The Essay

Joanna Robertson believes it's the everyday moments that shape, frame and colour our lives. That includes observing, or imagining, the lives of others around us. Are portraitists creating a mere image, or capturing the authentic selves of their subjects? The celebrated Belle Epoque painter Giovanni Boldini became a darling of Parisian society with his glamorous portrayals of society women, but a s...

'It's only the minutiae of life that are important,' wrote the Austro-Hungarian author Joseph Roth, announcing that he was 'going for a walk'. Joanna Robertson feels, and does, the same, and finds that far from small, the minutiae are actually infinite. Just walking from her Paris flat to a nearby bakery, yields so many observations, memories and encounters, that they conjure up the life of the wh...

The minutiae of the everyday frame, shape and colour our lives. Joanna Robertson lives in Paris, and finds that the views from her fourth-floor flat have a real influence on her daily life. Looking out over the neighbourhood of Montparnasse, her windows let her eye and mind wander over the sites of much recent and not so recent cultural history. Former residents whose residences she can still see,...

The minutiae of life have always fascinated Joanna Robertson. Moments like opening the curtains or shutters in the morning, putting the key in the lock when returning home, making dinner, or smelling the cooking of the neighbours. The author Virginia Woolf dismissed everyday repetitive rituals as 'moments of non-being', by contrast to epiphanies of experience or understanding that she saw as 'mome...

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Concluding the series, Paterson Joseph retraces the footsteps of pioneering writer, composer and abolitionist Ignatius Sancho through Westminster to a lost grave beneath the still-pulsing streets. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today, Anita Sethi journeys to the grave of her heroine Anne Brontë, overlooking the sea she so loved, and considers why she was buried high on a hill in Scarborough, away from her better known sisters. Her grave has over the years been neglected and ravaged by...

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today, Diana Souhami steps into the tomb of Radclyffe Hall in London’s Highgate Cemetery, where The Well of Loneliness author resides with her lover, her lover’s husband and their dog Tulip – an aptly unconventional set-up in death as in life. Producer: Ciaran...

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Paul Muldoon recalls numerous pilgrimages to the rugged west coast of Ireland, where the remains of WB Yeats may or may not be buried, as per his poetical final request. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Lauren Elkin finds Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise, Paris - where the outsider in life overshadows in death the greats of French literature who jostle for space in the famous cemetery. Producer: Ciaran Bermingham

From full stops to emojis, a Tudor letter to texting - how has the use of punctuation marks developed over the centuries? Florence Hazrat thinks about the way brackets help us understand the pandemic. The first parentheses appear in a 1399 manuscript by the Italian lawyer Coluccio Salutati, but - as her essay outlines - it took over 500 years for the sign born at the same time as the bracket, the...

Xangô (the god of thunder) and Paso Ñañigo’, composed by the Cuban Moises Simons, were two of the numbers performed by Elsie Houston in the clubs of Paris in the 1920s. Also able to sing soprano in Portuguese, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, Elsie's performances in Afro-Brazilian dialects chimed with the fashion for all things African. Adjoa Osei's essay traces Elsie's conn...

Africa's first filmmakers boldly revealed how, and why, colonialism lived on after the independences. Sarah Jilani takes a closer look at the works of Ousmane Sembène and Souleymane Cissé. The Malian director's 1982 film Finye (the Bambara word for wind) considers students as the winds of change, whilst Sembène's Mandabi, made in 1968, takes its title from a Wolof word deriving from the French for...

In 1821, Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater paved the way for drug memoirs, but how do contemporary novelists help us see the global opium trade in a different way? Fariha Shaikh's essay looks at the novel An Insular Possession published in 1986 by Timothy Mo, and at Amitav Ghosh's trilogy which began in 2008 with Sea of Poppies. She also quotes from her researches into The Calcutta...

What made him great? Celebrated as a military leader, Alexander took over an empire created by the Persians. Julia Hartley's essay looks at two examples of myth making about Alexander: The Persian Boy, a 1972 historical novel by the English writer Mary Renault and the Shānāmeh or ‘Book of Kings’, an epic written by the medieval Persian poet Abdolghassem Ferdowsi. Julia Hartley lectures at King's C...

Sculptures like mouldy fruit, sea creatures that look like oil, blocks of ice carved from a melting glacier and transported to a gallery, reforesting a disused quarry: Vid Simoniti looks at different examples of environmental art and asks whether they create empathy with nature and inspire behaviour change or do we really need pictures of loft insulation and ground source heat pumps displayed on g...

An 1856 portrait shows a 40-year-old man from Benin who managed to secure his freedom after being captured. Dasalu was taken from Dahomey to Cuba, alongside over five hundred adults and children in the ship Grey Eagle. Once in Havana, he worked for the Count of Fernandina but managed to get a letter to a missionary Charles Gollmer back in Africa. Jake Subryan Richard's essay traces the way one man...

The discovery of goffering irons, the tools used to shape ruffs, by an archaeological dig in North America, gives us clues about the way the first English settlers lived. Lauren Working's essay looks at the symbolism of the Elizabethan fashion for ruffs. Now back in fashion on zoom, they were denounced by Puritans, shown off in portraits of explorers like Raleigh and Drake, and seen by the Chesape...

Images of Cyril and Methodios adorn libraries, universities, cathedrals and passport pages in Slavonic speaking countries from Bulgaria to Russia, North Macedonia to Ukraine. But the journeys undertaken as religious envoys by these inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet have led to competing claims and political disagreements. Mirela Ivanova's essay considers the complications of basing ideas about na...

Comrade or "marra" in north east dialect, and the "dharma" or the way - were put together in a portmanteau word by poet Bill Martin (1925-2010). Poet and New Generation Thinker Jake Morris-Campbell reflects on this idea of Marradharma and what it offers to future generations growing up in the post-Brexit and post-industrial landscape of the north east. In his essay, Jake remembers the pilgrimage h...

"Delight in disorder" was celebrated in a poem by Robert Herrick (1591-1674) and the long hair, flamboyant dress and embrace of earrings that made up Cavalier style has continued to exert influence as a gender fluid look. Lauren Working's essay considers examples ranging from Van Dyck portraits and plays by Aphra Behn to the advertising for the exhibition called Fashioning Masculinities which runs...

From school to work to the military – uniforms can signal authority and belonging. But what happens when uniforms are worn by those whom institutions normally exclude? Or when they’re used out of context? New Generation Thinker Tom Smith explores playful, creative and queer uses of uniforms, from the cult film Mädchen in Uniform, recently released in the UK by the BFI, to documents he discovered i...

Fashion from the 1990s to the 1790s and back again: Jade Halbert traces the history of Droopy & Browns, a fashion business renowned for the flamboyant and elegant work of its designer, Angela Holmes. While many British designers of the late twentieth century looked to replicate a lean, monochromatic, almost corporate New York sensibility, Angela Holmes gloried in drama and historicism. A favou...

Oscar Wilde's famous line from The Importance of Being Earnest focuses on what we might not expect to find - Shahidha Bari's essay considers the range of objects we do carry around with us and why bags have been important throughout history: from designs drawn up in 1497 by Leonardo to the symbolism of Mary Poppins' carpet bag in PL Travers' novel to the luggage carried by refugees travelling acro...

"My lady's corselet" was developed by a pioneer of free verse on the frontlines of feminism, the poet Mina Loy. Celebrated in the 1910s as the quintessential New Woman, her love of freedom was shadowed by a darker quest to perfect the female body, as her unusual designs for a figure-correcting corset show. Sophie Oliver asks how she fits into a history of body-correcting garments and cosmetic surg...

Five Irish writers each take a passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses and, through a close reading, explore its meaning and significance within the wider work, as well as what it means to them. Reading Ulysses is a famously challenging experience for most readers, so can our Essayists help? In the final essay of the series, novelist Nuala O'Connor chooses the last episode of the book - Penelope - whic...