Garlic & Pearls

Garlic & Pearls

By Muriel Zagha and Suzanne RaineSociety & Culture
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Garlic & Pearls episodes

  • The Flushing Loo: Britain's greatest gift to the world?
    Suzanne takes the plunge as she launches into the rollercoaster history of how the British invented the modern toilet. Meet John Harington, Elizabeth I's 'saucy godson', translator of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and mad inventor of an early toilet called the Ajax (a pun on the word 'jakes'); Alexander Cumming, 18th-century Scottish watchmaker and loo progressive; and visionary pottery manufacturer Thomas Twyford, creator of the veritable lion of loos: the 1889 Deluge. Foul smells! Banishment! Valves! Great Exhibitions! Florentine patterns! Unsuccessful self-rising seats! And we also find out the origins of that mysterious word, 'loo', which may well be French...

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    55 min
  • Monoprix: Why is it the favourite shop of the urban bourgeoisie?
    Muriel introduces Suzanne to a teasing paradox: Monoprix stores crop up in city and town centres all over France, and yet 87% of French people never shop there. How can this be? This is a breathless tale of the buccaneering French high street, in which a thrifty magasin populaire imagined during the 1930s Depression is transformed into quite a different beast – urban, chic and pop, but still selling tins and knickers. Somewhere in the bowels of Monoprix HQ, a team of package designers are writing puns – but why? And the midst of Monoprix's history, there is an interlude when its founder joins the French Resistance. So how is Monoprix an expression of Frenchness? How do French people feel when they shop there? How does it, with its playful optimism, cater for a sort of dream life as well as real life? And, Suzanne wonders, does Monoprix have a British equivalent?

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    48 min
  • The Ghost Stories of MR James: All aboard the British uncanny!
    The dark is rising, and Suzanne is on hand to make the back of your neck prickle with the creepy, poetic and quintessentially British ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, aka MR James. Enter a twilit world of marshes and mists, country houses and seaside inns, where curiosity leads tweedy gentlemen scholars to unspeakable horrors: a hairy ghoul rises out of a manuscript; a hooded figure crawls ever closer towards the edge of a mezzotint; a bronze whistle summons an ancient figure of terror. But what would you do, faced with an intriguing and sinister object? And how did Suzanne come to be in possession of a haunted portrait? Happy Halloween!

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    1 hr
  • The boudoir: sulking room, private retreat, haven of frolics?

    Things get rather raffish and French as Muriel entices Suzanne into that most Gallic of spaces - the boudoir - and tells her everything she ever wanted to know about it but was afraid to ask.

    What actually happens in that room? What is it for? We open the door on the dazzling boudoirs of the 18th-century elite, filled with art and chinoiserie, on exquisite women’s retreats and on men’s delirious dens of debauchery. The Marquis de Sade, Balzac, Baudelaire and John Malkovich put in a appearance.

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    54 min
  • The Scarlet Pimpernel: The very first and quintessentially British masked superhero.
    They seek him here; they seek him there... Suzanne gives Muriel a riveting rendering of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Hungarian émigrée Baroness Orczy's colourful and melodramatic 1905 historical novel set during the French Revolution, in which a gallant mild-mannered fop and his associates stick it to Madame Guillotine by rescuing French aristocrats on the run from bloodthirsty sans culottes and the dastardly Citoyen Chauvelin. And why do these British heroes do this? For the sport of pulling 'the hare from the teeth of the hound', of course! This is a highly romantic rendering of the French Revolution seen from the British side of the Channel, but was there in fact a real-life Scarlet Pimpernel? And what happened to French emigrés in Britain? Isambard Kingdom Brunel guest stars.

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    1 hr
  • Toile de Jouy: A Tale of Printed Fabric, Savoir-Faire and Storytelling
    Muriel tells Suzanne the story of the printed cotton or linen known as toile de Jouy, generally printed in a single colour on a neutral background and created in the late 18th century by an enterprising German émigré, the engraving and colour specialist Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, at his thriving manufacture of Jouy-en-Josas. Patterns of exquisite refinement were beloved of the powerful, from Queen Marie-Antoinette to the Revolutionaries and Napoleon. They also harnessed the talent of great artists and, with their pastoral scenes, Enlightenment themes and celebration of important historical events, gained long-lasting hold of the French collective imagination, feeding into how much the French enjoy telling themselves stories about being French.

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    55 min
  • Literary Dystopia: A Very British Response to Social Change
    Suzanne explores dystopia, one of the most significant sub-genres of the British novel, where trouble often starts with the breakdown of the monarchy and aristocracy (which sounds a bit like France). It begins with Jonathan's Swift's Gulliver's Travels, then Mary Shelley comes along, then HG Wells's War of the Worlds – where most of Woking is destroyed even before the M25 is built. But our main focus is Aldous Huxley's astonishing 1932 novel Brave New World and its world of skyscrapers, aeroplanes and willing enslavement through entertainment and the scariest thing of all – sex!

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    59 min
  • De Gaulle: Resistance: How good is the French blockbuster about De Gaulle's time in London during the war?
    Muriel and Suzanne discuss a new French film set during the years 1940-41, a pivotal time in the history of France and Britain, as General de Gaulle, powered by 'a certain idea of France' and refusing to accept Pétain's new collaborationist regime, relocated to London to seek support from the British, devise the Free French response to the defeat and plan the recapturing of France. How good is the film? How persuasive is its portrayal of our respective national heroes De Gaulle and Churchill? How much accuracy do we expect from historical dramas? How much suspension of disbelief are we prepared to grant? The film has been a tremendous box office hit in France: what does this tell us about our need for an inspiring national narrative? Has the time come for France to reassess a complicated period of its history? And will this film change British perceptions of De Gaulle?

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    57 min
  • The Beaufort Scale: The Poetic British Way of Measuring What Happens at Sea
    Suzanne enlightens Muriel about the Beaufort Scale and explores the remarkable story of its creator, hydrographer Francis Beaufort, who went to sea as a boy, was shipwrecked in the Far East, took part in Napoleonic sea battles against the French and in 1805 devised a brilliant empirical scale full of poetic language to evoke the changeable quality of the wind and its effect on the sails of a ship and the surface of the sea. How should one assess a breeze, a gale, a hurricane and learn to survive at sea without Beaufort's system, which even the French adopted? Daniel Defoe guest stars. Beaufort's unorthodox private life, recorded in his ciphered journal – using the Beaufort cipher – adds a layer of intrigue. 

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    55 min
  • Camus’s L’Etranger: literature, murder and Absurdism in a French colony
    Camus’s terse 1942 novel about an enigmatic killing won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1957. It is entrenched as a French literary classic and as a gateway to Philosophy in French schools. But what, asks Muriel, do the book and its recent film adaptation by François Ozon tell us about morality, justice and the complicated history of the French in Algeria? 

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    58 min

About Garlic & Pearls

From the publisher's feed

Suzanne and Muriel examine a series of very different things – from a film to a kitchen utensil, a model train to a bar of soap – that define British or French attitudes, each explaining her cultural…

Best of Garlic & Pearls

Ranked by our users in the last 21 days

  1. Number 1: Monoprix: Why is it the favourite shop of the urban bourgeoisie?
    48 min
  2. Number 2: The Ghost Stories of MR James: All aboard the British uncanny!
    1 hr
  3. Number 3: The boudoir: sulking room, private retreat, haven of frolics?
    54 min