Best Chronicle Of Higher Educations Podcasts (2025)

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Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope 16:22

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35m ago16:22

16:22

Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last Chronicle of Barset: a model example of Anthony Trollope’s gift for comedy, pathos, social commentary and maste…

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Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy 13:28

5d ago13:28

13:28

Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death,…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges 13:10

11d ago13:10

13:10

Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursi…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre 15:22

18d ago15:22

15:22

What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on human emotion and its relation to consciousness. For Sartre, the emotions are not external forces acting upon consciousness but an a…

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Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens 17:27

25d ago17:27

17:27

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is …

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Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson 13:47

1M ago13:47

13:47

Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to men…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley 32:30

1M ago32:30

32:30

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘yearwithout a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creationmyth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horrorand trauma narrative, and continues to spark reinvention and reinterpretation. In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina …

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger 15:31

2M ago15:31

15:31

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting of objects that can be represented objectively, and into the kind of thinking that ‘responds and recalls’. For Heidegger, the world…

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Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot 16:49

2M ago16:49

16:49

The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life. Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggi…

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Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more 12:09

2M ago12:09

12:09

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an an…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg 32:13

2M ago32:13

32:13

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 19…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James 17:29

2M ago17:29

17:29

Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally delivered as a lecture and intended not so much as a defence of religion as an attack on anti-religion. James’s target was the ‘rugged and manly school of…

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Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 17:55

3M ago17:55

17:55

‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.’ The poem she had in mind turned out to be her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, publi…

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Love and Death: 'In Memoriam' by Tennyson 12:28

3M ago12:28

12:28

Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince Albert. Its subject is the death in 1833 of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22, and in its 131 s…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen 15:05

3M ago15:05

15:05

‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a central seam of the fantastic, and in this episode Marina and Adam turn to two writers in that mode who lived over a hundred years ap…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche 29:41

3M ago29:41

29:41

For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to forget what we already know. ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ was written in 1874, when Nietzsche was 30, and was published in a collection wit…

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Novel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell 25:04

4M ago25:04

25:04

In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thornton, she is forced to reassess her assumptions about justice and propriety. At the heart of the novel are a s…

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Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more 14:05

4M ago14:05

14:05

Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which poets have reflected on their own passing, is a small but eloquent one in the history of English poetry. In this…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka 16:06

4M ago16:06

16:06

In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it confronts the nightmares of modernity. In this episode, Marina Warner is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss the w…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley 14:44

4M ago14:44

14:44

T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where his only obligation was not to get married. Yet in over fifty years of slow, meticulous…

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Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray 32:52

5M ago32:52

32:52

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex…

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Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop 12:11

5M ago12:11

12:11

The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mar…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll 15:41

5M ago15:41

15:41

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular. Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the …

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill 14:13

5M ago14:13

14:13

Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s deeply repressed, coming to terms with the uncompromising educational experiment his father subjected him to as a…

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Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë 26:38

6M ago26:38

26:38

When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of H…

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Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray 15:21

6M ago15:21

15:21

Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino 15:35

6M ago15:35

15:35

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Trave…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson 15:10

6M ago15:10

15:10

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which…

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Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock 36:12

6M ago36:12

36:12

Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely l…

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Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop 13:37

7M ago13:37

13:37

This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the w…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift 15:41

7M ago15:41

15:41

Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Trave…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach 10:29

7M ago10:29

10:29

In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity. In this episode, Jonathan and James discuss the ways in which the book applies this thought to various aspects of Christian doct…

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Blackstone, Neoliberalism, and the Housing Crisis 28:51

7M ago28:51

28:51

David Harvey examines the relationship between wage repression, rising housing costs, and homelessness, presenting a stark critique of capitalist systems that prioritize speculative profits over meeting basic housing needs. He explores how inflation in housing markets, driven by financial speculation and companies like Blackstone, exacerbates econo…

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Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen 31:53

7M ago31:53

31:53

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money. In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow…

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Love and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas' 12:31

8M ago12:31

12:31

Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal for Milton’s later role as a writer of national epic. In the first episode of their new series, Seamus and Mark discuss the politica…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ 14:41

8M ago14:41

14:41

The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious stories in the context of the wider mysteries and pleasures of the Nights. ‘The P…

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Trumpism vs. Wage Justice 22:07

8M ago22:07

22:07

David Harvey reflects on the challenges of addressing inflation and wage repression in the U.S., especially for the 50% of the population struggling to live on $30,000–$40,000 a year. He critiques the Democratic Party's failure to focus on the economic needs of this group, emphasizing that inflation, despite slowing, continues to affect them due to…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Fear and Trembling' by Søren Kierkegaard 12:24

8M ago12:24

12:24

The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling appeared under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, and its playful relationship to the reader doesn’t stop there. Described as a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the…

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Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’ 7:57

8M ago7:57

7:57

Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property. The first epi…

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Introducing ‘Love and Death’ 5:13

8M ago5:13

5:13

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why the elegy can be a particularly energising form for poets engaging with their craft and the poetic tradition, and how elegy serves an important role in public grieving, remembering and healing. The firs…

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Introducing ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’ 8:06

8M ago8:06

8:06

Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes the scope of the series, in which she will also be joined by Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis. Together, Anna Della and Marina discuss the ways the fiction of wonder and astonishment can challenge so…

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Introducing 'Conversations in Philosophy' 8:35

8M ago8:35

8:35

James Wood and Jonathan Rée introduce their new Close Readings series, Conversations in Philosophy, running throughout 2025. They explain the title of the series and why they'll be challenging a hundred years of academic convention by reuniting the worlds of literature and philosophy. James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a sta…

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Political Poems: ‘Little Gidding’ by T.S. Eliot 10:51

8M ago10:51

10:51

In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ presents us with an apocalyptic vision of purifying fire. Suggesting that humanity can survive warfare only through renewed spiritual unity, Eliot finds …

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Among the Ancients II: Marcus Aurelius 59:50

9M ago59:50

59:50

For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the contradictions of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Said by Machiavelli to be the last of the ‘five good emperors’ who ruled Rome for most of the second century CE, Marcus oversaw devastating wars on the frontiers, a deadly plague and e…

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Medieval LOLs: Gwerful Mechain’s ‘Ode to the Vagina’ 10:45

9M ago10:45

10:45

For the final episode of their series in search of the medieval sense of humour Irina and Mary look at one of the most remarkable women authors of the Middle Ages, Gwerful Mechain, who lived in Powys in the 15th century. Mechain was part of a lively literary coterie in northeast Wales and in her poem Cywydd y Cedor (‘Ode to the Vagina’) she challen…

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Coming next year on Close Readings 1:57

9M ago1:57

1:57

As our Close Readings series come to an end this year, you’re probably wondering what’s coming in 2025. We’re delighted to announce there’ll be four new series starting in January: ‘Conversations in Philosophy’ with Jonathan Rée and James Wood Jonathan and James challenge a hundred years of academic convention by reuniting the worlds of philosophy …

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Human Conditions: ‘Sister Outsider’ by Audre Lorde 13:39

9M ago13:39

13:39

In the final episode of Human Conditions, Brent and Adam turn to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of prose with exceptional relevance to contemporary grassroots politics. Like Du Bois, Césaire and Baraka, Lorde’s work defies genre: as she argues in this collection, ‘poetry is not a luxury’ but an essential tool for liberation. Throughout…

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On Satire: 'A Far Cry from Kensington' by Muriel Spark 16:29

9M ago16:29

16:29

In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing was as bitingly satirical as any 20th-century novelist's. A Far Cry from Kensington has a deceptively simple plot: Agnes Hawkins, working for a publisher in London in the 1950s, insults Hector Bartlett,…

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Political Poems: ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney 12:21

9M ago12:21

12:21

As an undergraduate, Seamus Heaney visited Station Island several times, an ancient pilgrimage site traditionally associated with St Patrick and purgatory. Decades later, Heaney worked through competing calls for political engagement and his long-lapsed Catholicism in ‘Station Island’, a poem he described as an ‘exorcism’. A dreamlike reworking of …

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Among the Ancients II: Apuleius 11:12

10M ago11:12

11:12

Apuleius’ ‘Metamorphoses’, better known as ‘The Golden Ass’, is the only ancient Roman novel to have survived in its entirety. Following the story of Lucius, forced to suffer as a donkey until the goddess Isis intervenes, the novel includes frenetic wordplay, filthy humour and the earliest known version of the Psyche and Cupid myth. In this episode…