Decoding the Voynich Manuscript
In this popular episode of the podcast, we try to unlock the secrets of the Voynich Manuscript with Raymond Clemens from the Beinecke Library and Joseph Calamia, senior editor at Yale University Press.
The London Cage
Helen Fry— Writing the history of spies, espionage and the intelligence services, especially MI6 or the CIA, poses its own particular challenges. Secret intelligence organisations are shrouded in myth and mystery, often self-created, and that attracts a certain public curiosity. How far historians can reconstruct the full truth is an
Extremists Form Fellowships of Friends
Philippe-Joseph Salazar— One year ago an off-beat play about terrorism by Nobel-prize laureate Elfriede Jelinek premièred in Darmstadt, Germany, Wut (Rage) – at a time the country was straining both under a messy immigration often from countries who are suppliers of jihadists, and terror attacks often presented by the police as
The Exterminating Angel and the Entrapment of Guests
James A. W. Heffernan— Fifteen months ago, the Salzburg Festival first staged an opera that has just opened at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York: Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel. Based on Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film of that title, the opera tells the story of a lavish dinner party
Leon Trotsky, a Hundred Years After the Russian Revolution
Joshua Rubenstein— The romantic figure of Leon Trotsky, a man who helped lead the Bolsheviks to power a hundred years ago and then came to embody defiance of Joseph Stalin, continues to haunt our imagination. He joined the Bolsheviks as an outspoken teenager, then endured arrest and Siberian exile before
Ep. 8 – A History of Things That Go Bump in the Night
On this special Halloween edition of the podcast, cultural historian Leo Braudy, author of Haunted, sat down with us to talk about the history of monsters and other scary creatures. Spooky!
Æthelred, the Unready?
Levi Roach— Æthelred initially identified himself and his counsellors as the guilty parties and set about remedying his ways, restoring church lands, promoting new figures, fostering reform and making amends. This also coincided with his reconciliation with his mother, who was to remain his guiding hand till her death (999
Caged lies and Truth drugs
Helen Fry— The allegations of brutality at the London Cage are shocking enough, but evidence emerges to reveal for the first time in this book that Colonel Scotland apparently sanctioned the use of ‘truth drugs’ on his prisoners. Clearly, this needs to be placed in the broader context of the
Taming the US Shadow Banks
Tamim Bayoumi— US financial reformers faced a fundamentally different issue from those in Europe. Banks in Europe were under a flawed single system. The issues in the United States, on the other hand, centered on the dual nature of the pre-crisis banking system that contained a relatively tightly regulated core and
Strangers of Familiar Soil
Edward Dallam Melillo— On October 31, 1967, California governor Ronald Reagan addressed seventy-three diplomats, businesspeople, and academics who had assembled in Sacramento for the fourth annual Chile-California Conference. As the former Hollywood actor and future US president told his audience, “Well, Chile is something special to California, and to Californians