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I also wasn’t that impressed with History of Literature. Good range but the discussion never felt that deep and there was something offputting about the dude’s up-and-down delivery. Would recommend ‘Literature and History’ though. The host is maybe a little too much of a cheerfully earnest academic - I always skip the little acoustic guitar songs at the end - but he’s good on the cultural context for what he’s talking about and goes into some depth. The show started with Gilgamesh and is currently somewhere around episode 100, still working through late antiquity, so wouldn’t expect 17th c. lit anytime soon…
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Mar 13, 2022 10:04
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It’s myth and legend rather than history but Candlelit Tale is quite good. More from a historiographical angle, like the battles of Moytura never happened (unless you want to get fully into ‘the Fir Bolg represent this ethnic group, the Tuatha Dé represent this ethnic group’ which is questionable at best) but it’s valuable for looking at how Irish scholars/antiquarians from the early medieval period through to pretty much the 18th/19th century thought about Irish history. Just generally good fun too, both the performances of the mythic pieces and the contextual discussions around them.
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Sep 4, 2022 10:17
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Same kind of
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Oct 16, 2023 14:51
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In Our Time is still good but Melvyn Bragg does sound every one of his 84 years. Perfectly sharp and still getting amusingly mock-annoyed when a guest veers off-script, just audibly an elderly guy wheezing a bit. Separately I’ve been enjoying some of the New Books Network podcasts: new books in history, in archaeology, etc. They’re all interviews with authors of just-published academic works so they often at least aware of the cutting edge and go into a lot of detail. It’s a real firehouse of content though, they seem to have hosts or representatives from all over, meaning that if you don’t narrow the focus, your feed pulls in a few eps each day.
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Dec 30, 2023 11:44
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I like how Tides of History takes prehistory (including much of the Iron Age) on its own terms. He doesn’t throw up his hands at the lack of written documents and go oh well, nothing can possibly be known. He’s an archaeologist and when he talks about larger cultural or social trends in that language - state formation, ethnogenesis, the use of different food sources, adoption of new technologies - you can tell he gets it. He’s also been very good on the larger debates re: aDNA, migration and indo-European stuff. Not being blinded by the potential and jumping to simplistic conclusions, like in the earlier days of archaeogenetics, but equally not dismissing it out of hand. Agreed re: the interviews though. I quite like them but the ‘excited grad student talking to someone whose paper they liked’ vibes are strong.
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Mar 14, 2024 23:01
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