Épisodes

  • Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

    Dorothy Armstrong, "Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)
    Sep 10 2025
    A spellbinding look at the history of the world through the stories of twelve carpets Beautiful, sensuous, and enigmatic, great carpets follow power. Emperors, shahs, sultans and samurai crave them as symbols of earthly domination. Shamans and priests desire them to evoke the spiritual realm. The world's 1% hunger after them as displays of extreme status. And yet these seductive objects are made by poor and illiterate weavers, using the most basic materials and crafts; hedgerow plants for dyes, fibres from domestic animals, and the millennia-old skills of interweaving warps, wefts and knots. In Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets (St. Martin's Press, 2025), Dorothy Armstrong tells the histories of some of the world's most fascinating carpets, exploring how these textiles came into being then were transformed as they moved across geography and time in the slipstream of the great. She shows why the world's powerful were drawn to them, but also asks what was happening in the weavers' lives, and how they were affected by events in the world outside their tent, village or workshop. In its wide-ranging examination of these dazzling objects, from the 5th century BCE contents of the tombs of Scythian chieftains, to the carpets under the boots of Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the 1945 Yalta Peace Conference, Threads of Empire uncovers a new, hitherto hidden past right beneath our feet. Dorothy Armstrong is a historian of the material culture of South, Central and West Asia. She has taught at the Royal College of Art, Edinburgh College of Art and the University of Oxford. She was the Beattie Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, where she is now honorary research fellow. Threads of Empire is her first book. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    1 h et 14 min
  • Leah Hochman and Stanley M. Davids, "Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought" (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023)

    Leah Hochman and Stanley M. Davids, "Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought" (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023)
    Sep 7 2025
    The story of Judaism is the story of change. Throughout Jewish history, revolutionary events and subversive ideas have burst forth, repeatedly transforming Jewish experience. Re-forming Judaism: Moments of Disruption in Jewish Thought (Central Conference of American Rabbis, 2023), edited by Rabbi Stanley M. Davids (z’l) and Dr. Leah Hochman seeks to explore these ideas---and the individuals behind them---by delving into historical disruptions that led to lasting change in Jewish thought. The book includes distinguished array of scholars who take us on a journey from the disruptive prophets of ancient times, through rational, mystical, and extremist medievalists, to the impact of Haskalah and early Reform thought in modernity. It also explore contemporary innovations such as changes in liturgy and music, feminism, and post-Holocaust theology are included, as are insights into Sephardic and North African experiences. By showing how Judaism forms---then re-forms, and re-forms again---the contributors demonstrate that tensions between continuity and change have always been part of Jewish life, helping us to both understand the past and contemplate the future. Today, we are in conversation with Dr. Hochman Associate professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Los Angeles. Our host, Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    50 min
  • Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)

    Lyndsey Stonebridge on Hannah Arendt's Lessons on Love and Disobedience (JP)
    Sep 5 2025
    An Arendt expert has arrived at Arendt-obsessed Recall This Book. Lyndsey Stonebridge discusses her widely praised 2024 We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Lesley sees both radical evil and the banality of evil at work in Nazi Germany and in the causes of suffering and death in Gaza today. She compares the moral idiocy of authoritarians (like the murderous Nazis and those who are starving Gaza) to that of philosophers who cannot hear the echoes of what they are doing. Lesley and John discuss Arendt’s belief in the fragile ethics of the Founding Fathers, with its checks and balances and its politics based not on emotion but cool deliberation. Arendt could say that “The fundamental contradiction of [America] is political freedom coupled with social slavery,”” but why was she too easy on the legacy of imperial racism in America, missing its settler-colonial logic? Arendt read W. E. B. DuBois (who saw and said this) but perhaps, says Lesley, not attentively enough. Lyndsey is not a fan of Jonathan Glazer's Zone of Interest, because it makes the evil banality of extermination monstrous all over again (cf. her"Mythic Banality: Jonathan Glazer and Hannah Arendt.") Responsibility is crucial: She praises Arendt for distinguishing between temptation and coercion. Mentioned in the episode: Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 one of the last great historical events in Arendt’s lifetime. Lesley praises “reading while walking” and the unpacking of the totalitarian in Anna Burns’s marvelous Norther Ireland novel, Milkman. Hannah Pitkin’s wonderful 1998 The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social, emphasizes Arendt’s idea that although we are free, we can forfeit that freedom by assuming we are rule-bound. Arendt on the challenge of identity: “When one is attacked as a Jew, one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew.” The Holocaust is a crime agains humanity a crime against the human status, a crime "perpetrated on the body of the Jewish people".” Various books by Hannah Arendt come up: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on teh Banality of Evil. (1963). Judgement in Arendt is crucial from earliest days studying Kant and in her final works (among The Life of the Mind) she speaks of the moments when "the mind goes visiting.” Her earliest ideas about love and natality are in Love and Saint Augustine (1929, not published in English until 1996). Hannah Arendt is buried at Bard, near her husband Heinrich Blucher and opposite Philip Roth, who reportedly wanted to capture some of the spillover Arendt traffic. James Baldwin's essay “The Fire Next Time” (1963) caused Arendt to write Baldwin about the difference between pariah love and the love of those in power, who think that love can justify lashing out with power. Recallable Books Lyndsey praises Leah Ypi's (Free) forthcoming memoir about her Albanian family, Indignity. John recalls E. M Forster, Howard’s End a novel that thinks philosophically (in a novelistic vein) about how to continue being an individual in a new Imperial Britain. Listen and Read here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    56 min
  • Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025)

    Santiago Zabala, "Signs from the Future: Philosophy of Warnings" (Columbia UP, 2025)
    Sep 4 2025
    Returning to NBN is the philosopher Santiago Zabala, here to introduce his new book Signs from the Future: A Philosophy of Warnings (Columbia University Press, 2025). Warnings, for Zabala, are not synonymous with predictions. They are instead as much about the present as the future. They point towards already present crisis and contradictions. They also attempt to reorient us towards alternative paths. Embedded deeply in the critical hermeneutics of writers such as Heidegger, Arendt and Beauvoir but exploring contemporary issues such as gender, climate change and machine warfare, Zabala’s book is an accessible and applicable text that simultaneously tries to destabilize us in our present complacency while grounding us in an urgent need to seek alternatives. Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is the author of numerous books, including one previously discussed on this show, Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    54 min
  • Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)

    Diana Souhami, "No Modernism Without Lesbians" (Head of Zeus Book, 2020)
    Sep 3 2025
    Diana Souhami talks about her new book No Modernism Without Lesbians, out 2020 with Head of Zeus books. A Sunday Times Book of the Year 2020. This is the extraordinary story of how a singular group of women in a pivotal time and place – Paris, between the wars – fostered the birth of the Modernist movement. Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney, and Gertrude Stein. A trailblazing publisher; a patron of artists; a society hostess; a groundbreaking writer. They were all women who loved women. They rejected the patriarchy and made lives of their own – forming a community around them in Paris. Each of these four central women interacted with a myriad of others, some of the most influential, most entertaining, most shocking and most brilliant figures of the age. Diana Souhami weaves together their stories to create a vivid moving tapestry of life among the Modernists in pre-war Paris. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    39 min
  • Oswyn Murray, "The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present" (Harvard UP, 2024)

    Oswyn Murray, "The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present" (Harvard UP, 2024)
    Sep 3 2025
    The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present (Harvard UP, 2024) traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which successive generations have reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary worlds. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the conflict between Athens and Sparta became a touchstone in the development of republicanism, and in the nineteenth, Athens came to represent the democratic ideal. Amid the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, the Greeks were imagined in an age of suffering, inspiring defenses against nationalism, Nazism, communism, and capitalism. Oswyn Murray draws powerful conclusions from this historiography, using the ever-changing narrative of ancient Greece to illuminate grand theories of human society. Analyzing the influence of historians and philosophers including Hegel, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Braudel, Murray also considers how coming generations might perceive the Greeks. Along the way, The Muse of History offers rare behind-the-scenes glimpses of figures who shaped the study of ancient Greece, some devotedly cited to this day and others forgotten. We sit in on a class with Arnaldo Momigliano; meet Moses Finley after his arrival in England; eavesdrop on Paul Veyne, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet; and rediscover Michel Foucault. A thrilling work that rewrites established scholarly traditions and locates important ideas in unexpected places, The Muse of History reminds us that the meaning of the past is always made in and for the present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    1 h et 2 min
  • Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

    Lucy Delap, "Feminisms: A Global History" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
    Sep 2 2025
    Today Jana Byars talks to Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge University, about her new book Feminisms: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2020). This outstanding work, available later this year, takes a thematic approach to the topic of global feminist history to provide a unified vision that maintains appropriate nuance. Delap is a gender historian, writ large. Her first book, The Feminist Avant Garde (Cambridge 2007), examined the development of feminism in the Anglo-American context, tracing the ideas as developed in trans-Atlantic discourse. She then directed her gaze back to her homeland in subsequent publications, including Knowing their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford 2011) and the 2013 Palgrave release, Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Britain since 1890, Delap explore another expression of gender altogether. The breadth of her scholarship – women and men, intellectual elites and domestic servants, adults and children – prepared her to write this broad but fairly concise work of history. Enjoy our lively discussion! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    52 min
  • David Edmonds, "Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need" (Princeton UP, 2025)

    David Edmonds, "Death in a Shallow Pond: A Philosopher, a Drowning Child, and Strangers in Need" (Princeton UP, 2025)
    Sep 1 2025
    Imagine this: You’re walking past a shallow pond and spot a toddler thrashing around in the water, in obvious danger of drowning. You look around for her parents, but nobody is there. You’re the only person who can save her and you must act immediately. But as you approach the pond you remember that you’re wearing your most expensive shoes. Wading into the water will ruin them—and might make you late for a meeting. Should you let the child drown? The philosopher Peter Singer published this thought experiment in 1972, arguing that allowing people in the developing world to die, when we could easily help them by giving money to charity, is as morally reprehensible as saving our shoes instead of the drowning child. Can this possibly be true? In Death in a Shallow Pond, David Edmonds tells the remarkable story of Singer and his controversial idea, tracing how it radically changed the way many think about poverty—but also how it has provoked scathing criticisms.Death in a Shallow Pond describes the experiences and world events that led Singer to make his radical case and how it moved some young philosophers to establish the Effective Altruism movement, which tries to optimize philanthropy. The book also explores the reactions of critics who argue that the Shallow Pond and Effective Altruism are unrealistic, misguided, and counterproductive, neglecting the causes of—and therefore perpetuating—poverty. Ultimately, however, Edmonds argues that the Shallow Pond retains the power to shape how we live in a world in which terrible and unnecessary suffering persists. David Edmonds is the bestselling author of many critically acclaimed and popular books on philosophy, including Wittgenstein’s Poker (with John Eidinow). His other books include Parfit, The Murder of Professor Schlick, and Would You Kill the Fat Man? (all Princeton). A Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Oxford Institute and a former BBC radio journalist, Edmonds hosts, with Nigel Warburton, the Philosophy Bites podcast, which has been downloaded nearly 50 million times. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history
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    56 min