of mystery without systematic acceptance of any specific doctrine. Some commentators also criticize the poetry for having an archness of tone more suitable for children's verse, while others value this playful quality. It is generally agreed, however, that de la Mare was a skillful manipulator of poetic structure, a skill that is particularly evident in the earlier collections.….For his extravagance of invention de la Mare is sometimes labeled an escapist who retreats from accepted definitions of reality and the relationships of conventional existence. His approach to reality, however, is not escapist; rather, it profoundly explores the world he considered most significant—that of the imagination. In the London Mercury J.B. Priestley favorably concluded in 1924 that de la Mare is “one of that most lovable order of artists who never lose sight of their childhood, but re-live it continually in their work and contrive to find expression for their maturity in it, memories and impressions, its romantic vision of the world.”-bio via Poetry Foundation 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

Monica Pareschi"Inverness"Polidoro Editorewww.alessandropolidoroeditore.itC'è, nell'incontro con l'altro, una paura antica, uno spavento continuamente ricercato e fuggito. Incontri sbagliati, mancati. Incontri fatali, o intravisti.Baci velenosi. Bambine dai difetti repellenti. Addii dati in maniera fredda e intollerabile. Amori ricambiati in parte e scambiati per eterne maledizioni scolastiche.Monica Pareschi torna alla narrativa dopo il suo esordio di circa 10 anni fa. Un'opera contundente, corrosiva – ricorda la malizia fantastica di Leonora Carrington e il film Stoker di Park chan-Wook – fondata sui sentimenti più nascosti, sulle piccolezze mostruose, vitree, che tutti noi coviamo mentre amiamo e mentre odiamo.Monica Pareschi è autrice di È di vetro quest'aria, Italic Pequod, 2014. Traduce narrativa per le maggioricase editrici italiane. Ha tradotto e curato, tra gli al-tri, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte e Emily Brontë, Shirley Jackson, Doris Lessing, James Ballard, Bernard Malamud, Paul Auster, Nel 2020, per la sua traduzione di Wuthering Heights, ha vinto il Premio InternazionaleVon Rezzori e il Premio Letteraria e, nel 2023, il Premio Fondazione Capalbio per la traduzione di Piccole cose da nulla di Claire Keegan. Insegna traduzione letteraria all'Università Cattolica.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarewww.ilpostodelleparole.itDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.

Daily QuoteThe past was past; whatever it has been it was no more at hand. (Thomas Hardy)Poem of the DayThe Peace of Wild ThingsBy Wendell BerryBeauty of Words鸟兽不可与同群冰心

English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place in Warnham in 1792, spending his formative years at his family home. His family is well-connected with the Horsham District too.  While he wrote famous poems such as Ozymandias, Queen Mab and To A Skylark and influenced many poets and writers, including Robert Browning, WB Yeats, Thomas Hardy and George Bernard Shaw, Shelley - whose second wife Mary Shelley authored the famous gothic novel Frankenstein - never knew fame during his lifetime.  Despite Percy Bysshe Shelley's posthumous influence and literary reputation, many of us are unaware of the writer's connection to Horsham and know little about his life, other than his works. However, our guests for this episode - Carol Hayton and David Hide - directors of The Shelley Memorial Project - are among those hoping to change that.  The Shelley Memorial Project wants to create a lasting public memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley to commemorate Horsham's famous former citizen.  To find out more, we gathered around a table at the Shelley Arms in Broadbridge Heath to talk about Shelley, his connection to Horsham, and the project's plans to honour him.   

Jennifer Horne served as the twelfth Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2017 to 2021. The author of four collections of poems, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, Borrowed Light, and, most recently, Letters to Little Rock, she also has written a collection of short stories, Tell the World You're a Wildflower. She is the author of a literary biography, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author, described as “mesmerizing” and “a beguiling tale of madness and literature” by Publisher's Weekly. She has edited or co-edited five volumes of poetry, essays, and stories. Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England. Hardy is best known for his novels, including The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. His first book of poems, Wessex Poems, was published when Hardy was in his late 50s. He published seven more collections, and over 1,000 poems in his lifetime. In January of 1928, he died peacefully at his home in Dorchester, Dorset, England. Links:Jennifer HorneA Map of the World (Jennifer Horne's website)Bio and work at The Poetry FoundationA review of Letters to Little Rock at Alabama Writers Forum“Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging: Life-, Age-, and Art-Affirming Manifestos" at Southern Review of Books"Two Poems by Jennifer Horne" at Deep South MagazineThomas HardyBio and Poems at The Poetry FoundationThe Thomas Hardy Society

Jennifer Horne served as the twelfth Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2017 to 2021. The author of four collections of poems, Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, Borrowed Light, and, most recently, Letters to Little Rock, she also has written a collection of short stories, Tell the World You're a Wildflower. She is the author of a literary biography, Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author, described as “mesmerizing” and “a beguiling tale of madness and literature” by Publisher's Weekly. She has edited or co-edited five volumes of poetry, essays, and stories. Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England. Hardy is best known for his novels, including The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. His first book of poems, Wessex Poems, was published when Hardy was in his late 50s. He published seven more collections, and over 1,000 poems in his lifetime. In January of 1928, he died peacefully at his home in Dorchester, Dorset, England. Links:Jennifer HorneA Map of the World (Jennifer Horne's website)Bio and work at The Poetry FoundationA review of Letters to Little Rock at Alabama Writers Forum“Old Enough: Southern Women Artists and Writers on Creativity and Aging: Life-, Age-, and Art-Affirming Manifestos" at Southern Review of Books"Two Poems by Jennifer Horne" at Deep South MagazineThomas HardyBio and Poems at The Poetry FoundationThe Thomas Hardy Society

Today, Nancy Grace and Sheryl McCollum unpack the latest twists in the Brian Kohberger trial, where the defense is citing autism in an attempt to remove the death penalty. They also examine the mysterious deaths of Gene Hackman and his wife, exploring possible causes and forensic clues. Plus, Nancy breaks down the newly unsealed Epstein files - what the names on the list could mean and the potential cover-ups or delays in making these documents public. Show Notes: (0:00) Welcome! Nancy and Sheryl introduce this week’s crime roundup (0:30) CRU kicks off with a story from Nancy Grace’s early career (4:00) Tribute to Dee Emerson (9:30) Bryan Kohberger defense cites autism to get death penalty off table (10:55)  ”All of these brilliant people had some form of autism. Translation, that does not mean you cannot intend to do a crime, and it means you should not escape punishment for that crime.” (11:30) Speculations on Gene Hackman case (14:30) HAP Poem by: Thomas Hardy (17:00) Examining the placement of the pills found (18:30) Speculations of carbon monoxide poisoning (22:00) The Epstein documents (25:00) The systemic delays in prosecuting those connected to Epstein’s crimes (30:00) Darkside of when power is abused --- Nancy Grace is an outspoken, tireless advocate for victims’ rights and one of television's most respected legal analysts. Nancy Grace had a perfect conviction record during her decade as a prosecutor. She is the founder and publisher of CrimeOnline.com, a crime- fighting digital platform that investigates breaking crime news, spreads awareness of missing people and shines a light on cold cases. In addition, Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, a daily show hosted by Grace, airs on SIRIUS XM’s Triumph Channel 111 and is downloadable as a podcast on all audio platforms - https://www.crimeonline.com/ Connect with Nancy: X: @nancygrace Instagram: @thenancygrace Facebook: @nancygrace Sheryl “Mac” McCollum is an Emmy Award winning CSI, a writer for CrimeOnLine, Forensic and Crime Scene Expert for Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, and a CSI for a metro Atlanta Police Department. She is the co-author of the textbook., Cold Case: Pathways to Justice. Connect with Sheryl: Email: coldcase2004@gmail.com X: @ColdCaseTips Facebook: @sheryl.mccollumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Daily QuoteThere is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. (Agatha Christie)Poem of the DayAfter a JourneyThomas HardyBeauty of Words文学批评无用论季羡林

Send us a textIt's a bitingly cold, sleety night. There's a warning of snow in the forecast for later. It's a perfect night to sit together around a warm stove snug inside the Erica's cabin, while the wild world rages outside. The kettle is singing, the biscuit barrel is full. The night belongs to us.    Journal entry:7th February, Friday.“Yesterday's spectacular Blood-orange dawn Has given way to a dawn Without colour or feeling.We pick our way between Rutted potholes of slippery mud To the Magpie's scalding laugh.A wicked wind cuts In from the north-east And reminds me that I am, After all, an embodied being.”Episode Information:In this episode I read ‘Where does Comfort's Bosom Glow?' by John Clare from his Madrigals and Chronicles: Being newly found poems and ‘The Darkling Thrush' by Thomas Hardy (1900). I also quote from William Blake's (1796/7) The Four Zoas (Night the Second). With special thanks to our lock-wheelersfor supporting this podcast.Kevin B. Fleur and David Mcloughlin Lois Raphael Sami Walbury Tania Yorgey Andrea Hansen Chris Hinds David Dirom Chris and Alan on NB Land of Green Ginger Captain Arlo Rebecca Russell Allison on the narrowboat Mukka Derek and Pauline Watts Anna V. Orange Cookie Mary Keane. Tony Rutherford. Arabella Holzapfel. Rory with MJ and Kayla. Narrowboat Precious Jet. Linda Reynolds Burkins. Richard Noble. Carol Ferguson. Tracie Thomas Mark and Tricia Stowe Madeleine SmithGeneral DetailsThe intro and the outro music is ‘Crying Cello' by Oleksii_Kalyna (2024) licensed for free-use by Pixabay (189988). Narrowboat engine recorded by 'James2nd' on the River Weaver, Cheshire. Uploaded to Freesound.org on 23rd June 2018. Creative Commons Licence. Piano and keyboard interludes composed and performed by Helen Ingram.All other audio recorded on site. Support the showBecome a 'Lock-Wheeler'Would you like to support this podcast by becoming a 'lock-wheeler' for Nighttime on Still Waters? Find out more: 'Lock-wheeling' for Nighttime on Still Waters.Contact Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/noswpod Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nighttimeonstillwaters/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/noswpod.bsky.social Mastodon: https://mastodon.world/@nosw I would love to hear from you. You can email me at nighttimeonstillwaters@gmail.com or drop me a line by going to the nowspod website and using either the contact form or, if you prefer, record your message by clicking on the microphone icon. For more information about Nighttime on Still Waters You can find more information and photographs about the podcasts and life aboard the Erica on our website at noswpod.com.

Welcome to Monday Night Live Join us for another insightful episode of Monday Night Live, where Derek Arden welcomes an inspiring leader in education, Mike Foley, CEO of the Wessex Academy Trust. With a career spanning from teaching in London to leading one of the UK's most successful Multi-Academy Trusts, Mike shares his journey, leadership insights, and the challenges of managing 12 schools, 7,000 students, and nearly 1,000 staff members. Mike Foley's Leadership Journey Mike's career in education started unexpectedly. Growing up in South London, he initially considered a legal career after earning a history degree. However, a postgrad opportunity in teaching changed everything. He quickly discovered his passion for education, leading him to rapid promotions and eventually to the role of headteacher in his late 30s. After a decade in that role, he embraced the challenge of leading The Thomas Hardy School, one of the largest schools in the UK, before taking on the CEO position at Wessex Academy Trust in 2021. The Challenges of Leading a Multi-Academy Trust Running a multi-academy trust is a monumental task. Mike explains how strategic leadership, teamwork, and a strong culture keep the organization running smoothly. Key leadership challenges include: Maintaining a unified culture across 12 schools while allowing for individual school identities. Managing a £50 million budget efficiently, ensuring schools receive the necessary resources. Recruiting and retaining teachers, particularly as the UK faces a shortage of qualified educators. Supporting students post-COVID, especially those dealing with mental health challenges and complex learning needs. Leadership at Scale – The Power of People A recurring theme in Mike's leadership philosophy is trusting and empowering people. He emphasizes that leading at scale means ensuring others are motivated, aligned with the vision, and able to execute effectively. The key question he always asks himself is: How do I get people to do the right things, willingly and passionately? Mike also discusses the importance of continuous performance management. Instead of outdated annual reviews, the trust has moved towards ongoing performance reflection and feedback loops, helping leaders and teachers stay sharp and motivated. Education and Innovation – The Role of AI With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming a hot topic in education, Mike shares how Wessex Academy Trust is using AI creatively rather than banning it outright. One example? Students critiquing AI-generated essays to enhance their learning experience. He believes that embracing new technology, rather than fearing it, is crucial for the future of education. Mobile Phones in Schools – A Balanced Approach One of the biggest debates in education today is mobile phone use in schools. Mike recalls how, as headteacher at Thomas Hardy, he introduced a compromise policy: students could bring phones to school, but they had to be turned off and put away during the day. Breaking the rule meant parents had to come in to collect the phone. The result? A school-wide culture of responsibility and respect. Being an Ofsted Inspector – Insights from the Inside As an Ofsted inspector, Mike provides valuable insights into the inspection process. He highlights that Ofsted's role isn't just to criticize but to confirm schools' own self-assessments and help them improve. He also discusses upcoming changes to the Ofsted framework, expected in September 2025, which could impact the way Multi-Academy Trusts are evaluated. Final Leadership Advice – Building Resilience When asked for his one piece of advice for aspiring leaders, Mike emphasizes resilience. His mantra? Find the good in the bad. Every challenge presents a learning opportunity, and those who can adapt and push forward will be the most successful in any field. Thank You for Watching!

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 28, 2025 is: sward • SWORD • noun Sward is a literary word that refers to an area of land covered with grass. // The hikers emerged from the forest to find a green sward dotted with yellow and purple flowers stretching out before them. See the entry > Examples: “A century or so ago, if you lived in the Boston area and were obsessed with trees, you were in good company. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which had united enthusiasts of rare apples and ornamental maples since 1832, had helped found Mount Auburn Cemetery and endowed it with an immense, exotic plant collection. ... Tree mania seems to have come late to Greenlawn, however. Photographs taken sometime before 1914 show a bleak, bare sward.” — Veronique Greenwood, The Boston Globe, 18 Dec. 2023 Did you know? Sward sprouted from the Old English sweard or swearth, meaning “skin” or “rind.” It was originally used as a term for the skin of the body before being extended to another surface—that of the Earth. The word's specific grassy sense dates to the 16th century, and lives on today mostly in novels from centuries past, such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: “The sun was so near the ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long fingers pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted against the sloping sides of the vale.”

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for January 28, 2025 is: sward • SWORD • noun Sward is a literary word that refers to an area of land covered with grass. // The hikers emerged from the forest to find a green sward stretching out before them, and dotted with yellow and purple flowers. See the entry > Examples: “A century or so ago, if you lived in the Boston area and were obsessed with trees, you were in good company. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which had united enthusiasts of rare apples and ornamental maples since 1832, had helped found Mount Auburn Cemetery and endowed it with an immense, exotic plant collection. ... Tree mania seems to have come late to Greenlawn, however. Photographs taken sometime before 1914 show a bleak, bare sward.” — Veronique Greenwood, The Boston Globe, 18 Dec. 2023 Did you know? Sward sprouted from the Old English sweard or swearth, meaning “skin” or “rind.” It was originally used as a term for the skin of the body before being extended to another surface—that of the Earth. The word's specific grassy sense dates to the 16th century, and lives on today mostly in novels from centuries past, such as Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: “The sun was so near the ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long fingers pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted against the sloping sides of the vale.”

Daily QuoteImagine all the people living life in peace. (John Lennon)Poem of the DayAfterwardsThomas HardyBeauty of WordsThe Pond in WinterHenry David Thoreau

Daily QuoteThe world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only on big thing – desire. (Willa Cather)Poem of the DayThe Darkling ThrushThomas HardyBeauty of WordsMatildaRoald Dahl

If you're enjoying the Hardcore Literature Show, there are two ways you can show your support and ensure it continues: 1. Please leave a quick review on iTunes. 2. Join in the fun over at the Hardcore Literature Book Club: patreon.com/hardcoreliterature Thank you so much. Happy listening and reading! - Benjamin

Jake and Phil discuss Thomas Hardy's The Oxen, TS Eliot's Journey of the Magi, and The Pogues Fairytale of New York Thomas Hardy - The Oxen https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53215/the-oxen-56d232503c32d TS Eliot - Journey of the Magi https://poetryarchive.org/poem/journey-magi/ The Pogues - Fairytale of New York https://youtu.be/j9jbdgZidu8?si=AWYk4ya5bFPUyFtd

Daily QuoteThe mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled. (Plutarch)Poem of the DayThe Darkling ThrushThomas HardyBeauty of WordsEducatedTara Westover

Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give What can Thomas Hardy's tortured marriages teach us about love, obsession, and second chances? In this episode, biographer, novelist, and therapist Paula Byrne examines the intimate connections between life and literature, revealing how Hardy's relationships with women shaped his portrayals of love and tragedy. Byrne, celebrated for her bestselling biographies of Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, and Barbara Pym, brings her unique perspective to explore the profound ways personal relationships, cultural history, and creative ambition intersect to shape some of the most enduring works in literary history. Tyler and Paula discuss Virginia Woolf's surprising impressions of Hardy, why Wessex has lost a sense of its past, what Jude the Obscure reveals about Hardy's ideas about marriage, why so many Hardy tragedies come in doubles, the best least-read Hardy novels, why Mary Robinson was the most interesting woman of her day, how Georgian theater shaped Jane Austen's writing, British fastidiousness, Evelyn Waugh's hidden warmth, Paula's strange experience with poison pen letters, how American and British couples are different, the mental health crisis among teenagers, the most underrated Beatles songs, the weirdest thing about living in Arizona, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded November 14th, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Paula on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

Send us a textVersify record their first live podcast in the beautiful Sussex village of Alfriston, tackling the poetry of British literary titan, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928).Poems: The Voice, The Convergence of the Twain, At Castle Boterel.

#KöşedekiKitapçı'da bugün

Today's poem is a reluctant reckoning with the present absence created by grief. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Monday Night Live! From Pirate Adventures to Restoring Lost Treasures: Hidden History on Monday Night Live Description: In this week's episode of Monday Night Live, host Derek Arden welcomes longtime friend and former colleague, Godfrey Lancashire. With a fascinating background that spans banking, international hockey, and private investigation, Godfrey dives into a unique passion project he's undertaken: the discovery and restoration of a historic 16th-century artifact, once lost to time. Join Derek and Godfrey as they journey back to England's Elizabethan era, exploring swashbuckling adventures, historic landmarks, and a shipwrecked Spanish warship that played a surprising role in English history. Summary: Introducing Godfrey Lancashire: Banker, Investigator, and HistorianDerek Arden kicks off the episode by introducing his guest, Godfrey Lancashire, whose career is as varied as it is remarkable. After beginning in banking and playing an instrumental role as captain of the United Banks hockey team, Godfrey transitioned into private investigation, where he developed a knack for uncovering stories both hidden and forgotten. Today, he has become deeply involved in restoring a significant relic from Elizabethan England—one that speaks to his passion for history and adventure. A Dive into Elizabethan England: The Golden Age of ExplorationGodfrey takes viewers on an imaginative journey back to the Elizabethan era, a time of cultural and academic flourishing as well as daring maritime pursuits. Queen Elizabeth I, a strong proponent of education, saw the rise of scholars and explorers like William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir Walter Raleigh. It was an age where piracy was romanticized, and many individuals embarked on "noble" adventures on the high seas. Godfrey shares stories of exploration and commerce, where the spoils of piracy sometimes funded noble pursuits—one of which is the very school Thomas Hardy helped establish in Dorchester. Thomas Hardy's Legacy: A Pirate's Treasure TransformedGodfrey introduces Thomas Hardy, a “squire and pirate” from the small village of Frampton in Dorset, England. Hardy's adventures brought him wealth, which he used in 1569 to establish a school for boys, today known as Thomas Hardy School. This institution served as a pioneering educational center, and for centuries, it safeguarded a unique artifact: a beautifully carved wooden screen salvaged from the Spanish ship San Salvador, a ship that was once part of the Spanish Armada. Rediscovering a Lost Artifact: The Restoration of the San Salvador ScreenThis impressive wooden screen, standing at four meters high, was kept in Hardy's school building until it was transferred to new premises in 1927. Eventually, the screen was moved again but was sadly misplaced during a recent school theater renovation. Godfrey shares how the screen nearly ended up lost forever—discarded in a salvage yard—until an astute conservator recognized its historical value. Thanks to the conservator's sharp eye and dedication, the screen was carefully reassembled, piece by piece, with the support of the local community and generous donations. Preserving History with Passion: The Efforts Behind the Screen's RestorationGodfrey explains the meticulous restoration process, in which thousands of fragments were pieced back together like an intricate jigsaw puzzle. With expert knowledge, the team confirmed the screen's authenticity through materials testing, and the restored screen is now displayed in its former glory. The team has also uncovered fascinating details, including engravings and notes on the screen's reverse side, which offer glimpses into England's maritime past. Looking to the Future: Ensuring the Screen's Place in HistoryIn the final part of the interview, Godfrey speaks about the plans for the screen's future. Though originally housed in the school, discussions are underway to permanently display it at the Weymouth...

Populism is on the rise everywhere, and the long arc of history has bent away from freedom. Shikha Dalmia joins Amit Varma in episode 403 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss the derangements of our modern times -- and the threat that Donald Trump poses. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Shikha Dalmia on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reason, The Week and ISMA. 2. Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. 3. The UnPopulist. 4. The Seen/Unseen episode on immigration with Shikha Dalmia. 5. The Populist Playbook -- Episode 42 of Everything is Everything. 6. Why Both Modi and Trump are Textbook Populists (2017) -- Amit Varma. 7. Rhinoceros -- Eugène Ionesco. 8. Stopping the Rhinoceros Takeover -- Shikha Dalmia. 9. Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India — Akshaya Mukul. 10. The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism — Episode 139 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Akshaya Mukul). 11. Colours of the Cage: A Prison Memoir — Arun Ferreira. 12. The Reactionary Spirit -- Zack Beauchamp. 13. Narendra Modi takes a Great Leap Backwards — Amit Varma (on demonetisation). 14. Beware of the Useful Idiots — Amit Varma. 15. Stay Away From Luxury Beliefs -- Episode 46 of Everything is Everything. 16. The Good and Bad of Critical Race Theory -- Fabio Rojas. 17. The Color of Law -- Richard Rothstein. 18. Identity -- Francis Fukuyama. 19. Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter on Twitter/X. 20. The Fall of Minneapolis -- Alpha News. 21. What Really Happened to George Floyd? -- Coleman Hughes. 22. The retconning of George Floyd: Parts One, Two, an Update, Three -- Radley Balko. 23. The Murder Trial of OJ Simpson. 24. Glenn Loury & John McWhorter do a second take. 25. The Intellectual Foundations of Hindutva — Episode 115 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 26. A Typology of the New Right -- Shikha Dalmia. 27. The Flight 93 Election -- Michael Anton. 28. A Passage to India -- EM Forster. 29. Jane Austen on Amazon, Wikipedia and Britannica. 30. Thomas Hardy and W Somerset Maugham on Amazon. 31. Ayn Rand on Amazon, Wikipedia and Britannica. 32. Milton Friedman on Amazon, Wikipedia and Britannica. 33. Friedrich Hayek on Amazon, Wikipedia and Britannica. 34. Memories and Things — Episode 195 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aanchal Malhotra). 35. Remnants of a Separation — Aanchal Malhotra. 36. Arnold Kling and the Four Languages of Politics -- Episode 394 of The Seen and the Unseen. 37. The Life and Times of Vir Sanghvi — Episode 236 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. A Rude Life — Vir Sanghvi. 39. The Use of Knowledge in Society — Friedrich Hayek. 40. Four Papers That Changed the World -- Episode 41 of Everything is Everything. 41. Don't Mess With the Price System -- Episode 66 of Everything is Everything. 42. The Road to Serfdom -- Friedrich Hayek. 43. Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Govind Ranade, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar. 44. Caste, Capitalism and Chandra Bhan Prasad — Episode 296 of The Seen and the Unseen. 45. Yugank Goyal Is out of the Box — Episode 370 of The Seen and the Unseen. 46. What Is Populism? -- Jan-Werner Müller. 47. The State of Indian Politics — Episode 50 of The Seen and the Unseen (w JP Narayan). 48. The Gentle Wisdom of Pratap Bhanu Mehta — Episode 300 of The Seen and the Unseen. 49. The Liberalism of Fear -- Judith Shklar. 50. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Nooran Sisters and Hadiqa Kiani on Spotify. 51. Kamli -- Hadiqa Kiani. This episode is sponsored by CTQ Compounds. Check out The Daily Reader and FutureStack. Use the code UNSEEN for Rs 2500 off. Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new course called Life Lessons, which aims to be a launchpad towards learning essential life skills all of you need. For more details, and to sign up, click here. Amit and Ajay also bring out a weekly YouTube show, Everything is Everything. Have you watched it yet? You must! And have you read Amit's newsletter? Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Also check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Unpopulist' by Simahina.

The second part of this installment of Unearthed! gets into the listener-favorite subject of shipwrecks, plus animals, art, edibles and potables, and the catch-all potpourri category. Research: 19 News Investigative Team. “Exhumation of Cleveland Torso Killer's unidentified victims now underway.” https://www.cleveland19.com/2024/08/09/exhumation-cleveland-torso-killers-unidentified-victims-now-underway/ Abdallah, Hanna. “Hydraulic lift technology may have helped build Egypt's iconic Pyramid of Djoser.” EurekAlert. 8/5/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1051645 Addley, Esther. “Dorset ‘Stonehenge' under Thomas Hardy's home given protected status.” The Guardian. 9/24/2024. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/sep/24/dorset-stonehenge-discovered-under-thomas-hardy-home-dorchester Adhi Agus Oktaviana et al, Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07541-7 Agence France-Presse. “‘Virtually intact' wreck off Scotland believed to be Royal Navy warship torpedoed in first world war.” The Guardian. 8/17/2024. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/17/virtually-intact-wreck-off-scotland-believed-to-be-royal-navy-warship-torpedoed-in-wwi Anderson, Sonja. “A Statue of a 12-Year-Old Hiroshima Victim Has Been Stolen.” Smithsonian. 7/16/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/statue-of-a-child-killed-by-the-bombing-of-hiroshima-has-been-stolen-180984710/ Anderson, Sonja. “An 11-Year-Old Boy Rescued a Mysterious Artwork From the Dump. It Turned Out to Be a 500-Year-Old Renaissance Print.” Smithsonian. 9/17/2024 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-11-year-old-boy-rescued-a-mysterious-artwork-from-the-dump-it-turned-out-to-be-a-500-year-old-renaissance-print-180985074/ Anderson, Sonja. “Archaeologists Uncover Ancient Warship's Bronze Battering Ram, Sunk During an Epic Battle Between Rome and Carthage.” Smithsonian. 8/28/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-uncover-ancient-warships-bronze-battering-ram-sunk-during-epic-battle-between-rome-and-carthage-180984983/ ANderson, Sonja. “Someone Anonymously Mailed Two Bronze Age Axes to a Museum in Ireland.” Smithsonian. 7/15/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/two-anonymously-sent-bronze-age-axes-arrive-at-an-irish-museum-in-a-pancake-box-180984704/ Anderson, Sonja. “These Signed Salvador Dalí Prints Were Forgotten in a Garage for Half a Century.” Smithsonian. 8/29/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-signed-salvador-dali-prints-were-forgotten-in-a-garage-for-half-a-century-180984994/ Anderson, Sonja. “What Is the Secret Ingredient Behind Rembrandt's Golden Glow?.” Smithsonian. 8/1/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-secret-ingredient-behind-rembrandt-golden-glow-180984816/ “Jamestown DNA helps solve a 400-year-old mystery and unexpectedly reveals a family secret.” Phys.org. 8/13/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-jamestown-dna-year-mystery-unexpectedly.html#google_vignette Ariane E. Thomas et al, The Dogs of Tsenacomoco: Ancient DNA Reveals the Presence of Local Dogs at Jamestown Colony in the Early Seventeenth Century, American Antiquity (2024). DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2024.25 Artnet “Previously Unknown Mozart Composition Turns Up in a German Library.” 9/20/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/unheard-mozart-composition-manuscript-found-leipzig-2540432 ArtNet News. “Conservation of a Rubens Masterpiece Turns Up Hidden Alterations.” Artnet. 6/20/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rubens-judgement-of-paris-conservation-national-gallery-2501839 Artnet News. “Gardner Museum Is Renovating the Room That Witnessed a Notorious Heist.” 9/18/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/gardner-museum-renovate-dutch-room-2538856 Benzine, Vittoria. “Turkish Archaeologists Uncover Millefiori Glass Panels for the First Time.” Artnet. 9/12/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/millefiori-glass-panels-turkey-2535407 Binswanger, Julia. “A Thief Replaced This Iconic Churchill Portrait With a Fake. Two Years Later, the Original Has Been Recovered.” Smithsonian. 9/16/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-thief-replaced-this-iconic-churchill-portrait-with-a-fake-two-years-later-the-original-has-been-recovered-180985075/ Binswanger, Julia. “A Viking-Era Vessel Found in Scotland a Decade Ago Turns Out to Be From Asia.” Smithsonian. 9/4/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-viking-era-vessel-found-in-scotland-a-decade-ago-turns-out-to-be-from-asia-180985021/ Binswanger, Julia. “Hidden Self-Portrait by Norman Cornish Discovered Behind Another Painting .” Smithsonian. 7/24/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-hidden-norman-cornish-self-portrait-is-discovered-on-the-back-of-a-painting-180984741/ Binswanger, Julia. “Students Stumble Upon a Message in a Bottle Written by a French Archaeologist 200 Years Ago.” Smithsonian. 9/25/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/students-discover-french-archaeologists-200-year-old-message-in-a-bottle-just-in-time-on-an-eroding-coast-180985129/ Brinkhof, Tim. “Amateur Sleuths Are Convinced They Have Found Copernicus's Famous Compass.” Artnet. 8/7/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/copernicus-compass-poland-2521967 Brinkhof, Tim. “The U.K. Bars Export of Alan Turing's Wartime Notebooks.” Artnet. 8/19/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/turing-notebooks-uk-export-bar-2525678 Brown, DeNeen L. “Navy exonerates Black sailors charged in Port Chicago disaster 80 years ago.” Washington Post. 7/17/2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/07/17/port-chicago-disaster-navy-exonerates-black-sailors/ Bryant, Chris. “Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing's ‘Delilah' project papers at risk of leaving the UK.” Gov.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/second-world-war-codebreaker-alan-turings-delilah-project-papers-at-risk-of-leaving-the-uk Byram, Scott et al. “Clovis points and foreshafts under braced weapon compression: Modeling Pleistocene megafauna encounters with a lithic pike.” PLOS One. 8/21/2024. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307996#sec013 Cascone, Sarah. “Long-Lost Artemisia Gentileschi Masterpiece Goes on View After Centuries of Obscurity.” Artnet. 9/9/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/kimbell-art-museum-artemisia-gentileschi-2533554 Cascone, Sarah. “Mythical French ‘Excalibur' Sword Goes Missing.” Artnet. 7/10/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/durandal-sword-in-the-stone-gone-missing-2510560 Casey, Michael. “Discovery of musket balls brings alive one of the first battles in the American Revolution.” Associated Press. 7/17/2024. https://apnews.com/article/revolutionary-war-musket-balls-national-park-service-33dc4a91c00626ad0d27696458f09900 David, B., Mullett, R., Wright, N. et al. Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age. Nat Hum Behav 8, 1481–1492 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01912-w Davis, Lisa Fagan. “Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript.” Manuscript Road Trip. 9/8/2024. https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispectral-imaging-and-the-voynich-manuscript/ Deliso, Meredith. “Witness gets emotional recounting doomed Titan dive during Coast Guard hearing on submersible implosion.” ABC News. 9/19/2024. https://abcnews.go.com/US/oceangate-titan-coast-guard-hearing-mission-specialist/story?id=113843817 Feldman, Ella. “Painting Attributed to Rembrandt Found Tucked Away Inside an Attic in Maine.” 9/6/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/painting-attributed-to-rembrandt-found-tucked-away-inside-an-attic-in-maine-180985036/ Fox, Jeremy C. “A French ship that sank after a collision in fog in 1856 off the Mass. coast has been found.” Boston Globe. 9/7/2024.. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/07/metro/ship-sank-1856-found-massachusetts/?event=event12 com News Staff. “Bullet found with remains during excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery, marks 3rd confirmed gunshot victim.” 8/2/2024. https://www.fox23.com/news/bullet-found-with-remains-during-excavation-at-oaklawn-cemetery-marks-3rd-confirmed-gunshot-victim/article_bf2eb2c8-5122-11ef-b13a-7f883d394aae.html Giordano, Gaia et al. “Forensic toxicology backdates the use of coca plant (Erythroxylum spp.) in Europe to the early 1600s.” Journal of Archaeological Science. Volume 170, 2024, 106040, ISSN 0305-4403, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2024.106040. Gouevia, Flavia. “Donegal farmer uncovers 22kg slab of ancient bog butter.” The Irish News. 9/13/2024. https://www.irishnews.com/news/ireland/donegal-farmer-uncovers-22kg-slab-of-ancient-bog-butter-YUJKZVXG6NH43G3SBZ3DAUDCHI/ Hawkins, Grant. “Texas A&M's Quest To Save An Alamo Cannon.” Texas A&M Today. 7/31/2024. https://today.tamu.edu/2024/07/31/texas-ams-quest-to-save-an-alamo-cannon/ Howe, Craig and Lukas Rieppel. “Why museums should repatriate fossils.” Nature. 6/18/2024. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02027-y Ian G. Barber et al, American sweet potato and Asia-Pacific crop experimentation during early colonisation of temperate-climate Aotearoa/New Zealand, Antiquity (2024). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.143 Imai, Kunihiko. “Researchers identify mystery artifact from ancient capital.” The Ashai Shimbun. 9/5/2024. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15415562 Kael, Sascha. “The plague may have caused the downfall of the Stone Age farmers.” EurekAlert. 7/10/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1050694 Kokkinidis, Tasos. “Second Ancient Shipwreck Discovered at Antikythera, Greece.” Greek Reporter. 7/1/2024. https://greekreporter.com/2024/07/01/second-ancient-shipwreck-discovered-antikythera-greece/ Kovac, Adam. “17th-Century Mummified Brains Test Positive for Cocaine.” 8/27/2024. https://gizmodo.com/17th-century-mummified-brains-test-positive-for-cocaine-2000491460 Kuta, Sarah. “Divers Can Now Explore Historic Shipwrecks in Lake Michigan More Easily.” Smithsonian. 8/23/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/divers-can-now-explore-historic-shipwrecks-in-lake-michigan-more-easily-180984959/ Kuta, Sarah. “Divers Find Crates of Unopened Champagne in 19th-Century Shipwreck.” Smithsonian. 7/31/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/divers-find-shipwreck-loaded-with-champagne-near-sweden-180984784/ Kuta, Sarah. “DNA Reveals Identity of Officer on the Lost Franklin Expedition—and His Remains Show Signs of Cannibalism.” Smithsonian. 9/26/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-reveals-identity-of-officer-on-the-lost-franklin-expedition-and-his-remains-show-signs-of-cannibalism-180985154/ Kuta, Sarah. “Shipwreck Found in Lake Michigan 130 Years After Sinking With Captain's ‘Intelligent and Faithful' Dog Onboard.” Smithsonian. 7/25/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/shipwreck-found-in-lake-michigan-130-years-after-sinking-with-captains-intelligent-and-faithful-dog-onboard-180984766/ Larson, Christina. “Stonehenge's 'altar stone' originally came from Scotland and not Wales, new research shows.” Phys.org. 8/17/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-stonehenge-altar-stone-scotland-wales.html Lawson-Tancred, Jo. “A Marble God Is Found in an Ancient Roman Sewer.” Artnet. 7/9/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/marble-hermes-ancient-roman-sewer-2509628 Lawson-Tancred, Jo. “Legal Battle Intensifies Over Tunnel That May ‘Irreversibly Harm' Stonehenge.” Artnet. 7/24/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/legal-battle-stonehenge-tunnel-2515809 Martin B. Sweatman, Representations of calendars and time at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe support an astronomical interpretation of their symbolism, Time and Mind (2024). DOI: 10.1080/1751696X.2024.2373876 Merrington, Andrew. “Archaeological scanners offer 2,000-year window into the world of Roman medicine.” Phys.org. 7/16/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-archaeological-scanners-year-window-world.html#google_vignette Metcalfe, Tom. “3 shipwrecks from 'forgotten battle' of World War II discovered off remote Alaskan island.” LiveScience. 8/18/2024. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/3-shipwrecks-from-forgotten-battle-of-world-war-ii-discovered-off-remote-alaskan-island Moreno-Mayar, J.V., Sousa da Mota, B., Higham, T. et al. Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas. Nature 633, 389–397 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4 National Museum of Ireland. “Appeal for information about Bronze Age axeheads found in Westmeath.” https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/News/Appeal-for-information-about-Bronze-Age-Axeheads-F Nichols, Kaila. “A history buff bought a piece of a tent from Goodwill for $1,700. It really did belong to George Washington.” CNN. 7/21/2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/21/us/george-washington-tent-fragment-goodwill/index.html Ogliore, Talia. “Archaeologists report earliest evidence for plant farming in east Africa.” EurekAlert. 7/9/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1050678 Orie, Amarachi. “New Titanic photos show major decay to legendary wreck.” CNN. 9/2/2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/02/science/titanic-photos-show-major-decay-intl-scli/index.html Owsley DW, Bruwelheide KS, Harney É, et al. Historical and archaeogenomic identification of high-status Englishmen at Jamestown, Virginia. Antiquity. 2024;98(400):1040-1054. doi:10.15184/aqy.2024.75 org . “New finds in treasure-laden shipwreck off Colombia.” 8/9/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-treasure-laden-shipwreck-colombia.html#google_vignette Pirchner, Deborah. “Pompeii skeleton discovery shows another natural disaster may have made Vesuvius eruption even more deadly.” EurekAlert. 7/18/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1050523 Qiblawi, Adnan. “A Metal Tube in a Polish Museum Turns Out to Be a 150-Year-Old Time Capsule.” Artnet. 7/5/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/polish-museum-time-capsule-2508303 Cooley et al, Rainforest response to glacial terminations before and after human arrival in Lutruwita (Tasmania), Quaternary Science Reviews (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.108572 Schrader, Adam. “Historian Identifies Lost Henry VIII Portrait in Background of Social Media Photo.” Artnet. 7/26/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/historian-identifies-henry-viii-portrait-social-media-photo-2517144 Seaton, Jamie. “Did Prehistoric Children Make Figurines Out of Clay?” Smithsonian. 7/2/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/did-prehistoric-children-make-figurines-out-of-clay-180984534/ Solly, Melian. “Archaeologists Say They've Solved the Mystery of a Lead Coffin Discovered Beneath Notre-Dame.” Smithsonian. 9/18/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-say-theyve-solved-the-mystery-of-a-lead-coffin-discovered-beneath-notre-dame-180985103/ Stockholm University. "Study reveals isolation, endogamy and pathogens in early medieval Spanish community." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 August 2024. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240828154921.htm. Strickland, Ashley. “Archaeologists unearth tiny 3,500-year-old clay tablet following an earthquake.” CNN. 8/16/2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/16/science/ancient-cuneiform-tablet-turkey-earthquake/index.html Svennevig, Birgitte. “Chemical analyses find hidden elements from renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe's alchemy laboratory.” EurekAlert. 7/24/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1052085 The History Blog. “Animal figurine found in early Viking settlement in Iceland.” 8/27/2024. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/70960 The History Blog. “Bronze Age axe found off Norwegian coast.” 7/14/2024. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/70697 The History Blog. “Tomb of military leader in Augustus' wars in Spain found in Pompeii.” 7/17/2024. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/70715 The History Blog. “Wolf teeth found in ancient Venetii cremation burial.” 9/25/2024. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/71171 Thomas AE, Hill ME, Stricker L, et al. The Dogs of Tsenacomoco: Ancient DNA Reveals the Presence of Local Dogs at Jamestown Colony in the Early Seventeenth Century. American Antiquity. 2024;89(3):341-359. doi:10.1017/aaq.2024.25 Thorsberg, Christian. “Sticks Discovered in Australian Cave Shed New Light on an Aboriginal Ritual Passed Down for 12,000 Years.” Smithsonian. 7/9/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sticks-discovered-in-australian-cave-shed-new-light-on-an-aboriginal-ritual-passed-down-for-12000-years-180984642/ Whiddington, Richard. “Van Gogh's ‘Irises' Appear Blue Today, But Were Once More Violet, New Research Finds.” Artnet. 7/24/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/van-gogh-irises-getty-2515593 Whiddington, Richard. “Was Venice's Famed Winged Lion Statue Actually Made in China?.” Artnet. 9/17/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/bronze-venice-lion-from-china-2537486 Wizevich, Eli. “Newly Deciphered, 4,000-Year-Old Cuneiform Tablets Used Lunar Eclipses to Predict Major Events.” Smithsonian. 8/9/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-deciphered-4000-year-old-cuneiform-tablets-used-lunar-eclipses-to-predict-major-events-180984871/ Woolston, Chris. “New study challenges drought theory for Cahokia exodus.” Phys.org. 7/3/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-drought-theory-cahokia-exodus.html Potter, Lisa. “Genetics reveal ancient trade routes and path to domestication of the Four Corners potato Genetic analysis shows that ancient.” EurekAlert. 7/24/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1052517 Cell Press. "World's oldest cheese reveals origins of kefir." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 September 2024. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/09/240925122859.htm See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Part one of this edition of Unearthed! is mostly updates - about two-thirds of the episode. The rest is weapons, medicine, and books and letters.  Research: 19 News Investigative Team. “Exhumation of Cleveland Torso Killer's unidentified victims now underway.” https://www.cleveland19.com/2024/08/09/exhumation-cleveland-torso-killers-unidentified-victims-now-underway/ Abdallah, Hanna. “Hydraulic lift technology may have helped build Egypt's iconic Pyramid of Djoser.” EurekAlert. 8/5/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1051645 Addley, Esther. “Dorset ‘Stonehenge' under Thomas Hardy's home given protected status.” The Guardian. 9/24/2024. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/sep/24/dorset-stonehenge-discovered-under-thomas-hardy-home-dorchester Adhi Agus Oktaviana et al, Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago, Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07541-7 Agence France-Presse. “‘Virtually intact' wreck off Scotland believed to be Royal Navy warship torpedoed in first world war.” The Guardian. 8/17/2024. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/17/virtually-intact-wreck-off-scotland-believed-to-be-royal-navy-warship-torpedoed-in-wwi Anderson, Sonja. “A Statue of a 12-Year-Old Hiroshima Victim Has Been Stolen.” Smithsonian. 7/16/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/statue-of-a-child-killed-by-the-bombing-of-hiroshima-has-been-stolen-180984710/ Anderson, Sonja. “An 11-Year-Old Boy Rescued a Mysterious Artwork From the Dump. It Turned Out to Be a 500-Year-Old Renaissance Print.” Smithsonian. 9/17/2024 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-11-year-old-boy-rescued-a-mysterious-artwork-from-the-dump-it-turned-out-to-be-a-500-year-old-renaissance-print-180985074/ Anderson, Sonja. “Archaeologists Uncover Ancient Warship's Bronze Battering Ram, Sunk During an Epic Battle Between Rome and Carthage.” Smithsonian. 8/28/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-uncover-ancient-warships-bronze-battering-ram-sunk-during-epic-battle-between-rome-and-carthage-180984983/ ANderson, Sonja. “Someone Anonymously Mailed Two Bronze Age Axes to a Museum in Ireland.” Smithsonian. 7/15/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/two-anonymously-sent-bronze-age-axes-arrive-at-an-irish-museum-in-a-pancake-box-180984704/ Anderson, Sonja. “These Signed Salvador Dalí Prints Were Forgotten in a Garage for Half a Century.” Smithsonian. 8/29/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-signed-salvador-dali-prints-were-forgotten-in-a-garage-for-half-a-century-180984994/ Anderson, Sonja. “What Is the Secret Ingredient Behind Rembrandt's Golden Glow?.” Smithsonian. 8/1/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-secret-ingredient-behind-rembrandt-golden-glow-180984816/ “Jamestown DNA helps solve a 400-year-old mystery and unexpectedly reveals a family secret.” Phys.org. 8/13/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-jamestown-dna-year-mystery-unexpectedly.html#google_vignette Ariane E. Thomas et al, The Dogs of Tsenacomoco: Ancient DNA Reveals the Presence of Local Dogs at Jamestown Colony in the Early Seventeenth Century, American Antiquity (2024). DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2024.25 Artnet “Previously Unknown Mozart Composition Turns Up in a German Library.” 9/20/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/unheard-mozart-composition-manuscript-found-leipzig-2540432 ArtNet News. “Conservation of a Rubens Masterpiece Turns Up Hidden Alterations.” Artnet. 6/20/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rubens-judgement-of-paris-conservation-national-gallery-2501839 Artnet News. “Gardner Museum Is Renovating the Room That Witnessed a Notorious Heist.” 9/18/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/gardner-museum-renovate-dutch-room-2538856 Benzine, Vittoria. “Turkish Archaeologists Uncover Millefiori Glass Panels for the First Time.” Artnet. 9/12/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/millefiori-glass-panels-turkey-2535407 Binswanger, Julia. “A Thief Replaced This Iconic Churchill Portrait With a Fake. Two Years Later, the Original Has Been Recovered.” Smithsonian. 9/16/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-thief-replaced-this-iconic-churchill-portrait-with-a-fake-two-years-later-the-original-has-been-recovered-180985075/ Binswanger, Julia. “A Viking-Era Vessel Found in Scotland a Decade Ago Turns Out to Be From Asia.” Smithsonian. 9/4/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-viking-era-vessel-found-in-scotland-a-decade-ago-turns-out-to-be-from-asia-180985021/ Binswanger, Julia. “Hidden Self-Portrait by Norman Cornish Discovered Behind Another Painting .” Smithsonian. 7/24/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-hidden-norman-cornish-self-portrait-is-discovered-on-the-back-of-a-painting-180984741/ Binswanger, Julia. “Students Stumble Upon a Message in a Bottle Written by a French Archaeologist 200 Years Ago.” Smithsonian. 9/25/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/students-discover-french-archaeologists-200-year-old-message-in-a-bottle-just-in-time-on-an-eroding-coast-180985129/ Brinkhof, Tim. “Amateur Sleuths Are Convinced They Have Found Copernicus's Famous Compass.” Artnet. 8/7/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/copernicus-compass-poland-2521967 Brinkhof, Tim. “The U.K. Bars Export of Alan Turing's Wartime Notebooks.” Artnet. 8/19/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/turing-notebooks-uk-export-bar-2525678 Brown, DeNeen L. “Navy exonerates Black sailors charged in Port Chicago disaster 80 years ago.” Washington Post. 7/17/2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/07/17/port-chicago-disaster-navy-exonerates-black-sailors/ Bryant, Chris. “Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing's ‘Delilah' project papers at risk of leaving the UK.” Gov.UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/second-world-war-codebreaker-alan-turings-delilah-project-papers-at-risk-of-leaving-the-uk Byram, Scott et al. “Clovis points and foreshafts under braced weapon compression: Modeling Pleistocene megafauna encounters with a lithic pike.” PLOS One. 8/21/2024. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307996#sec013 Cascone, Sarah. “Long-Lost Artemisia Gentileschi Masterpiece Goes on View After Centuries of Obscurity.” Artnet. 9/9/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/kimbell-art-museum-artemisia-gentileschi-2533554 Cascone, Sarah. “Mythical French ‘Excalibur' Sword Goes Missing.” Artnet. 7/10/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/durandal-sword-in-the-stone-gone-missing-2510560 Casey, Michael. “Discovery of musket balls brings alive one of the first battles in the American Revolution.” Associated Press. 7/17/2024. https://apnews.com/article/revolutionary-war-musket-balls-national-park-service-33dc4a91c00626ad0d27696458f09900 David, B., Mullett, R., Wright, N. et al. Archaeological evidence of an ethnographically documented Australian Aboriginal ritual dated to the last ice age. Nat Hum Behav 8, 1481–1492 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01912-w Davis, Lisa Fagan. “Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript.” Manuscript Road Trip. 9/8/2024. https://manuscriptroadtrip.wordpress.com/2024/09/08/multispectral-imaging-and-the-voynich-manuscript/ Deliso, Meredith. “Witness gets emotional recounting doomed Titan dive during Coast Guard hearing on submersible implosion.” ABC News. 9/19/2024. https://abcnews.go.com/US/oceangate-titan-coast-guard-hearing-mission-specialist/story?id=113843817 Feldman, Ella. “Painting Attributed to Rembrandt Found Tucked Away Inside an Attic in Maine.” 9/6/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/painting-attributed-to-rembrandt-found-tucked-away-inside-an-attic-in-maine-180985036/ Fox, Jeremy C. “A French ship that sank after a collision in fog in 1856 off the Mass. coast has been found.” Boston Globe. 9/7/2024.. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/07/metro/ship-sank-1856-found-massachusetts/?event=event12 com News Staff. “Bullet found with remains during excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery, marks 3rd confirmed gunshot victim.” 8/2/2024. https://www.fox23.com/news/bullet-found-with-remains-during-excavation-at-oaklawn-cemetery-marks-3rd-confirmed-gunshot-victim/article_bf2eb2c8-5122-11ef-b13a-7f883d394aae.html Giordano, Gaia et al. “Forensic toxicology backdates the use of coca plant (Erythroxylum spp.) in Europe to the early 1600s.” Journal of Archaeological Science. Volume 170, 2024, 106040, ISSN 0305-4403, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2024.106040. Gouevia, Flavia. “Donegal farmer uncovers 22kg slab of ancient bog butter.” The Irish News. 9/13/2024. https://www.irishnews.com/news/ireland/donegal-farmer-uncovers-22kg-slab-of-ancient-bog-butter-YUJKZVXG6NH43G3SBZ3DAUDCHI/ Hawkins, Grant. “Texas A&M's Quest To Save An Alamo Cannon.” Texas A&M Today. 7/31/2024. https://today.tamu.edu/2024/07/31/texas-ams-quest-to-save-an-alamo-cannon/ Howe, Craig and Lukas Rieppel. “Why museums should repatriate fossils.” Nature. 6/18/2024. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02027-y Ian G. Barber et al, American sweet potato and Asia-Pacific crop experimentation during early colonisation of temperate-climate Aotearoa/New Zealand, Antiquity (2024). DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2024.143 Imai, Kunihiko. “Researchers identify mystery artifact from ancient capital.” The Ashai Shimbun. 9/5/2024. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15415562 Kael, Sascha. “The plague may have caused the downfall of the Stone Age farmers.” EurekAlert. 7/10/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1050694 Kokkinidis, Tasos. “Second Ancient Shipwreck Discovered at Antikythera, Greece.” Greek Reporter. 7/1/2024. https://greekreporter.com/2024/07/01/second-ancient-shipwreck-discovered-antikythera-greece/ Kovac, Adam. “17th-Century Mummified Brains Test Positive for Cocaine.” 8/27/2024. https://gizmodo.com/17th-century-mummified-brains-test-positive-for-cocaine-2000491460 Kuta, Sarah. “Divers Can Now Explore Historic Shipwrecks in Lake Michigan More Easily.” Smithsonian. 8/23/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/divers-can-now-explore-historic-shipwrecks-in-lake-michigan-more-easily-180984959/ Kuta, Sarah. “Divers Find Crates of Unopened Champagne in 19th-Century Shipwreck.” Smithsonian. 7/31/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/divers-find-shipwreck-loaded-with-champagne-near-sweden-180984784/ Kuta, Sarah. “DNA Reveals Identity of Officer on the Lost Franklin Expedition—and His Remains Show Signs of Cannibalism.” Smithsonian. 9/26/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-reveals-identity-of-officer-on-the-lost-franklin-expedition-and-his-remains-show-signs-of-cannibalism-180985154/ Kuta, Sarah. “Shipwreck Found in Lake Michigan 130 Years After Sinking With Captain's ‘Intelligent and Faithful' Dog Onboard.” Smithsonian. 7/25/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/shipwreck-found-in-lake-michigan-130-years-after-sinking-with-captains-intelligent-and-faithful-dog-onboard-180984766/ Larson, Christina. “Stonehenge's 'altar stone' originally came from Scotland and not Wales, new research shows.” Phys.org. 8/17/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-stonehenge-altar-stone-scotland-wales.html Lawson-Tancred, Jo. “A Marble God Is Found in an Ancient Roman Sewer.” Artnet. 7/9/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/marble-hermes-ancient-roman-sewer-2509628 Lawson-Tancred, Jo. “Legal Battle Intensifies Over Tunnel That May ‘Irreversibly Harm' Stonehenge.” Artnet. 7/24/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/legal-battle-stonehenge-tunnel-2515809 Martin B. Sweatman, Representations of calendars and time at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe support an astronomical interpretation of their symbolism, Time and Mind (2024). DOI: 10.1080/1751696X.2024.2373876 Merrington, Andrew. “Archaeological scanners offer 2,000-year window into the world of Roman medicine.” Phys.org. 7/16/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-archaeological-scanners-year-window-world.html#google_vignette Metcalfe, Tom. “3 shipwrecks from 'forgotten battle' of World War II discovered off remote Alaskan island.” LiveScience. 8/18/2024. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/3-shipwrecks-from-forgotten-battle-of-world-war-ii-discovered-off-remote-alaskan-island Moreno-Mayar, J.V., Sousa da Mota, B., Higham, T. et al. Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas. Nature 633, 389–397 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07881-4 National Museum of Ireland. “Appeal for information about Bronze Age axeheads found in Westmeath.” https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/News/Appeal-for-information-about-Bronze-Age-Axeheads-F Nichols, Kaila. “A history buff bought a piece of a tent from Goodwill for $1,700. It really did belong to George Washington.” CNN. 7/21/2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/21/us/george-washington-tent-fragment-goodwill/index.html Ogliore, Talia. “Archaeologists report earliest evidence for plant farming in east Africa.” EurekAlert. 7/9/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1050678 Orie, Amarachi. “New Titanic photos show major decay to legendary wreck.” CNN. 9/2/2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/02/science/titanic-photos-show-major-decay-intl-scli/index.html Owsley DW, Bruwelheide KS, Harney É, et al. Historical and archaeogenomic identification of high-status Englishmen at Jamestown, Virginia. Antiquity. 2024;98(400):1040-1054. doi:10.15184/aqy.2024.75 org . “New finds in treasure-laden shipwreck off Colombia.” 8/9/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-treasure-laden-shipwreck-colombia.html#google_vignette Pirchner, Deborah. “Pompeii skeleton discovery shows another natural disaster may have made Vesuvius eruption even more deadly.” EurekAlert. 7/18/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1050523 Qiblawi, Adnan. “A Metal Tube in a Polish Museum Turns Out to Be a 150-Year-Old Time Capsule.” Artnet. 7/5/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/polish-museum-time-capsule-2508303 Cooley et al, Rainforest response to glacial terminations before and after human arrival in Lutruwita (Tasmania), Quaternary Science Reviews (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.108572 Schrader, Adam. “Historian Identifies Lost Henry VIII Portrait in Background of Social Media Photo.” Artnet. 7/26/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/historian-identifies-henry-viii-portrait-social-media-photo-2517144 Seaton, Jamie. “Did Prehistoric Children Make Figurines Out of Clay?” Smithsonian. 7/2/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/did-prehistoric-children-make-figurines-out-of-clay-180984534/ Solly, Melian. “Archaeologists Say They've Solved the Mystery of a Lead Coffin Discovered Beneath Notre-Dame.” Smithsonian. 9/18/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-say-theyve-solved-the-mystery-of-a-lead-coffin-discovered-beneath-notre-dame-180985103/ Stockholm University. "Study reveals isolation, endogamy and pathogens in early medieval Spanish community." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 August 2024. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/08/240828154921.htm. Strickland, Ashley. “Archaeologists unearth tiny 3,500-year-old clay tablet following an earthquake.” CNN. 8/16/2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/16/science/ancient-cuneiform-tablet-turkey-earthquake/index.html Svennevig, Birgitte. “Chemical analyses find hidden elements from renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe's alchemy laboratory.” EurekAlert. 7/24/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1052085 The History Blog. “Animal figurine found in early Viking settlement in Iceland.” 8/27/2024. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/70960 The History Blog. “Bronze Age axe found off Norwegian coast.” 7/14/2024. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/70697 The History Blog. “Tomb of military leader in Augustus' wars in Spain found in Pompeii.” 7/17/2024. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/70715 The History Blog. “Wolf teeth found in ancient Venetii cremation burial.” 9/25/2024. http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/71171 Thomas AE, Hill ME, Stricker L, et al. The Dogs of Tsenacomoco: Ancient DNA Reveals the Presence of Local Dogs at Jamestown Colony in the Early Seventeenth Century. American Antiquity. 2024;89(3):341-359. doi:10.1017/aaq.2024.25 Thorsberg, Christian. “Sticks Discovered in Australian Cave Shed New Light on an Aboriginal Ritual Passed Down for 12,000 Years.” Smithsonian. 7/9/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sticks-discovered-in-australian-cave-shed-new-light-on-an-aboriginal-ritual-passed-down-for-12000-years-180984642/ Whiddington, Richard. “Van Gogh's ‘Irises' Appear Blue Today, But Were Once More Violet, New Research Finds.” Artnet. 7/24/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/van-gogh-irises-getty-2515593 Whiddington, Richard. “Was Venice's Famed Winged Lion Statue Actually Made in China?.” Artnet. 9/17/2024. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/bronze-venice-lion-from-china-2537486 Wizevich, Eli. “Newly Deciphered, 4,000-Year-Old Cuneiform Tablets Used Lunar Eclipses to Predict Major Events.” Smithsonian. 8/9/2024. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-deciphered-4000-year-old-cuneiform-tablets-used-lunar-eclipses-to-predict-major-events-180984871/ Woolston, Chris. “New study challenges drought theory for Cahokia exodus.” Phys.org. 7/3/2024. https://phys.org/news/2024-07-drought-theory-cahokia-exodus.html Potter, Lisa. “Genetics reveal ancient trade routes and path to domestication of the Four Corners potato Genetic analysis shows that ancient.” EurekAlert. 7/24/2024. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1052517 Cell Press. "World's oldest cheese reveals origins of kefir." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 25 September 2024. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/09/240925122859.htm See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Thomas Hardy (1840 -1928) and his commitment to poetry, which he prized far above his novels. In the 1890s, once he had earned enough from his fiction, Hardy stopped writing novels altogether and returned to the poetry he had largely put aside since his twenties. He hoped that he might be ranked one day alongside Shelley and Byron, worthy of inclusion in a collection such as Palgrave's Golden Treasury which had inspired him. Hardy kept writing poems for the rest of his life, in different styles and metres, and he explored genres from nature, to war, to epic. Among his best known are what he called his Poems of 1912 to 13, responding to his grief at the death of his first wife, Emma (1840 -1912), who he credited as the one who had made it possible for him to leave his work as an architect's clerk and to write the novels that made him famous. With Mark Ford Poet, and Professor of English and American Literature, University College London Jane Thomas Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hull and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds Tim Armstrong Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London Producer: Simon TillotsonIn Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

The novelist, biographer and critic Dame Margaret Drabble published her debut novel in 1963. She quickly went on to become a bestselling and critically acclaimed chronicler of the lives of modern women in a series of contemporary realist stories, often based on her own life and experiences. Her 19 novels include The Millstone, The Waterfall, The Ice Age and The Radiant Way, and her non-fiction includes books on Thomas Hardy, William Wordsworth and Arnold Bennett. She has also edited the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Dame Margaret tells John Wilson about her upbringing in Sheffield and how winning a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, shaped her literary tastes. It was there that she heard the lectures of the academic F R Leavis and first discovered contemporary novels by Angus Wilson and Saul Bellow. She became an actress and worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company before her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, the story of the relationship between two sisters, was published in 1963. She recalls how her literary career began in the wings of the RSC and talks candidly about her often strained relationship with her older sister, the late novelist A S Byatt. Dame Margaret also discusses the influence of her friend, the Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing.Producer: Edwina Pitman

James Arlington Wright was born on December 13, 1927, in Martins Ferry, Ohio. His father worked for fifty years at a glass factory, and his mother left school at fourteen to work in a laundry; neither attended school beyond the eighth grade. While in high school in 1943, Wright suffered a nervous breakdown and missed a year of school. When he graduated in 1946, a year late, he joined the U.S. Army and was stationed in Japan during the American occupation. He then attended Kenyon College on the G.I. Bill, and studied under John Crowe Ransom. While there, he also befriended future fellow poet Robert Mezey. Wright graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1952. Wright traveled to Austria, where, on a Fulbright Fellowship, he studied the works of Theodor Storm and Georg Trakl at the University of Vienna. He returned to the U.S. and earned master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Washington, studying with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. He went on to teach at The University of Minnesota, Macalester College, and New York City's Hunter College.The poverty and human suffering Wright witnessed as a child profoundly influenced his writing and he used his poetry as a mode to discuss his political and social concerns. He modeled his work after that of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, whose engagement with profound human issues and emotions he admired. The subjects of Wright's earlier books, The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), include men and women who have lost love or have been marginalized from society and they invite the reader to step in and experience the pain of their isolation. Wright possessed the ability to reinvent his writing style at will, moving easily from stage to stage. His earlier work adheres to conventional systems of meter and stanza, while his later work exhibits more open, looser forms, as with The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963).Wright was elected a fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1971, and, the following year, his Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press) received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.Wright died in New York City on March 25, 1980. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

This week's Local Legends episode is a very special conversation in which Martin gathers round the Three Ravens campfire with Tim Laycock, an inspirational, multi-talented person and a true champion for the county of Dorset.Author of books including Dorset Folk Tales, writing is just the tip of the iceberg with Tim, who came to the attentions of many in the British folk community through his work as part of Magic Lantern with the one and only Taffy Thomas. Music is absolutely key to Tim's life. He is a tremendous singer and multi-instrumentalist, and, like a crafty folk song magpie, he has been finding stories and songs, and story-songs, and bringing them out and into the light across his many years of performance. With a rich catalogue of wonderful recordings available as CDs and through streaming services, his talents stretch yet further, including into theatre, where he has worked with the likes of the National Theatre, Shakespeare's Globe, Festival Theatre Chichester, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and many others.He has written ten plays, too, some award-winning, and has had a long and successful career as a performer and director. Being a Dorset man, it's perhaps necessary that Thomas Hardy would feature in that mix, and Tim is also the Artistic Director of the New Thomas Hardy Players, while also performing Hardy's poetry and works as part of his work as a storyteller and entertainer.On top of which, he is an extremely friendly and knowledgeable chap, so, please settle in and get comfortable for one of the richest, most interesting conversations we've had for Local Legends so far. One that folds in everything from nativity plays with John Eliot Gardiner to the Dorset Oozer, the poetry of William Barnes to false teeth being lost off fishing boats.It's a great one, as is Tim himself. And to learn more about Tim and his work, do visit his website at https://timlaycock.co.uk/ Otherwise, we'll be back on Monday with our brand new episode all about the history and folklore of Northamptonshire! The Three Ravens is an English Myth and Folklore podcast hosted by award-winning writers Martin Vaux and Eleanor Conlon.Released on Mondays, each weekly episode focuses on one of England's 39 historic counties, exploring the history, folklore and traditions of the area, from ghosts and mermaids to mythical monsters, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends, and much, much more. Then, and most importantly, the pair take turns to tell a new version of an ancient story from that county - all before discussing what that tale might mean, where it might have come from, and the truths it reveals about England's hidden past...Bonus Episodes are released on Thursdays (Magic and Medicines about folk remedies and arcane spells, Three Ravens Bestiary about cryptids and mythical creatures, Dying Arts about endangered heritage crafts, and Something Wicked about folkloric true crime from across history) plus Local Legends episodes on Saturdays - interviews with acclaimed authors, folklorists, podcasters and historians with unique perspectives on that week's county.With a range of exclusive content on Patreon, too, including audio ghost tours, the Three Ravens Newsletter, and monthly Three Ravens Film Club episodes about folk horror films from across the decades, why not join us around the campfire and listen in?Learn more at www.threeravenspodcast.com, join our Patreon at www.patreon.com/threeravenspodcast, and find links to our social media channels here: https://linktr.ee/threeravenspodcast Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Daily QuoteHe who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. (Alexander Pope)Poem of the DayGoing and Stayingby Thomas HardyBeauty of WordsThe Last Night of the WorldRay Bradbury

Daily QuoteA man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. (Charles Darwin)Poem of the DayGoing and Stayingby Thomas HardyBeauty of WordsOf Fortuneby Francis Bacon

We continue with our third horror collection from Libriviox. This week it's "The Withered Arm" by Thomas Hardy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue with our third horror collection from Libriviox. This week it's "The Withered Arm" by Thomas Hardy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In episode 72 of the Wonder World podcast, Pam and Olivia guide us through the fun and quirky celebrations for the third week of August, including National Bacon Lovers Day and National Tooth Fairy Day. They share fascinating historical tidbits, such as the theft of the Mona Lisa and the first sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, and introduce the word of the week, "jolt."The episode also features a trivia question about William Wilberforce, some listener-submitted jokes, and a reading of the poem "An August Midnight" by Thomas Hardy. Tune in for an enjoyable mix of history, humor, and learning!Links and ResourcesThe Wonder Kids Club - bonus audio and printables for each showSupport the show with a one-time donation.Wonder World Podcast Monday, August 21, 2023The TeamHost: Pam BarnhillHost: Olivia BarnhillResearch and Writing: Betsy CypressProduction: Thomas BarnhillGraphics: Katy WallaceOperations: Meg Angelino

Today's poem is a shape poem dedicated to chefs, but (surprise?) it might be about more than cooking.John Hollander, one of contemporary poetry's foremost poets, editors, and anthologists, grew up in New York City. He studied at Columbia University and Indiana University, and he was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. Hollander received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Levinson Prize, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and the poet laureateship of Connecticut. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and he taught at Hunter College, Connecticut College, and Yale University, where he was the Sterling Professor emeritus of English.Over the course of an astonishing career, Hollander influenced generations of poets and thinkers with his critical work, his anthologies and his poetry. In the words of J.D. McClatchy, Hollander was “a formidable presence in American literary life.” Hollander's eminence as a scholar and critic was in some ways greater than his reputation as a poet. His groundbreaking introduction to form and prosody Rhyme's Reason (1981), as well as his work as an anthologist, has ensured him a place as one of the 20th-century's great, original literary critics. Hollander's critical writing is known for its extreme erudition and graceful touch. Hollander's poetry possesses many of the same qualities, though the wide range of allusion and technical virtuosity can make it seem “difficult” to a general readership.Hollander's first poetry collection, A Crackling of Thorns (1958) won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Awards, judged by W.H. Auden. And in fact James K. Robinson in the Southern Review found that Hollander's “early poetry resembles Auden's in its wit, its learned allusiveness, its prosodic mastery.” Hollander's technique continued to develop through later books like Visions from the Ramble (1965) and The Night Mirror (1971). Broader in range and scope than his previous work, Hollander's Tales Told of the Fathers (1975) and Spectral Emanations (1978) heralded his arrival as a major force in contemporary poetry. Reviewing Spectral Emanations for the New Republic, Harold Bloom reflected on his changing impressions of the poet's work over the first 20 years of his career: “I read [A Crackling of Thorns] … soon after I first met the poet, and was rather more impressed by the man than by the book. It has taken 20 years for the emotional complexity, spiritual anguish, and intellectual and moral power of the man to become the book. The enormous mastery of verse was there from the start, and is there still … But there seemed almost always to be more knowledge and insight within Hollander than the verse could accommodate.” Bloom found in Spectral Emanations “another poet as vital and accomplished as [A.R.] Ammons, [James] Merrill, [W.S.] Merwin, [John] Ashbery, James Wright, an immense augmentation to what is clearly a group of major poets.”Shortly after Spectral Emanations, Hollander published Blue Wine and Other Poems (1979), a volume which a number of critics have identified as an important milestone in Hollander's life and career. Reviewing the work for the New Leader, Phoebe Pettingell remarked, “I would guess from the evidence of Blue Wine that John Hollander is now at the crossroads of his own midlife journey, picking out a new direction to follow.” Hollander's new direction proved to be incredibly fruitful: his next books were unqualified successes. Powers of Thirteen (1983) won the Bollingen Prize from Yale University and In Time and Place (1986) was highly praised for its blend of verse and prose. In the Times Literary Supplement, Jay Parini believed “an elegiac tone dominates this book, which begins with a sequence of 34 poems in the In Memoriam stanza. These interconnecting lyrics are exquisite and moving, superior to almost anything else Hollander has ever written.” Parini described the book as “a landmark in contemporary poetry.” McClatchy held up In Time and Place as evidence that Hollander is “part conjurer and part philosopher, one of our language's true mythographers and one of its very best poets.”Hollander continued to publish challenging, technically stunning verse throughout the 1980s and '90s. His Selected Poetry (1993) was released simultaneously with Tesserae (1993); Figurehead and Other Poems (1999) came a few years later. “The work collected in [Tesserae and Other Poems and Selected Poetry] makes clear that John Hollander is a considerable poet,” New Republic reviewer Vernon Shetley remarked, “but it may leave readers wondering still, thirty-five years after his first book … exactly what kind of poet Hollander is.” Shetley recognized the sheer variety of Hollander's work, but also noted the peculiar absence of anything like a personality, “as if the poet had taken to heart, much more fully than its author, Eliot's dictum that poetry should embody ‘emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.'” Another frequent charge leveled against Hollander's work is that it is “philosophical verse.” Reviewing A Draft of Light (2008) for Jacket Magazine, Alex Lewis argued that instead of writing “philosophizing verse,” Hollander actually “borrows from philosophy a language and a way of thought. Hollander's poems are frequently meta-poems that create further meaning out of their own self-interrogations, out of their own reflexivity.” As always, the poems are underpinned by an enormous amount of learning and incredible technical expertise and require “a good deal of time and thought to unravel,” Lewis admitted. But the rewards are great: “the book deepens every time that I read it,” Lewis wrote, adding that Hollander's later years have given his work grandeur akin to Thomas Hardy and Wallace Stevens.Hollander's work as a critic and anthologist has been widely praised from the start. As editor, he has worked on volumes of poets as diverse as Ben Jonson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; his anthologist's credentials are impeccable. He was widely praised for the expansive American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (1994), two volumes of verse including ballads, sonnets, epic poetry, and even folk songs. Herbert Mitgang of the New York Times praised the range of poets and authors included in the anthology: “Mr. Hollander has a large vision at work in these highly original volumes of verse. Without passing critical judgment, he allows the reader to savor not only the geniuses but also the second-rank writers of the era.” Hollander also worked on the companion volume, American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (2000) with fellow poets and scholars Robert Hass, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff.Hollander's prose and criticism has been read and absorbed by generations of readers and writers. Perhaps his most lasting work is Rhyme's Reason. In an interview with Paul Devlin of St. John's University, Hollander described the impetus behind the volume: “Thinking of my own students, and of how there was no such guide to the varieties of verse in English to which I could send them and that would help teach them to notice things about the examples presented—to see how the particular stanza or rhythmic scheme or whatever was being used by the particular words of the particular poem, for example—I got to work and with a speed which now alarms me produced a manuscript for the first edition of the book. I've never had more immediate fun writing a book.” Hollander's other works of criticism include The Work of Poetry (1993), The Poetry of Everyday Life (1997), and Poetry and Music (2003).Hollander died on August 17, 2013 in Branford, Connecticut.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Get out your sunscreen and Mr Whippy's as we consider what July has in store for us in the heavens and hedgerows, including talk of St Swithin's Day and Sirius, plus Thomas Hardy and some early Irish verse.

For many years, Irish writer Paul Lynch was a household name…in France. And while his work was popular in translation, and received numerous French literary awards, it was still considered niche. This all changed in 2023, following the release of Prophet Song, which was critically lauded and eventually won the holy grail of English language literary awards: the Booker Prize. This week we return to the Melbourne Writers' Festival to hear a conversation between Michael and Paul about how Paul became a writer, and why he doesn't think Prophet Song is a political novel.Reading list:Red Sky in Morning, Paul Lynch, 2013The Black Snow, Paul Lynch, 2014Grace, Paul Lynch, 2017Beyond the Sea, Paul Lynch, 2020Prophet Song, Paul Lynch, 2023The Prisoner of Zenda, Anthony Hope, 1894King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard, 1885The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy, 1886The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry, 2024You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store. Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram and TwitterGuest: Paul Lynch.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For many years, Irish writer Paul Lynch was a household name…in France. And while his work was popular in translation, and received numerous French literary awards, it was still considered niche. This all changed in 2023, following the release of Prophet Song, which was critically lauded and eventually won the holy grail of English language literary awards: the Booker Prize. This week we return to the Melbourne Writers' Festival to hear a conversation between Michael and Paul about how Paul became a writer, and why he doesn't think Prophet Song is a political novel. Reading list: Red Sky in Morning, Paul Lynch, 2013 The Black Snow, Paul Lynch, 2014 Grace, Paul Lynch, 2017 Beyond the Sea, Paul Lynch, 2020 Prophet Song, Paul Lynch, 2023 The Prisoner of Zenda, Anthony Hope, 1894 King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard, 1885 The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy, 1886 The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry, 2024 You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.  Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram and Twitter Guest: Paul Lynch.

Let's read some horror poetry. To watch the video click here To read along: A Child's Nightmare by Robert Graves: https://www.bartleby.com/120/35.html The Shadow on the Stone by Thomas Hardy: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem... Because I Could Not Stop for Death (479) by Emily Dickinson: https://poets.org/poem/because-i-coul... The Fairies by William Allingham: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org... Please check out my NEW MERCH STORE Get your HELLMOUTH CON tickets here TRIGGER WARNINGS AVAILABLE AT BOTTOM OF SHOW NOTES. MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. Leave me a voice mail! ‪(323) 546-8764‬ Ad Free version available on Patreon LinkTree for all of my social media, YouTube, Patreon etc. You can send your stories to: scareyoutosleep@gmail.com Music by Epidemic Sound and Co.AG Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Let's read some horror poetry. To watch the video click here To read along: A Child's Nightmare by Robert Graves: https://www.bartleby.com/120/35.html The Shadow on the Stone by Thomas Hardy: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem... Because I Could Not Stop for Death (479) by Emily Dickinson: https://poets.org/poem/because-i-coul... The Fairies by William Allingham: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org... Please check out my NEW MERCH STORE Get your HELLMOUTH CON tickets here TRIGGER WARNINGS AVAILABLE AT BOTTOM OF SHOW NOTES. MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. Leave me a voice mail! ‪(323) 546-8764‬ Ad Free version available on Patreon LinkTree for all of my social media, YouTube, Patreon etc. You can send your stories to: scareyoutosleep@gmail.com Music by Epidemic Sound and Co.AG Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We humans imprint ourselves on our surroundings - and they, in turn, have the power to affect us. In this episode, Jacke talks to Gareth Russell (The Palace: From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of History at Hampton Court) about the building that Thomas Hardy famously called a "Spellbound Palace" in one of his finest poems. We'll hear about the building's history and why it holds a special place in literary history, including the planning of the King James Bible and as a site for early Shakespeare performances. PLUS Jess Cotton (John Ashbery: A Critical Life) selects her choice for the last book she will ever read. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's the start of a new hundred episodes! Fresh off her tour for her new novel The Road from Belhaven, superguest Margot Livesey joins Jacke for a discussion of mistakes in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Then Jacke tells Margot the heartrending story of Hardy's fraught relationship with his first wife Emma - and how Emma's death unlocked some of his greatest poetry. Help support the show at patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. The History of Literature Podcast is a member of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate Network. Learn more at www.thepodglomerate.com/historyofliterature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's poem is The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy.The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Major writes… “The late poet Donald Hall said that “A poem is one inside talking to another inside.” We live chiefly in our own minds, but poetry allows us to make public our most intimate thoughts. Our true feelings struggle to find expression; our dreams are a valve. But poetry, too, acts as a channel by which we begin to hear ourselves and hear others. ” Celebrate the power of poems with a gift to The Slowdown today. Every donation makes a difference: https://tinyurl.com/rjm4synp

Thomas Hardy (born June 2, 1840 - died January 11, 1928) was born in Dorset, England. The son of a stone mason, he trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years.Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies (Tinsley Brothers) in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1891) and Jude the Obscure (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication. He left fiction writing for poetry and published eight collections, including Poems of the Past and the Present (Harper & Bros., 1902) and Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1914).Hardy's poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition. A traditionalist in technique, he nevertheless forged a highly original style, combining rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with a variety of meters and stanzaic forms. A significant influence on later poets (including Robert Frost, Wystan Hugh Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin), his influence has increased over the course of the twentieth century, offering a more down-to-earth, less rhetorical alternative to the more mystical and aristocratic precedent of William Butler Yeats. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe