Motherload

This week, Peter Filkins, winner of the inaugural Freudenheim Translation Prize, joins us with chair of the judges Boyd Tonkin to talk about the mercurial genius of Elias Canetti; and a poem in praise of Tuesdays by Jamie McKendrick.'The Book Against Death', by Elias Canetti, tra ...  Show more

This week, Mary Beard dons her VR set to experience a Roman cataclysm; and Mary Hitchman on the history of humanity's fascination with the moon.'The Last Days of Pompeii: The immersive exhibition', Immerse LDN, Excel, London, until March 15'The Medieval Moon', by Ayoush LazikaniP ...  Show more

Dystopias are a longstanding staple of film and literature, particularly science fiction, but what can we learn from them? Do they simply entrench despair or act as a prompt to improve the world? And what do The Two Ronnies have to do with all this? As a stage adaptation of Kay D ...  Show more

“Severance” is an office drama with a twist: the central characters have undergone a procedure to separate their work selves (“innies,” in the parlance of the show) from their home selves (“outies”). The Apple TV+ series is just the latest cultural offering to explore how the ...

The categories religion and race share a common genealogy. The modern understanding of these terms emerges within the European enlightenment but grasping their gradual production requires us to investigate further. In Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford University Press, 2016), ...  Show more

Jane Ellen Harrison was Britain’s first female career academic, a maverick public intellectual burdened with the label ‘the cleverest woman in England’. Her quips and quirks became legendary, but many of those anecdotes were promulgated by Harrison herself. Mary Beard joins Tom t ...  Show more