For forty years, Thomas James Wise made a fortune forging copies of books that had never existed, sometimes even convincing their authors they were the real deal. Despite a damning exposé by amateur detectives in the 1930s, Wise never confessed or faced legal repercussions, and his fakes have become collectors’ pieces in their own right. Gill Partington join ... Show More
Today
On Politics: The Bust-up at the BBC
The BBC is in crisis, again. A leaked dossier alleging a lack of impartiality in its reporting on Trump, Israel, race and gender has felled its director general and drawn threats of a defamation lawsuit from the White House. Yet many at the corporation point to the dossier’s cult ... Show More
1h 4m
Nov 21
Aftershock: The War on Terror – Episode 1: With Us or Against Us
In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush declared a state of emergency and initiated what would become an unprecedented expansion of US power. Public debate narrowed: there were new limits on what was acceptable, and not acceptable, to say. The London Review of Books published a nu ... Show More
44m 54s
Dec 2021
Michael K. Bourdaghs, "A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature" (Duke UP, 2021)
Modernity arrived in Japan, as elsewhere, through new forms of ownership. In A Fictional Commons: Natsume Soseki and the Properties of Modern Literature (Duke UP, 2021), Michael K. Bourdaghs explores how the literary and theoretical works of Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), widely cel ... Show More
52m 6s
Nov 2023
Why is Shakespeare's First Folio So Important?
<p>In 1623, seven years after William Shakespeare died, two of his friends and fellow actors led an effort to publish a single volume containing 36 of the plays he had written, half of which had never been officially published before. Now known as the First Folio, that volume has ... Show More
28m 14s
Sep 2023
Review: ‘The Fraud’, Zadie Smith
In more than two decades since Zadie Smith burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, ‘White Teeth’, her books, essays and short stories have continued to enjoy commercial and critical success. Her latest novel brings to life the story of the Tichborne case – one of the ... Show More
29m 39s
Oct 2023
The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson - Scary Stories
<p><em>They were in a boat all alone on a foggy night in the middle of the Pacific ocean. But they weren’t alone. A strange voice cries out in the darkness, in search of food, but he is unwilling to be seen. The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson, </em>that’s next on The ... Show More
40 m