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Fiction and the Fantastic: J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter
J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that stil
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus
Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a prof
Novel Approaches: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who
Love and Death: 'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller
Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her writing has helped cement her cult status, not least The Hearing Trumpet (1974). Before
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir
At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either state. In her 1947 book, Simone de Beauvoir
Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope
Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last C
Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy
Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their m
Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by parado
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre
What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on human emotion and its
Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the d
Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson
Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas S
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horror and trauma narrative, and conti
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger
What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting of objects that can b
Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reim
Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more
As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) an
Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg
James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an ant
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James
Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally delivered as a lecture and intended not so m
Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic
Love and Death: ‘In Memoriam’ by Tennyson
Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince
Fiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen
‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a central seam of the fan
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche
For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to forget what we already know
Novel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell
In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thor
Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more
Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which po
Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka
In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it conf
Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley
T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton
Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation o
Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop
The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childho
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill
Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s dee
