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Culture

Essays and videos on the arts, literature, travel, rituals and celebrations
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Ageing and death

Peregrinations of grief

A friend and a falcon went missing. In pain, I turned to ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ – and found a new vision of sorrow and time

Emily Polk

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Animals and humans

Why be dragons? How massive, reptilian beasts entered our collective imagination

58 minutes

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Stories and literature

Her blazing world

Margaret Cavendish’s boldness and bravery set 17th-century society alight, but is she a feminist poster-girl for our times?

Francesca Peacock

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Stories and literature

On Jewish revenge

What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?

Shachar Pinsker

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Stories and literature

Robert Frost’s poetic reflection on youth, as read in his unforgettable baritone

5 minutes

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Stories and literature

Do liberal arts liberate?

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life

Nick Romeo

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Stories and literature

Terrifying vistas of reality

H P Lovecraft, the master of cosmic horror stories, was a philosopher who believed in the total insignificance of humanity

Sam Woodward

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Stories and literature

The real Miss Julie

Victoria Benedictsson assumed a male identity, achieved literary stardom, and took her own life. Then Strindberg stole it

Elisabeth Åsbrink

A colourful book illustration of a weary traveller in a forest being awoken by a peacock tugging at his sleeve
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Comparative philosophy

Folklore is philosophy

Both folktales and formal philosophy unsettle us into thinking anew about our cherished values and views of the world

Abigail Tulenko

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Religion

There was no Jesus

How could a cult leader draw crowds, inspire devotion and die by crucifixion, yet leave no mark in contemporary records?

Gavin Evans

A smiling young girl and a cat, nose to nose, by a window sill, with pinecones beside them
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Stories and literature

The best stories smell

When scents are used to intensify a narrative, they heighten young readers’ emotions and enrich their memory banks

Natalia Kucirkova

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Stories and literature

Saved by Infinite Jest

Bereft and suicidal, I lay on my sofa. Only David Foster Wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does

Mala Chatterjee

Three motorcyclists are riding on an empty road winding through English moorland beneath a blue sky
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Stories and literature

Citizens

Devon, 1970s: I’m a rector’s son, hanging out with Boz the biker. My life is about to open up – what does it promise for him?

Tim Pears

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Stories and literature

A French Creole folktale nearly lost to time is given new, gorgeously animated life

6 minutes

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Mood and emotion

Moments of poetry pierce through the mundane at a small-town grocery

13 minutes

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Stories and literature

Vergil’s secret message

Long derided as mere coincidences, acrostics in ancient poetry are finally being taken seriously – with astonishing results

Julia Hejduk

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Philosophy of language

Quantum poetics

How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality

William Egginton

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Human rights and justice

Beyond obscenity

A century after the trial against ‘Ulysses’, we must revisit the civil liberties arguments of its defender, Morris Ernst

Brett Gary

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Stories and literature

Myths from Earth’s edge – what the Icelandic sagas reveal about Norse morality

57 minutes

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Stories and literature

Poet of impermanence

Enheduana is the first known named author. Her poems of strife and upheaval resonate in our own unstable times

Sophus Helle

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Stories and literature

Solace and saudade

In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon

Jonardon Ganeri & Sarah Seymour

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Stories and literature

The diaries of Kafka

By day an insurance official, by night he was an incessant, insomniacal scribe of the space between waking and dreaming

Ross Benjamin

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Quantum theory

All possible worlds

Long a matter of philosophical speculation, the idea of multiple realities has been given new artistic licence by physics

Timothy Andersen

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Stories and literature

What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?

10 minutes