Marcel Proust

Jacke gets ready for the Halloween season with an episode filled with madness, murder, and ghosts! First, he recounts the story of Romantic period writers Charles and Mary Lamb. Although the brother-sister duo later became famous for their summaries of Shakespeare's tales, they e ...  Show more

What does it mean to live a good life? How can we accomplish it? For more than two thousand years, Western civilization has looked to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to help answer those questions. In this episode, Jacke talks to translator Robin Waterfield and scholar John Sellar ...  Show more

In 2022, France is marking the centenary of the death of the novelist Marcel Proust, the author of the 20th century masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past. In this archive edition of Witness History, Proust's friend, Prince Antoine Bibescu, recalls his conversations with the auth ...  Show more

Did the foundational event of Proust’s great novel really happen? Michael Wood talks to Tom about several English translations of In Search of Lost Time, old and new, and what they reveal about different ways of reading the novel. If the dipping of the madeleine in his tea conjur ...  Show more

Centuries before Proust's Remembrance of Things Past took us on a tour of memory and James Joyce played with stream of consciousness, a 16th century nobleman - Michel de Montaigne - developed a wholly new style of reflective prose that examined his place in the world. ...

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emile Zola's greatest literary success, his thirteenth novel in a series exploring the extended Rougon-Macquart family. The relative here is Etienne Lantier, already known to Zola’s readers as one of the blighted branch of the family tree and his s ...  Show more