Eccentric Circles

Stephanie and Fred head to the pub in Fitzrovia to carry out the post mortem on the series. Amongst other pressing matters, they ask how our subjects hold up against their more famous Bloomsbury contemporaries. How much should individuals be forgiven for being products of their time? And, is anyone too important to be cancelled? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To wrap things up we return to conversations with several academics we heard from earlier.  We ask them why is it that our subjects are so much less known than their Bloomsbury Set contemporaries. We focus on the end of the Machine Age and its anticipation of the Space Age to come, and ask how our subjects fared in the run up to World War 2 when faced with a choice of mostly totalitarian futures....

Machen was a great influence on HP Lovecraft, and the development of the fantasy and horror genres. Stephen King is a fan.  There is a direct line from Machen's writing to Dungeons and Dragons, grail quests such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Game of Thrones.  Machen bemoaned modernity, the mechanised slaughter of the Great War and especially the dreary Church of England, which had los...

Immensely talented and good looking, in the years leading up to the Great War Augustus John was a celebrity. London restaurants named dishes after him. But now he has faded into obscurity.  The man who might today have been as famous as Picasso was unable to live up to his artistic promise. Yet the bohemian lifestyle he led, his dress and commitment to non-conformity was his true great work and wa...

This time we eschew drugs and the occult, and instead focus on traditional christianity.  We take a look at two men whose faith was central to their being and work. They were the artists, Stanley Spencer and David Jones. Spencer was a painter, and Jones was an engraver, painter, printer, and poet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We round off our investigation into the ways the occult has impacted the present. Yoga was an “exotic” practice that percolated into the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It re-emerged as a fringe New Age hippie craze, before becoming the global industry, valued at many billions of dollars, that it is today. These days yoga and  mindfulness are seen as central components of...

The legal situation around drugs was very different in London at the turn of the 20th century from what it is now. Opium was a go-to painkiller. And cocaine and cannabis products were also very widely available. In 1896, London hosted its first hallucinogenic trip when Havelock Ellis boiled up some peyote buttons in his flat. For Bohemian London, the time was ripe for experimentation. Later on, dr...

Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare are partially responsible for the development of what is known as sex magic.  Crowley was, among other things, an occultist, an important figure in the propagation of yoga in the West, a conjurer of demons, and a heroin addict. He enjoyed a licentious, all encompassing sexuality. His law, “Do What Thou Wilt,” has arguably become the dominant way of seeing re...

We'll be covering the modern holy trinity of Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll, along with other more traditional religious devotion. We'll look into the popularity of the occult and its lasting legacy. And we'll be asking: "Where better to escape to: the future, full of progress and space travel, or to the comfort of the past?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

WARNING: this episode uses explicit language almost from the start. In 1918, the year that the First World War ended, a slim little book was published. Its title was Married Love, and it was going to change the course of Western sexuality forever.   Its author was Marie Stopes. She believed that mutual orgasm was an essential component of a successful marriage. This was a radical, progressive view...

London sees the arrival of Italian Futurism with its glorification of machinery, war, and above all, the motor car. The Futurists, in turn, engender Vorticism, possibly Britain’s only homegrown avant-garde movement. The Vorticists believe that artists should be supreme representations of the individual, that they should make challenging art which rattles the cage of bourgeois society, that art cou...

At the turn of the 20th century, in Britain establishment tastes in art prevailed and leaned traditional. Despite being the heart of a global empire, the country suffered from an island mentality. The fall of Oscar Wilde and his subsequent escape to Paris only added to a suspicion of all things French. Decadence itself had been a French import. The English, according to the painter and writer, Wyn...

The Edwardian period tends to get a bad rap - legitimately in the case of human zoos - but is there anything for which we ought to be grateful? Because of how it ended, with the carnage of the First World War, it’s easy to see the time as the quiet before the storm. But as we saw last episode, this was far from the case. There was rampant culture war, a crisis of confidence about the Empire and wh...

We tend to think of the Edwardian period as a dull interlude, where a complacent ruling class lazed away in blissful ignorance of what was coming: industrialised warfare and the dissolution of empire. In reality, this was a time of huge upheaval. There was the fight for Irish Home Rule, suffragism, socialism and vegetarianism. Telegraph cables stretched around the world. Darwinism had dealt creati...

Right at London’s centre is Trafalgar Square, presided over, from his column, by the wounded figure of Admiral Nelson. Running into the Square from the East is The Strand. It has been a thoroughfare since Roman times. Along with the trams and omnibuses, carts and cattle, walked our cast of mad, bad and brilliant thinkers whose ideas and energy helped to build the world we know today. Over the cour...

Some periods, some cities give rise to ideas and circles of thinkers, that are both of the time and outside it. Machine Age London has had a deep legacy on all our lives - on matters as disparate as education, sex, drugs, yoga and rock ‘n’ roll. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices