Close Readings: 'Vanity Fair' by William Make...

HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projected cost of more than £100 billion, and perhaps won’t even be ‘high speed’. To dis ...  Show more

When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider what happens when poetry, and poets, meet technology, and why a poem it ...  Show more

Like it or not, there's no escaping Charles Dickens at this time of year.

But who was the man behind classics such as A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and of course, A Christmas Carol?

His life is as rich as many of the characters' stories in one of his b ...

It's October, the perfect month to celebrate the master of mystery and the macabre. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Richard Kopley about his book Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, a comprehensive critical biography that combines a narrative of Poe's enduring challenges (including h ...  Show more

Responding to a special request from a listener, Jacke discusses Fyodor Dostoevsky, his novel The Brothers Karamazov, and the search for meaning in a meaningless world. This episode was originally released as episode #250 on October 7, 2020. For reasons Jacke discusses, it has no ...  Show more

In this episode, Jacke talks to author David Denby about his new book, Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer, a group biography (loosely inspired by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians) that describes how four larger-than-life figures upended the restrained culture of ...  Show more