The Big Idea

The University of Edinburgh•www.ed.ac.uk

Society & Culture

Experts from one of the world's leading universities discuss and unpack today's big issues and ideas.

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Episodes

The Spanish Civil War: Why did hundreds of Scots volunteer to fight Fascism in Spain?

2019 marks 100 years of the Spanish degree at the University of Edinburgh. An exhibition and series of events are taking place to mark the occasion, under the ‘Conectando’ banner. This year also marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that saw the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and led to Spain being ruled by a Fascist dictatorship until 1975. In this edition of the Big Idea podcast, Ranald Leask is joined by two experts on the conflict, from the Uni...

Apr 25, 2019•29 min

The Great War: The impact and legacy of ‘the War to end all wars’

November 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that brought the First World War to an end. More than 15 million people died in the conflict, which ushered in a horrifying new type of industrial slaughter; high explosive shells, poison gas, aircraft, machine guns, and tanks mechanised killing to a brutal new level. Now, a century on, how do we remember those who perished? What does remembrance mean and how has it changed? How different is the British act of remembrance ...

Nov 07, 2018•33 min

The James Tait Black Prizes 2017

Recorded live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, a discussion with this year’s winners of Britain’s oldest literary awards. Eimear McBride, winner of the fiction prize for The Lesser Bohemians, talks about her modernist novel, set in the bedsits and fraught headspaces of 1990s London. Laura Cumming, winner of the biography prize for her book, The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velazquez, talks about her centuries-hopping tale of a lost masterpiece, the man who painted it, and the man th...

Aug 17, 2017•38 min

Secrets and Spies: Why do people believe conspiracy theories?

We all love a conspiracy theory: 9/11 was an inside job; the moon landings were faked; Princess Diana was assassinated. There is a thrill in joining the dots between seemingly random events and discovering hidden patterns. As the University hosts Edinburgh Spy Week, the annual event that examines espionage fiction and film and the ways in which secrecy runs through culture, the organisers ask why such theories have such a pull on the imagination, and what happens when they are elevated to the st...

Apr 17, 2017•36 min

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