Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their pec ... Show More
Oct 29
Narrative Poems: ‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of the King came in 1859. But in 1861 he took a break from Arthurian romance to try so ... Show More
19m 51s
Oct 24
The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and ... Show More
52m 4s
Oct 21
Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos
Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition,’ ... Show More
23m 52s
May 2020
S1 Ep2: “What Will Survive of Us Is Love”: Memory and Emotion in Late-Medieval England
Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying hand-in-hand, immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Philip Larkin would later describe in his celebrated poem, An Arundel Tomb, as their ‘stone fidelity’. These gestural monuments seem to belong to a broader tendency towar ... Show More
31m 14s
Dec 2021
EP08 - Prufrock Among the Women | Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Part One)
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Part One). This is the first of two episodes devoted to one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century, wherein Eliot’s enigmatic speaker invites us on an evening stroll through his memories, his fears and his inhibitions ... Show More
1h 25m