In June, the pope invited dozens of artists to Rome for the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum’s contemporary art collection. Patricia Lockwood was one of them. She tells Tom more about the surreal experience and why irony, in the words of Pope Francis, is ‘a marvellous virtue’.
George Orwell wasn’t afraid to speak against totalitarianism – but what was he for? Colin Burrow joins Tom to unpick the cultural conservatism and crackling violence underpinning Orwell’s writing, to reassess his vision of socialism and to figure out why teenagers love him so much.
In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of haemophiliacs were infected with HIV and hepatitis C through blood products known to be contaminated. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Tom Crewe join Malin to discuss the findings and what they mean for survivors.
When Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of fraud last week, the only surprise was how quickly the jury reached their verdict. John Lanchester joins Tom to discuss how the former crypto billionaire ended up facing a life sentence, from his early career in finance and embrace of Effective Altruism to the simple but audacious nature of his crime, and why he found himself in a US court, even though US citizens were banned from using his trading company, FTX.
Anglophiles abroad love the British sense of humour – but what does that actually mean? Jonathan Coe joins Malin for a serious chat about comedy and its double-edged role in the UK’s political life.
Nineteenth-century Britain is often imagined as gloomy and dark, epitomised by Dickensian grime and Queen Victoria’s prolonged state of black-clad mourning. But in reality this period saw an explosion of colour, following a number of scientific discoveries, as shown in Colour Revolution, a new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. This is a sponsored episode.
Daisy Hay joins Tom to discuss how contributors and their enthusiasms shaped the Oxford English Dictionary to this day.
As the siege on Gaza intensifies, many observers are describing the current Hamas-Israel conflict as a complete overhaul of the region’s status quo. Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 Magazine, and Michael Sfard, a leading human rights lawyer, join Adam Shatz to discuss the roots and ramifications of the current crisis.
Crass, violent, misogynistic, dumb, fake – and irresistible. Tom Crewe reads his 2021 piece unpacking his youthful obsession with pro-wrestling, a sport both ‘hideous’ and ‘Homeric’.
Rosemary Hill explains how the 19th century’s obsession with Vesuvius spawned scientific disciplines, artistic innovations and nude picnics.
Laleh Khalili joins Tom to discuss the case of Arif Naqvi, who for many on the right epitomises the idea of the 'woke capitalist', and what goes wrong when private equity firms look to profit from public services.
In a world where communication is only as effective as its ‘truthiness’, numbers are vital to political success. But, as John Lanchester explains, some of the most influential stats in UK politics are ‘pants’. John joins Tom to discuss why GDP, immigration numbers and English Premier League odds are so frequently misleading, and how we can be better attuned to the misuse of data.
Adolfo Kaminsky, a first-class forger while still a teenager, saved thousands of lives as an agent of the French Resistance. ‘Forgery wasn’t just an art he perfected,’ Adam Shatz writes, ‘but a vocation and an ethics.’
As Colm Tóibín explains in a recent piece, Ulysses is pockmarked with errors, only some intentional. Colm joins Tom to discuss Joyce’s deliberate and accidental mistakes, Trieste’s essential influence on the novel, and why a queer reading of Ulysses really does hold water.
‘Octopuses,’ Amia Srinivasan writes, ‘are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.’ In our third summer reading, Srinivasan explores the paradoxical nature of octopus lives, and the difficulties humans have in understanding them.