The Canon Club

Dmitri Shostakovich is considered one of the great composers of the 20th century, and one of the greatest of all Russian musicians. Noted for versatility of style, his work includes 15 symphonies, string quartets, concertos, but also operas, ballets, and a number of works composed for theatre and cinema. His work also became the soundtrack of the Soviet Union and its turbulent existence, first und...

Vincent Van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherland, the son of a Protestant clergyman and into a family with close ties to the art world. Initially he struggled to find direction, working in various roles in his homeland, in England and France, at one time settling as preacher among Belgian coal miners. But increasingly he dedicated himself to painting, mixing in Paris with leading...

Thomas Mann was born into an upper-middle class family in Lübeck in 1875, son of a German father and Brazilian mother. After his father's death the family moved to Munich where he and his brother, Heinrich, established themselves as writers. Thomas Mann married into the wealthy Jewish Pringsheim but despite a seemingly happy marriage and sixe children, he had str...

This week, Paul and Ed discuss the emergence of a style of building which represents the birth of the western architecture, namely the Romanesque. Across Europe there remain thousands of buildings which are still categorised are Romanesque, but what does the term mean, where does it come from and what defines building of this kind? To help us find out we are joined by John McNeill, an Oxford exper...

The novel Anna Karenina was published by Count Leo Tolstoy in 1878. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between Anna, a respectably married upper-class woman, and a young army officer, Count Vronsky. Anna, torn between duty and passion, cannot resist the latter and is drawn to her destruction. It is also the story of Count Levin, a character in no small part based on Tolstoy himse...

Anton Bruckner was born in 1824 in Ansfelden near Linz in Upper Austria, the eldest of eleven children born to a schoolmaster. He became a teacher then was appointed an organist, eventually moving to Vienna. Bruckner was a late developer as a composer, lacking confidence in his abilities. After various early efforts including two preparatory symphonies he wrote nine fully recognised symphonies, th...

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s later and darkest tragedies. Set in eleventh-century Scotland, it tells the story of how Macbeth, triumphant and promoted by the King after triumph in battle, has his future Kingship foretold by three witches and is moved, with the encouragement of his wife, to murder the king and take the throne. Macbeth and his wife are consumed by guilt and ma...

Born outside Milan in 1571, Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio trained in a local workshop and then launched himself as an artist in Rome in his early 20s. His striking and highly individual style won him wide acclaim and patronage from high levels in the Church and the aristocracy. But his quarrelsome personality and violence meant he was in and out of jail and culminated in his committ...

Paul Morland and Ed West are trying to get to grips with the Western canon. Like most of us, they feel under-read and incompetent in the presence of the great Western artistic inheritance. The stuff that shaped our civilisation. From Thomas Mann's Death In Venice, to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. From Macbeth to A Doll's House, Goya to Goethe, Canterbury Tales to The Ring Cycle. It's a world we often n...