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 Mary Beard: The Roman Triumph [33:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“I’m interested in saying, look, how can you challenge the Asterix-and-the-Romans kind of image that we tend to have of Rome?
“We are determined to turn a blind eye to Roman subtlety, humour and sophistication because the Romans do a very good job for us of being bridge-builders and thugs.
“The Greeks are sophisticated guys […]

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“It’s a very surreal place… children have grown up with bomb scrap around them. So when they see bomb scrap, they don’t perceive any danger. It’s all around you.The houses are made of bombs. It’s piled up by the side of the roads. It’s part of the fabric of life.”
I’ve just completed a […]

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“In politics there’s a constant endeavour to expose hypocrisy. Because people don’t like hypocrisy, it’s a very useful weapon to attack an opponent.
But the exposure of hypocrisy - the anti-hypocritical movement - doesn’t drive hypocrisy out of politics. It doesn’t even diminish the amount of hypocrisy that there is. If anything it […]

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 Frolova-Walker: Russia Music and Nation [24:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

“In Russian music you have a very different portrayal of Russia [from the one you find in literature], which has very strong rhythms, very festive images. It’s very bright, very colourful, very, very different from the melancholy Russian soul.”
Writing of Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar after its premiere in 1836, one Russian […]

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There was an entertaining piece by Joe Queenan in last Sunday’s NYT about the pleasures of long books (and in particular the three volumes of Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities), and the havoc they can wreak on the normal functioning of life (plus their value as a diversionary tactic):

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