Arnold Weinstein, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, discusses his latest book, The Lives of Literature, and his own life of literature: the authors that have mattered most to him, what students have taken from his courses, and which books have recently become unteachable. He writes, 'The best books interrogate their readers—jostle their assumptions, challenge their own sense of "me" – and the teacher's calling must be to convey this "live”.' Hosted on Acast. ...
Jun 16, 2022•42 min•Ep. 80
Translator Laura Marris discusses her experience of translating Albert Camus's 1947 novel, The Plague , during the Covid pandemic: 'I would be working on the scene where the doctors are meeting with the prefect of the city to try to convince him to put in more stringent public health measures. And then I would read the paper and there would be stuff about the CDC, Trump and I'd just think this is a very bizarre parallel. In the end, that was also something I had to think about, and potentially c...
Mar 02, 2022•43 min•Ep. 79
When she tells people she’s researching the royal family, Laura Clancy, our guest on this week's episode, often encounters the response that the UK has more important things to worry about. Plus the associated responses that the royals don’t cost that much, that they’re good for the country, or that ultimately they don’t really matter. For a lot of Britons, they just are , a bit like the weather. Laura disagrees. She says: ‘we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain without talking about the m...
Feb 04, 2022•51 min•Ep. 78
This is the second half of the conversation I had last autumn with Polly Barton, a translator from Japanese and the author of a terrific memoir cum reflection on language and translation, Fifty Sounds . In the first part we talked about Polly’s early fascination with Japan and language, and her decision aged 21 to go to live and work on a remote Japanese island and her experience of learning the language. In this part we talk about her decision to become a translator, some of the challenges that...
Jan 27, 2022•30 min•Ep. 77
In this first part of my conversation with translator and writer Polly Barton, we talk about Polly’s early fascination with Japan and how she found herself on a remote Japanese island at the age of 21. ‘Sometimes’, she writes in her book Fifty Sounds , ‘I wonder how I ever thought I’d survive, setting out for a rural island with just a handful of Japanese words to my name.’ But survive she does and goes on to tell the tale... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jan 19, 2022•36 min•Ep. 76
'Music somehow seems to be natural, to exist as something apart – and yet it is suffused with human values, with our sense of what is good or bad, right or wrong. Music doesn't just happen, it is what we make it, and what we make of it. People think through music, decide who they are through it,' says Nicholas Cook, my guest in this episode. His quest in his recent new edition of his highly influential Very Short Introduction to Music (Oxford, 2021) is to explore those human values. In this podc...
Oct 30, 2021•40 min•Ep. 75
In this programme we’re looking at what I thought of as ‘the humble filing cabinet’ until I read Craig Robertson ’s fascinating book, The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information ( University of Minnesota Press , 2021). It’s easy to regard filing cabinets as space-hogging lumps of metal from a bygone era filled with dusty files; an obsolete way of storing information now that all our data lives in the cloud. But previous generations thought of their data as ‘live’ too, and a century or ...
Oct 15, 2021•38 min•Ep. 74
Charles Dickens introduced the word 'boredom' to the English language in 1853, but the feeling it describes dates back much further. You can find it in the Bible or the work of classical writers. Only recently, though, have psychologists investigated what boredom is actually trying to tell us. And the news is not all bad. In this episode, Professor James Danckert reveals some of the latest discoveries in the science of boredom. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 28, 2021•46 min•Ep. 73
Nineteenth-century Dublin was a city full of beasts: horses, pigs, cattle, sheep, dogs... all living in close proximity to the human residents. Historian Juliana Adelman describes the city thronged with beasts and explains why animals were often at the centre of Dubliners' heated debates about the kind of city they wanted to live in – and what that meant for the animals. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Apr 08, 2021•31 min•Ep. 72
In this new episode in the Conversations with Publishers series, my guest is Margo Irvin , who’s an editor at Stanford University Press , where she’s been commissioning history and Jewish studies for the past five years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Mar 05, 2021•30 min•Ep. 71
In this episode, we delve deep into clutter with Jennifer Howard, author of a recent book entitled Clutter: An Untidy History. This book is for you if you have a closet that will no longer close because it is so crammed with clothes, or a garage piled with boxes you keep meaning to sort, or a storage unit that you pay for every month without having an exit strategy. Maybe it’s especially for you if you have an older relative with a house piled high with belongings that you know they will never g...
Feb 11, 2021•29 min•Ep. 70
“From childhood,” Sonia Shah says, “we are taught that plants, animals, and people belong in certain places.” A powerful result of this, she suggests, is a dominant view of human migration as unnatural, a threat, and migrants as vectors of chaos and disorder. Her important new book, featured here, sets out to challenges this and other persistent myths. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Jan 07, 2021•39 min•Ep. 69
Rob Tempio is Princeton University Press’s publisher for the ancient world, philosophy & political theory. He says on the Press’s website: 'I believe passionately in both the inherent and enduring fascination of these subjects and in the ways in which they perpetually speak to the present.' In this interview he talks about his career and his books, including the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Nov 23, 2020•14 min•Ep. 68
For all its importance to Greek history and myth, Thebes – Seven-gated Thebes whose patron god was Dionysus, birthplace of Herakles, the city of Oedipus and Antigone – tends to get bit parts in the broader story of ancient Greece. Until now. Paul Cartledge, Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University, has devoted a whole book to what he calls the ‘forgotten city’ of ancient Greece. I think you’re likely to find it fascinating for the fresh insights that a shift in p...
Nov 12, 2020•43 min•Ep. 67
In this episode, I talk to Dean Smith, who’s been director of Duke University Press for almost a year and a half, and before that was director of Cornell University Press. Earlier in his career, Dean held posts at Chapman & Hall as director of electronic publishing and the American Chemical Society as vice president for sales and marketing. Earlier still, he was the director of Project MUSE at the Johns Hopkins University Press. So a wealth of experience in the university press world. When h...
Oct 26, 2020•42 min•Ep. 66
This episode is another in the series of Conversations with Publishers, which aims to find out more about the people who decide what gets published. Our guest is Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, a post he has held since 1998, and in the interview we talk about his career both before and after his arrival in Minneapolis. The University of Minnesota Press was established 1925. On its website, it says: ‘Minnesota is a midsize university press.’ If so, it would be fair to ...
Sep 08, 2020•39 min•Ep. 65
In this programme, we’re exploring the life and music of Francis Poulenc, in the company of writer and musicologist Roger Nichols. Yale University Press recently published Roger’s biography of Poulenc, who was the pre-eminent member of the group known as Les Six and remains probably France's best-loved and most-performed 20th-century composer. One reviewer wrote of Roger's book: ‘I don’t think anyone writes better about classical music than Nichols, his wry humour and gift for surprising connect...
Aug 27, 2020•45 min•Ep. 64
This week we explore the life and work of the master of the 19th-century short story, Guy de Maupassant, in the company of his recent biographer Christopher Lloyd, who’s emeritus professor of French at Durham. (The TLS called Chris's book ‘a crisp, witty, balanced and well-informed guide.’) Depending on your age and background, you might have read some Maupassant at school, or maybe encountered him on a literature survey course at university. He’s much anthologized. But that has proved to be a m...
Jul 29, 2020•33 min•Ep. 63
We all know the Aztecs practised human sacrifice, a fact that so predominates in popular impressions of them that almost everything else about them is cast in its shadow. Yet as my guest in this episode, Camilla Townsend, writes in her latest book, The Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs : "The Aztecs would never recognize themselves in the picture of their world that exists in the books and movies we have made." So who were the Aztecs really? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more i...
Jul 15, 2020•38 min•Ep. 62
Babette’s Feast, released in 1987, was the first Danish submission to win the Oscar for best foreign language film and it’s the subject of Julian Baggini’s recent book in the BFI Film Classics series. A short, engaging essay on the film that won’t take you much longer to read than the film’s running time. Babette’s Feast is based on a short story by Karen Blixen, best known as the author of Out of Africa . It’s set in the 19th century an austere part of northern Denmark in an equally austere Chr...
Jul 02, 2020•30 min•Ep. 61
A young man inherits a house on an island in the middle of the raging waters of a mighty river from a mysterious great-uncle. But to satisfy the conditions of the will, the man must remain on the island for three months, with no other human company save his great-uncle Malicroix’s taciturn servant. And then there will be a further obligation to fulfil… The book is set in the Camargue in southern France in the early 19th century and was written in the 1940s by French novelist Henri Bosco. Despite...
Jun 11, 2020•33 min•Ep. 60
Why is it so hard to concentrate? How can we do it better? Dutch psychologist Stefan van der Stigchel has some suggestions... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
May 24, 2020•38 min•Ep. 59
This week, we have a returning guest to the podcast, Oxford professor of geography Danny Dorling , who spoke to me recently about his new book Slowdown . Danny has given his book one of those subtitles that clearly map out the terrain he intends to cover: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives. You may currently be feeling at best ambivalent about the idea of slowdown, with so many of us are enduring a Covid-19-enforced pause and desperate ...
May 10, 2020•38 min•Ep. 58
Last November, I spoke to Christopher E. Forth about his book, Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life ( Reaktion Books , 2019), which he describes as a ‘study in the formation of stereotypes’, and in particular the negative stereotypes that have accreted round fat, and fat people, over time. Those stereotypes may have gone into overdrive in the latter part of the 20th century, but Chris shows that there was already ambivalence about corpulence in the ancient world: the building blocks of l...
Apr 21, 2020•33 min•Ep. 57
This week, another interview in the series of Conversations with Translators . My guest is Meredith McKinney , a translator from Japanese whose anthology of classical Japanese travel writing was published in Penguin Classics at the end of last year. I was alerted to her book by an excellent review of it by PD Smith in the Guardian : ‘In this remarkable work of translation and scholarship, filled with wonderful vignettes of Japanese life and sensibility, McKinney introduces readers to the nation’...
Apr 05, 2020•48 min•Ep. 56
After a three-month hiatus, the Hedgehog and the Fox is back with a new spring season. To get it under way, in this latest podcast we explore the role of pigs and pork in shaping American history, in the company of historian Joseph Anderson , who told me: Swine, like so many species, are very opportunistic and they are able to exploit a niche. That was one of the things that made them such a great source of calories for thousands of years. When you put them in an estuary, or you put them in hill...
Mar 09, 2020•37 min•Ep. 55
This week we have an interview with Sarah Caro, who describes herself on Twitter as ‘Editorial Director for Social Sciences at Princeton University Press , long-suffering Arsenal fan and qualified optimist’. In this interview we focus mostly on the first of those, though the third clearly influences everything Sarah does. As you’ll hear, she’s had an amazingly dynamic career, having worked at a significant number of leading publishers in senior roles across a number of disciplines. Along with he...
Nov 27, 2019•27 min•Ep. 54
Hedgehog & Fox This week we have an interview with Amy Brand , who for the past four years has been director of the MIT Press . In a recent Q&A that appeared on the Scholarly Kitchen , Amy said of her role at the MIT press: The job is a perfect fit for me because it builds on my experiences beyond publishing in academic science, university administration and research startups. In our conversation, we talk about the changes Amy has made at the press and how she sees them against the wider...
Nov 22, 2019•32 min•Ep. 53
My guest today is Charlie Gere , who hates the Lake District; so much so, in fact, that his new book is unambiguously entitled I Hate the Lake District . But it’s not a diatribe against fudge shops and coach tours. He writes in his introduction: ‘I love the North West of England, but hate the “Lake District”, and the way it’s fetishized and sacralized as some kind of “unspoilt” paradise, a consolatory Eden to which those battered by contemporary life can retreat. ‘I also love it, guiltily, for t...
Nov 18, 2019•24 min•Ep. 52
My guest in this programme is Duncan Exley, who in his recent book, The End of Aspiration , warns: Living standards over the coming years are predicted to stagnate for middle-income households and to fall for those with low incomes, and in occupational terms, people born in the early 1980s are the first group since comparable records began in 1946 to be in lower-status jobs than their parents were at the same age.Our children are now more likely to slide down the scale than to climb up. Duncan i...
Sep 26, 2019•39 min•Ep. 51
