The Hedgehog and the Fox (2024)

09/03/2020

After a three-month hiatus, the Hedgehog and the Fox is back with a new spring season. To get it under way, in this latest podcast we explore the role of pigs and pork in shaping American history, in the company of historian Joseph Anderson, who told me: Swine, like so many species, are very opportunistic and they are able to exploit a niche. [ 308 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2020/03/09/american-gehographies/

Pork has been called 'the meat that built a nation'. In this podcast, historian Joseph Anderson explains why pigs and pork were so important in US history

27/11/2019

This week we have an interview with Sarah Caro, who describes herself on Twitter as ‘Editorial Director for Social Sciences at Princeton University Press, long-suffering Arsenal fan and qualified optimist’. In this interview we focus mostly on the first of those, though the third clearly influences everything Sarah does. As you’ll hear, she’s had an amazingly dynamic career, having worked at a significant number of leading publishers in senior roles across a number of disciplines. [ 110 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/11/27/conversations-with-publishers-sarah-caro-princeton-university-press/

Sarah Caro, Princeton University Press's editorial director for social sciences, talks about her career and her motivations

18/11/2019

My guest today is Charlie Gere, who hates the Lake District; so much so, in fact, that his new book is unambiguously entitled I Hate the Lake District. But it’s not a diatribe against fudge shops and coach tours. He writes in his introduction: ‘I love the North West of England, but hate the “Lake District”, and the way it’s fetishized and sacralized as some kind of “unspoilt” paradise, a consolatory Eden to which those battered by contemporary life can retreat. [ 188 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/11/18/charlie-gere-hates-the-lakes/

Charlie Gere explains why he loves the North West but hates the Lake District and the new nature writing.

26/09/2019

My guest in this programme is Duncan Exley, who in his recent book, The End of Aspiration, warns: Living standards over the coming years are predicted to stagnate for middle-income households and to fall for those with low incomes, and in occupational terms, people born in the early 1980s are the first group since comparable records began in 1946 to be in lower-status jobs than their parents were at the same age. [ 287 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/09/26/duncan-exley-the-end-of-aspiration/

My guest in this programme is Duncan Exley, who in his recent book, The End of Aspiration, warns: Living standards over the coming years are predicted to stagnate for… Read More

10/09/2019

This week we have an interview with Christie Henry, who’s director of Princeton University Press. She joined PUP two years ago in September 2017, after twenty-four years at the University of Chicago Press, where she was Editorial Director for Sciences, Social Sciences, and Reference Publishing. In the course of our conversation, Christie mentioned that she thought university presses had some 'reputational work' to do. [ 508 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/09/10/christie-henry-shaping-knowledge-shaping-communication/

Christie Henry, director of Princeton University Press, discusses the landscape of university press publishing today

25/08/2019

This week, Georgian London as you’ve never experienced it before: populated with animals, pullulating with animals – pigs snuffling in the dirt recycling the city’s waste; herds of sheep and cattle, thousands of them each week, being driven through the streets to and from Smithfield market; horses being used for every form of transport and playing a key part in old and new industries; barking guard dogs protecting property from prowling burglars. [ 403 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/08/25/thomas-almeroth-williams-georgian-london-a-city-full-of-beasts/

The animals of Georgian London are largely overlooked by historians, yet the city could not have functioned without them. Historian Thomas Almeroth-Williams on redressing that neglect

01/08/2019

This week, a new life of Geoffrey Chaucer, the fourteenth-century poet who is regarded as a father of English literature, though that's a stereotype my guest, Marion Turner, wants to ditch. Marion Turner I think a lot of the ways that we think about Chaucer now are very problematic. Particularly the idea of 'the father of English literature', which immediately makes people think he's a bit boring, that he's an old man and a patriarch, and that he's didactic. [ 1,012 more word ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/08/01/marion-turner-on-chaucer-a-european-life/

Marion Turner discusses her vibrant, critically acclaimed new life of Geoffrey Chaucer and invites us to look beyond the tired 'father of English literature' label

25/07/2019

This week we have the director’s cut of an interview with Caroline Priday, who’s Global Promotions Director for Princeton University Press, and head of their European office in Woodstock, near Oxford. (Extracts from this interview featured in the podcast marking Princeton’s European office’s 20th birthday recently and longer interviews with other participants in that programme will appear in the next few months, including an extensive interview with the Press’s director, Christie Henry.) [ 136 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/07/25/caroline-priday-on-promoting-university-press-books/

Princeton University Press's global promotions director talks about her career and promoting academic books in the 21st century

17/07/2019

This week, we ask, are Britain and France still trapped in their own myth-making about their colonial pasts? My guest on the programme is Robert Gildea, who is professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. On the British situation he told me: "One of the elements that 'this island story' finds difficult to cope with is the fact that Britain now is very much a multicultural society. [ 350 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/07/17/robert-gildea-on-colonialisms-lingering-legacy/

Are Britain and France still trapped in the myths of their colonial past? Oxford historian Robert Gildea argues they are still harming our politics today

01/07/2019

This week's programme is rather unusual: it has six guests rather than one. To mark the twentieth birthday of Princeton University Press's European office in Woodstock, near Oxford, I spoke to some PUP staff members about their jobs and their views on the publishing landscape. The extract below is from my conversation with Christie Henry, who's been director of the press since 2017. [ 1,014 more word ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/07/01/princeton-university-press-europe-at-20/

We mark the 20th birthday of Princeton University Press Europe by talking to staff members about their jobs, motivations, challenges and enthusiasms

25/06/2019

This week the Hedgehog and the Fox explore four centuries in the afterlife of Joan of Arc. Our guest, Gail Orgelfinger, is a medievalist by training and a founding member of the International Joan of Arc Society; she’s also senior lecturer emerita at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her new book from Penn State University Press, Joan of Arc in the English Imagination 1429-1829… [ 300 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/06/25/gail-orgelfinger-of-the-afterlife-of-joan-of-arc/

Why was Joan of Arc such a fascinating figure in the English imagination for centuries after she was executed? Literary historian Gail Orgelfinger explains

24/05/2019

This week, another in our series of Conversations with Translators. And with my guest Tim Allen, we move for the first time (at last) beyond European languages. I’m always interested in stories of how translations come about, because chance so often plays a much bigger part than design. So it was with Tim, visiting Asia for the first time twenty years ago as part of his job, knowing no Vietnamese, but hearing from everyone he met about this book, … [ 312 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/05/24/tim-allen-on-vietnams-national-epic/

Timothy Allen discusses how he learned Vietnamese in order to translate Vietnam's national epic, The Song of Kieu (Penguin Classics)

15/05/2019

This week, the Hedgehog and the Fox explore the benefits of speaking more than one language in the company of science writer Marek Kohn. Marek has recently published a book called Four Words for Friend, a reference to the fact that a Russian speaker has a choice of four different ways of indicating the degree of closeness he or she feels towards someone who in English would simply be referred to as a friend. [ 201 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/05/15/marek-kohn-four-words-for-friend/

Are there advantages to speaking more than one language? Will computer translation eradicate them? Science writer Marek Kohn discusses why multilingualism matters

29/04/2019

This week, the Hedgehog and the Fox investigate the origins of human musicality by looking for musical ability and perception in other animals, including rhesus macaques, zebra finches, a cockatoo named Snowball, and Ronan, a headbanging California sea lion. Our guide to this Evolving Animal Orchestra, as his book title puts it, is Henkjan Honing, professor of music cognition at the University of Amsterdam. [ 265 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/04/29/evolving-animal-orchestra/

How did human musicality evolve and what can we learn about it by studying non-human animals? Henkjan Honing, professor of music cognition, explains

12/04/2019

This week, we launch a new series, Conversations with Publishers. It seems to me that being curious about books needn’t stop at the people who write them; it can also mean being curious about those who commission them and publish them; those who decide what they look like and how we discover them. And as most, though not quite all, of the books featured on this podcast come from university presses, that will be the main focus in this new series. [ 415 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/04/12/conversations-with-publishers-derek-krissoff-west-virginia-university-press/

In the first in a new series, Derek Krissoff talks about his career in university presses and why he belives they are 'low-key thriving' today

03/04/2019

Bradley Stephens introduces Victor Hugo from George Miller on Vimeo.
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/04/03/bradley-stephens-victor-hugo-video/

Bradley Stephens introduces Victor Hugo from George Miller on Vimeo. Related

30/03/2019

My guest this week is Mark Polizzotti, author notably of a biography of surrealist André Breton; publisher at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and acclaimed translator from French of books by a wide range for writers from Gustave Flaubert to France’s most recent Nobel laureate, Patrick Modiano. In his recent book, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto… [ 356 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/03/30/mark-polizzotti-a-translation-manifesto/

Acclaimed translator Mark Polizzotti on why we should think of translations as sources of pleasure, not medicines to be taken grudgingly

14/03/2019

This week we’re focusing on one of the nineteenth century's most successful and influential writers, Victor Hugo. By the time of his death in 1885, Hugo was undoubtedly the most famous French writer in the world, a literary colossus who had made his mark in the theatre, as a novelist and poet, and as a statesman. An estimated two million people lined the streets of Paris for his funeral. 263 more words [ 261 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/03/14/bradley-stephens-victor-hugo-beyond-les-miserables/

There's much more to Victor Hugo than Les Misérables. In this podcast Bradley Stephens introduces his tumultuous life and vast literary output

06/03/2019

This week we tackle a big question with my guest Tim Ingold: what’s the point of anthropology? Tim tells me: ‘Anthropology should be an ethical project which is dedicated to the problem of how on earth we are all going to live together in this world of ours, now and into the future, given the multiple crises that we’re facing. [ 274 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/03/06/tim-ingold-anthropologys-subject-is-humanity-unsliced/

Tim Ingold: Anthropology should be an ethical project dedicated to the problem of how on we are all going to live together in this world of ours, now and into the future, given the multiple crises that we’re facing.

26/02/2019

This week the Hedgehog and the Fox turn their curiosity on books themselves, indeed on a book entitled The Book by Amaranth Borsuk, which appears in the MIT Essential Knowledge Series. Amaranth is a scholar, poet, and book artist who works at the intersection of print and digital media. She’s also assistant professor in the school of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. [ 182 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/02/26/amaranth-borsuk-on-the-book/

Amaranth Borsuk on the book as object, content, idea, interface – and sausage...

18/02/2019

I was in Stockholm for the first time a few weeks before Christmas, so I was intrigued when I recently came across a new book about a study that’s followed all the children born in that city in a single year throughout their lives from adolescence on. The book, Born in 1953, is by Sten-Åke Stenberg and it comes from… [ 395 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/02/18/sten-ake-stenberg-born-in-1953/

15,000 children were born in Stockholm in 1953. Project Metropolitan charted their lives, sometimes controversially, to understand why some would fare better than others.

31/01/2019

In the first Hedgehog & Fox podcast of 2019, we grapple with some big questions – does history matter? If so, why? And is it, and other forms of knowledge, facing unprecedented challenges to the very notion of expertise? Fortunately, we have high-powered help in tackling these questions: Lynn Hunt, distinguished research professor in the history faculty of UCLA. She told me: [ 230 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2019/01/31/lynn-hunt-why-history-matters/

Lynn Hunt tackles some big questions in history: does it matter? If so, why? And is it, and other forms of knowledge, facing unprecedented challenges today?

21/12/2018

Julian Baggini introduces How the World Thinks from George Miller on Vimeo.
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/12/21/julian-baggini-on-how-the-world-thinks/

A short video in which Julian Baggini explains how he set about exploring how the world thinks

21/12/2018

My guest today is Paul Luna, who’s the author of a recent book on typography in the Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press. Paul is also emeritus professor of typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading. And – full disclosure – Paul and I were colleagues at OUP in the 1990s, where he headed the design department in the academic division and I was a commissioning editor. [ 185 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/12/21/paul-luna-on-typography/

Typography: it's more than just picking fonts – it shapes all aspects of written and visual communication. Paul Luna on the changing role of the typographer

11/12/2018

This week the Hedgehog and the Fox examine the humble postcard. In fact, when the postcard was new it was anything but humble, as Monica Cure, my guest on today’s programme, points out: it was radical. In 1865 a German postal director, Heinrich von Stephan, came up with an idea to make business communication easier: a pre-stamped thick-stock paper card of standard size. [ 359 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/12/11/monica-cure-on-the-power-of-the-postcard/

Why were postcards called a 'Frankenstein monster' in their early days? Monica Cure explores the curious history of the postcard in this podcast

02/12/2018

A few weeks ago, I put up an interview with Anne O’Neill-Henry about her book Mastering the Marketplace, which examines the dawn of the era of the bestseller in nineteenth-century France. One of the main titles we talked about was one of that century’s biggest bestsellers, The Mysteries of Paris by Eugène Sue. This book, published in 150 instalments in the early 1840s, was such a hit that people would queue up for the latest episode, public readings were held and it spawned a whole subgenre of Mysteries of… novels. [ 169 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/12/02/jonathan-loesberg-on-translating-a-lurid-and-breathless-bestseller/

Eugène Sue's 'lurid and breathless' novel, The Mysteries of Paris, may be the bestselling novel of all time. Jonathan Loesberg talks about translating it

19/11/2018

This week the hedgehog and the fox explore literary anonymity in the company of John Mullan – not the sort of anonymity where the author’s name has simply been lost in the mists of time or never recorded, an anonymous ballad, a medieval epic, but deliberate anonymity, whereby writers seeks to shape how their texts are perceived by withholding their real names. [ 139 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/11/19/john-mullan-on-anon/

Why have so many writers published anonymously (or pseudonymously)? In this podcast John Mullan reveals that there is more to it than mere modesty

10/11/2018

This week The Hedgehog & the Fox go looking for those much-despised denizens of our urban landscape, gulls, in the company of writer, birdwatcher and radio producer Tim Dee. Gulls weren't always held in such contempt. Tim writes in his new book, Landfill: Gulls were the sea’s creatures for a long time. Far out, they didn’t find their way into human places, or feature much when early naturalists first began to write about birds they had seen. [ 108 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/11/10/tim-dee-down-in-the-dump-with-the-gulls/

British tabloids love to hate gulls. Writer and birdwatcher Tim Dee speaks up for these much-maligned birds which have come to share our cities with us

02/11/2018

This week the hedgehog and the fox are in the company of philosopher Julian Baggini and we are in pursuit of no less a question than how the world thinks – in just over half an hour. Comparative philosophy is a discipline generally left outside the mainstream in the West. Departments of philosophy, which are really departments of western philosophy, rarely look outside their own tradition to see what thinkers from China, or Japan, or the Islamic world to name but three traditions with long histories and rich literatures, have to say on any given question. [ 201 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/11/02/julian-baggini-how-the-world-thinks/

How does the world think? Philosopher Julian Baggini travelled the world in order to find out. In this podcast he talks about what he discovered

26/10/2018

This week the hedgehog and the fox venture out into that time of day that the French call between the dog and the wolf, in other words, in the fading light of dusk: the transitional time that is no longer day but not yet night; 'to some bringing peace, to others care', as the French poet Baudelaire put it. Our guide to the twilit world is… [ 253 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/10/26/peter-davidson-in-the-gathering-dusk/

'The burnt-out ends of smoky days': Peter Davidson reflects on why twilight holds such appeal for writers and painters, and how they have depicted it

18/10/2018

In this week's programme I talk to Danny Dorling about inequality, its causes and consequences. Danny is professor of geography at the University of Oxford. In his latest book, Peak Inequality: Britain’s Ticking Time Bomb, he argues that inequality is the political issue of our time. ‘Almost all rich countries in the world are more economically equitable than the UK and the US,’ Danny writes in the introduction. [ 60 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/10/18/danny-dorling-on-peak-inequality/

‘Almost all rich countries in the world are more economically equitable than the UK and the US,’ says Danny Dorling. He explains what can be done about it.

12/10/2018

This is a lightly edited transcript of my recent interview with Tessa Laird, which you can find here: Tessa Laird, who teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, began painting bats as a student after encountering the bats of Australia, which has a much richer variety of them than her native New Zealand. Other bat-related projects followed, the latest of which is a book entitled… [ 3,610 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/10/12/tessa-laird-of-bat-bombs-and-other-chiropteran-marvels/

This is a lightly edited transcript of my recent interview with Tessa Laird, which you can find here: Tessa Laird, who teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts, University… Read More

09/10/2018

In France in the 1830s many of the features of the commercial publishing world we know today were coming into being: celebrity authors, runaway bestsellers, commercially minded publishers, copycat trends, debates about high culture versus low. In this week's podcast Anne O'Neil-Henry tells me how this came about and why Eugène Sue's serialised novel, The Mysteries of Paris, was such a sensational bestseller. [ 261 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/10/09/anne-oneil-henry-on-the-mysteries-of-paris-and-other-bestsellers/

In France in the 1830s many features of publishing we know today came into being: celebrity authors, runaway bestsellers, commercially minded publishers...

01/10/2018

In this week's programme we’re exploring the concept of wonder in the company of science writer Caspar Henderson, author of A New Map of Wonders. One reviewer called the book ‘astounding, mind-bogglingly, unimaginably wonderful’. Twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman described his interest in science matter-of-factly as ‘simply to find out more about the world’. But Caspar Henderson repeatedly shows that wonder has been a frequent stimulant or accompaniment to that impulse to find out: a marvelling at the complexity or simplicity, the intricacy or interrelatedness of the natural world, its laws, and ourselves. [ 134 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/10/01/caspar-henderson-in-search-of-modern-marvels/

Science writer Caspar Henderson discusses how our capacity for wonder is enhanced, not diminished, by science

23/09/2018

In this the first programme in the new autumn season, the Hedgehog and the Fox go in search of bats, in the company of Tessa Laird. Tessa, who teaches at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, began painting these creatures as a student, after encountering the bats of Australia, which has a much richer variety of them than her native New Zealand. [ 150 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/09/23/tessa-laird-on-the-weird-world-of-bats/

Bats have had a bad press throughout much of human history, associated with night, madness, disease and vampirism. Tessa Laird on the reality of the bat

10/08/2018

Leisure, we quickly learn, is the reward for hard work, the chance to recharge before returning to the fray. But idleness is unearned, unjustified, self-indulgent – certainly not something a responsible human being with any concern for self-realization should engage in… That anyway has been the prevailing view in western societies at least since the enlightenment. See Kant, Marx, Hegel and many others. [ 150 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/08/10/brian-oconnor-in-defence-of-idleness/

What's wrong with a life of idleness? Why have most philosophers condemned it as unworthy of our humanity? Brian O'Connor speaks up for idleness

03/08/2018

This week my guest is Meghan Warner Mettler, who’s an assistant professor of history at Upper Iowa University. Meghan is the author of the recent book, How to Reach Japan by Subway: America’s fascination with Japanese Culture, 1945-65, published by Nebraska University Press. Meghan’s book is itself fascinating, charting as it does the many ways in which Americans eagerly embraced aspects of Japanese culture as part of the US’s post-war, 180-degree pivot in its attitude to Japan. [ 201 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/08/03/meghan-warner-mettler-how-america-learned-to-love-japan/

Meghan Warner Mettler discusses 'the biggest about-face in US foreign policy' history, when the nation fell in love with Japanese culture

26/07/2018

Griselda Po***ck introduces Charlotte Salomon
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/07/26/griselda-pollock-introduces-charlotte-salomon/

A short video in which art historian Griselda Po***ck introduces the work of Charlotte Salomon, a German-Jewish artist killed at Auschwitz

26/07/2018

This week's podcast is a conversation with Griselda Po***ck about her recent book, Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. Griselda Po***ck is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds and has for forty years been challenging the way in which art is studied in isolation from other forms of visual culture, and, especially, the ways in which the role of women artists has been marginalized. [ 1,031 more word ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/07/26/griselda-pollock-charlotte-salomons-theatre-of-memory/

Griselda Po***ck discusses German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who died in Auschwitz, leaving behind an extraordinary artwork, Life? or Theatre?

20/07/2018

In this week's programme I talk to film historian Gary D Rhodes about the birth of the American horror film. Gary’s book is a fascinating exploration of the first two decades of cinema before the first world war when everything was still new and untried. Horror didn’t yet exist as a genre but it’s astonishing to see how many of the themes and tropes that we’re familiar with today had already been experimented with by 1915: vampires, ghosts, possessions; Jekyll and Hyde; Frankenstein and his monster; the mad scientist with his bubbling test tubes; even the haunting that is unmasked as a con trick all made their first screen appearances in those first twenty years. [ 442 more words ]
https://www.podularity.com/thehedgehogandthefox/2018/07/20/gary-d-rhodes-on-the-birth-of-american-horror-films/

What were the very earliest horror films in the history of cinema like? Leading film historian Gary D Rhodes discusses the birth of the horror genre

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