“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… Read More
Marina Frolova-Walker: Russianness in music
Category: From the Archive
Greg Garrett: still life with zombies
I spoke recently to Greg Garrett, who is professor of English at Baylor University in Texas, where he teaches fiction and screenwriting, literature, film, popular culture, and theology. Greg’s latest… Read More
Ingrid Tague: how we came to love pets
The eighteenth century was when pet-keeping went mainstream. The first recognizable pet shops were set up, the first missing dog ads appeared in the newspapers. Over the course of the… Read More
Ronald Hutton: the lurking fear of witches
“The fear of bad magic lurks below the skin of Western society. At times it comes up above the surface.” In his new book, The Witch: A History of Fear… Read More
Rosalyn LaPier: the Blackfeet’s “invisible reality”
My guest on this week’s programme is Rosalyn LaPier who’s associate professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana and a research associate at the National Museum… Read More
Rachel Sherman: living on Uneasy Street
New School sociologist Rachel Sherman interviewed fifty affluent residents of New York (the most unequal city in the United States) to find out their attitudes to wealth. She writes of… Read More
Helen Fry on The London Cage: “It’s a house of secrets…”
The ‘house’ in question was in Kensington Palace Gardens and, as far as its clandestine wartime function was concerned, did not officially exist. In 1940 four mansions were requisitioned to… Read More
Pat Shipman: “We turned wolves into dogs”
In Pat Shipman’s book, The Invaders (Harvard University Press), she argues that our last close relative, the Neanderthals, were driven to extinction not solely by climate change – though that… Read More
Jerry Kaplan: Humans Need Not Apply
The recent news story about robots developing their own private language claimed alarmed Facebook researchers had to pull the plug on their experiment. The story turned out to be not… Read More
Jan Zalasiewicz on 4 billion years of climate history
What do we know about the Earth’s ancient climate, and how do we know it? What can it tell us about its – and our – possible future? Leicester professor… Read More