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Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, p...

· 13 min 29 sec

'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so...

· 14 min 53 sec

'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so...

· 15 min 38 sec

Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried...

· 11 min 21 sec

Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried...

· 10 min 36 sec

The broad theme of this series, truth and lies, was a favourite subject of Lucian of Samosata, the last of our Greek-language authors. A cosmopolitan and highly cultured Syrian subject of the Roman Em...

· 14 min 3 sec

The broad theme of this series, truth and lies, was a favourite subject of Lucian of Samosata, the last of our Greek-language authors. A cosmopolitan and highly cultured Syrian subject of the Roman Em...

· 14 min 48 sec

In their quest for the medieval sense of humour Mary and Irina come to The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, a 15th-century reimagining of the nativity as domestic comedy that’s less about the birth of Jesus...

· 11 min 19 sec

In their quest for the medieval sense of humour Mary and Irina come to The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, a 15th-century reimagining of the nativity as domestic comedy that’s less about the birth of Jesus...

· 36 min 4 sec

On the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in book form, Mark and Seamus finish the second series of Modern-ish Poets by considering how revolutionary the poem was, the numerous m...

· 1 hr 8 min 15 sec

Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western conceptions of masculinity and adulthood served as tools o...

· 13 min 21 sec

Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western conceptions of masculinity and adulthood served as tools o...

· 14 min 6 sec

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic, hedonistic poet...

· 1 hr 21 sec

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Charlotte Mew, who brought the Victorian art of dramatic monologue into the 20th century, and whose difficult experiences are often refracted th...

· 47 min 17 sec

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford continue their series with a look at the life and work of W.B. Yeats, from his early quest for a mythological Irish culture, to his shift towards the Modernist experiment, a...

· 1 hr 1 min 40 sec

Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O’Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson—her dashes, death instinct and obliquity. To listen series one of Modern-ish Poets, and all our other Close Read...

· 1 hr 2 min 45 sec

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the island poet and playwright surrounded by an oceanic consciousness, whose writing recognises a...

· 56 min 12 sec

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, a...

· 13 min 23 sec

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness, in the fourth episode of series two of Modern-ish Poets. To l...

· 56 min 22 sec

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, a...

· 12 min 38 sec