Beowulf

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the great writers on Central Europe after the first world war and on the dying of the old orders with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a German speaking Jew from Brody in the north-eastern edge of that Empire, which was then i ...  Show more

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), the graphic artist and printmaker best known for his impossible buildings, paradoxical perspectives, and repeating geometric patterns. Born in Leeuwarden and trained as a printmaker, Escher visited t ...  Show more

Composed towards the end of the first millennium, Beowulf is the classic Anglo-Saxon epic poem that transcends its time to shed light on psychological and spiritual truths that still ring true today.

Seamus Heaney’s deeply felt interpretation - widely a ...

Beowulf is the most famous Old English epic poem, relating the adventures of the eponymous hero as he battles beasts and dragons in a pre-Viking Scandinavian world. However, it's so much more than just a story of men and monsters, as Heather O'Donoghue reveals in this conversatio ...  Show more

Greetings!Welcome back to the podcast and let me introduce the heroic Beowulf! Beowulf is an epic poem that is one of the most important texts in old English (that's an English that was spoken thousands of years ago and sounds very different from what we speak today!)Monster aler ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Song of the Nibelungs, a twelfth century German epic, full of blood, violence, fantasy and bleakness. It is a foundational work of medieval literature, drawing on the myths of Scandinavia and central Europe. The poem tells of two couples, Siegf ...  Show more