As we all know, the text of a book can possess incredible powers, transporting readers across time and space. But what about the books themselves? In this episode, Jacke talks to author Emma Smith (This Is Shakespeare) about her new book, Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers, which provides a material history of books and the people who love ... Show More
Aug 24
825 Henry James's Ghosts (with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm) | My Last Book with David Womersley
In 1895, Henry James suffered through a terrible failure, as his play Guy Domville was greeted by hoots, jeers, and tomatoes being thrown at the play's author. James responded by starting work on his masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, which tells the story of a governess and the ... Show More
1h 8m
Aug 17
824 Why Did Mary Shelley Try to Erase Her? The Claire Clairmont Story (with Emily Franklin) | My Last Book with Mathelinda Nabugodi
It's an often-told, momentous story: how in the summer of 1816, four friends, including famed Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, along with Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) and Byron's doctor John Polidori, gathered in a Swiss villa and decided to tell each ... Show More
1h 5m
Aug 13
823 Abraham Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth, and Shakespeare in a Divided America (with James Shapiro)
United States President Abraham Lincoln and his assassin John Wilkes Booth were both deeply immersed in Shakespeare's works. And yet, the conclusions they reached about how best to end tyranny--a feature of both Macbeth and Julius Caesar--could not have been more different. As Ja ... Show More
54m 57s
Oct 2021
170: Ruth Ozeki (THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS) & Walter Benjamin's "UNPACKING MY LIBRARY"
<p>Ruth Ozeki steps on into the Damn Library Hyperverse to shine. We talk about her latest opus, <em>The Book of Form and Emptiness</em>, and how books are magical, and accessing her teenage self, and an unexpected turn of narrative luck with snowglobes, along with many other thi ... Show More
1h 8m
May 2024
Books You Can't Read -- By Design!
Books are amazing. When you think about it, a good book can be a portal to another world. A book can a time machine, and the right story can genuinely change a person's life... so long as you can actually read it. In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Matt delve into the strange stor ... Show More
44m 1s
Jul 2023
Tudor Gifts: How to Win Friends and Influence People
<p>How meaningful can a gift - especially of a book - be? In the fickle world of the Tudor court, the strategic gifting of books was a common practice, bound up in relationships of power, politics and protest. A new exhibition exploring this subject at the Bodleian Library, Oxfor ... Show More
41m 54s