James Wood explores what Woolf's modernist masterpiece owes to the techniques of 19th-century realism and the influence of Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down these certainties to arrive at the ultimate unknowability of character.
At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to Catholic Europe. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, much of that world had vanished. The Reformation not only changed the religious practices of its inhabitants, it brought a widespread transfer of property that reshaped the character and activity of the city and turned it into a theatre of power, punishment and debate.
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam’s encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and chastisement of Scottish masculinity ever since its publication, but the attitude of its narrator remains elusive throughout.
Meehan and Peter look at the origins of James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis in the radical work of Lynn Margulis and the contributions of his academic collaborator Dian Hitchcock, and in the science of cybernetics, and consider the degree to which any formulation of Gaia can explain certain processes, from the impact of the ecological competition between daisies to the carbon-silicate cycle.
James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman to discuss the place of The Death of Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, and consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening.
In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life and consider the many systems that the novel draws on, challenges, reproduces and mutates.
Rosemary is joined again by Matthew Davies to continue the story of England’s capital through its rapid rise in the first half of the 14th century and a long period turmoil thereafter, including the Hundred Years’ War, the revolts of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, and the Wars of the Roses.
William Hazlitt wrote of ‘The Rape of the Lock’ that ‘you hardly know whether to laugh or weep’, and in this episode Seamus and Mark discuss why Alexander Pope's mock epic masterpiece is at once the funniest poem in the English language and an essay on the seriousness of trivial things.
In The Burning Earth, Sunil Amrith uses history as a way of understanding why we got to a moment of accelerated environmental change, drawing on multiple strands of human activity over more than 500 years to trace the origins of environmental crisis. In this episode, Meehan and Peter interrogate some of Amrith’s major themes and examples, from the damaging impact of 18th-century ideas of freedom on our relationship to the natural world, to his analysis of postwar environmentalism through the figures of Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson and Indira Gandhi.
James Wood looks at three of Chekhov’s stories, ‘Gusev’ (1890), ‘The Bishop’ (1902) and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and the ways in which each seeks to curb the judgment or expectations of the reader to foreground the experiences of his characters, even beyond death.
Rosemary is joined by Matthew Davies, professor of urban history at Birkbeck, to trace this story of London from where the Romans left it in the early fifth century, through multiple invasions, grand projects and power struggles up to its emergence as a flourishing capital city in the thirteenth century.
Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Milton’s study of temptation and free will became an unparalleled expression of poetic brilliance, from its thrillingly ambiguous and seductive depiction of Satan to its vivid dramatisation of the reproachful lovers confronting the consequences of their misdeeds, and ultimately its claim to being the finest love poem in English.
In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible. Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith reflect on the ways Czerski’s book has altered their thinking about the ocean, and whether new perspectives can ever be enough to change public policy.
Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present three humiliating episodes from his earlier life, offers no kind of conclusion. Instead, it is the unbearable moments of psychological truth that make ‘Notes from Underground’ a revolutionary development in the history of realism.
After Roman London was hit by a catastrophic fire in about 125 AD, perhaps the result of another local revolt, it entered a new period of sophistication which saw the emergence of elaborate townhouses for its mercantile and administrative elite, richly embellished with mosaics and wall paintings. But the city had stopped growing, and when a devastating plague arrived in about 165 AD, which may well have been Europe’s first encounter with smallpox, it was probably already on a long slow decline caused by its diminishing importance as a trading hub.