History of Ideas: Simone Weil

The penultimate great political fiction in this series is not strictly a fiction: it’s Annie Ernaux’s retelling of her own life in The Years (2008), thereby recapturing the story of France in the second half of the twentieth century. How can one woman’s story stand in for all the ...  Show more

Today’s political fiction is a spy novel, a Cold War comedy and a meditation on the nature of good and evil: Graham Greene’s The Human Factor. Why has Greene so fallen out of fashion? What made the South African secret police his idea of pure evil? Was this book shaped by Greene’ ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil. Born in Paris in 1909 into a wealthy, agnostic Jewish family, Weil was a precocious child and attended the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, achieving the top marks in her cla ...  Show more

Why would someone disown their son over a pair of glasses? How could an unmarried woman in 1918 have published a book about sexual pleasure? And what is an appropriate gift for a newlywed prince and princess? 

Today, we’re looking at the complicated woman who wa ...

Today’s show is built around three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better.” Those sentences form the foundat ...

Si la littérature s’avère parfois exotisante ou violente lorsqu’elle aborde les vies colonisées, elle permet aussi de rendre un juste hommage à des vies longtemps jugées indignes d’intérêt. Telle est la démarche d’Abdellah Taïa dans l’ouvrage <a href="https:// ...