The Game's Afoot

As January draws to a close, we take a look back through some of the conversations we have had so far in 2026. First, publisher Alessandro Gallenzi joined us to reveal how he turned literary detective and uncovered Dylan Thomas's youthful plagiarism, then Joanna Kavenna explains ...  Show more

This week, Maria Scott on recently discovered photographs of Jeanne Duval, muse and lover of Charles Baudelaire; and Pratinav Anil weighs up the case for and against reparations.'Reparations: Slavery and the tyranny of imaginary guilt', by Nigel Biggar'The big payback: The case f ...  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