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Booking Overview
Metrics
Episodes: 213
Frequency: Weekly
Rating: 4.7/5.0
Estimated listeners: 1k-10k
Gender skew: Unknown
Location: USA
Contact Information
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Host
Rosemary Hill - British historian, writer and London Review of Books contributor known for work on architecture, cultural history and British history.
Seamus Perry - British literary scholar, poet and academic specializing in English literature, poetry and Romanticism.
Mark Ford - British poet, literary critic and academic known for writing on modern and contemporary poetry and literature.
Meehan Crist - Writer, editor and researcher whose work addresses literature, science and the environmental crisis.
Peter Godfrey-Smith - Australian philosopher of science and author known for work on philosophy of biology, evolution, cognition and science.
Booking Intelligence
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Recent Guest Discussions
Vanessa Harding - London Under The Stuart Monarchs, Early Modern Urban Life, The English Civil War And The Political And Cultural Development Of London.
Recent Topics
Episodes
London Revisited: The Road to Civil War
July 13, 2026
When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half of Westminster up in 1605. But the plot failed, and with James’s reign came a new, lavish court life, the emergence of the first newspapers amid the booming print industry around St Paul’s, and, with the guidance of Inigo Jones, the arrival of the renaissance in London’s architecture wit...
Narrative Poems: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth
July 05, 2026
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s interest in rural poverty as much as the natural world. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the two poems as part of the literary revolu...
Nature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
June 28, 2026
Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. Braiding Sweetgrass was an enormous success for a small press publication, becoming a bestseller and a touchstone for readers searching for alternatives to extractivist realpolitik. In this episode, Meehan and Peter look at the most compelling features of Kim...
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