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This is a catch-up version of James O'Brien's Mystery Hour. To join the game, call 0345 60 60 973, Thursdays at 12pm.

Yanis Varoufakis, the firebrand economist and former Greek Minister of Finance, joins David for a talk about the Iran war, Trump's tariffs and the new drug charges against him. Plus how our oldest library has been reflecting us for 200 years. The Mitchell Librarian, Richard Neville, talks about the living collection under his care.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most successful of Shakespeare's plays in his own time. Written with no Part 2 in mind as 'Henry the Fourth', the play explores ideas about who can be a legitimate ruler and why, and how anyone can rightly succeed to the throne. This was an especially pressing question for his Tudor audience as Elizabeth I had named no successor. Playwrights, banned from openly discussing the jeopardy her subjects faced, turned to these themes of power, legitimacy and succession in distant and recent history. When Shakespeare combined this relevance with the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal and with the tensions between noble fathers and sons, he had a play that fascinated well into the Jacobean era and has been revived throughout the centuries.

With

Emma Smith

Lucy Munro

And

Laurence Publicover

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Hailey Bachrach, Staging Female Characters in Shakespeare’s English History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Warren Chernaik, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Stephen Greenblatt, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (Bodley Head, 2018)

Graham Holderness, Shakespeare: The Histories (Red Globe Press, 1999)

Jean Howard and Phyllis Rackin, Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare's English Histories (Routledge, 1997)

William Shakespeare (eds. Indira Ghose, Anna Pruitt and Emma Smith), Henry IV Part I: The New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2024)

William Shakespeare (ed. Gordon McMullan), 1 Henry IV: A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd edition (Norton, 2003)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Bob Dylan and the Beatles watched each other closely. Jim Windolf is fascinated by the parallels in their stories, the obvious moments they influenced each other and the unconcealable tensions at the times they met, all mapped out in his book ‘Where The Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other – and Changed the World’. He talks to us here from New York about what he discovered when writing it, which touches on …

… deep-end Dylan and Beatles fans: which can be “crankier”?

… the Chaplin-like comic timing of Dylan’s early shows and the humour of the Beatles’ early stage act

… the song Lennon and Dylan wrote, recorded and then lost – now possibly in the Dakota archive  

… the theory that 4th Time Around refers to the four Beatles songs clearly derived from Dylan

… first impressions of each other - “Teenybop music!” “Folk crap!” – and how both acts were crowd-pleasers who could feign indifference

… when the two superpowers met at the Delmonico, Warwick and Savoy hotels

… Dylan in ’66: “girls still scream at me … but in a different way”

… the night Bob, Paul and Dana Gillespie saw John Lee Hooker at Blaises

… how Lennon’s I Want You was a direct response to Dylan’s song of the same title

… the 15 Dylan songs played in the Get Back sessions

… Bob’s touching low-key visit to Lennon’s childhood home

… and the failed attempts by Bob and McCartney to collaborate.

Order copies of ‘Where The Music Had To Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other – and Changed the World’ here:

https://www.waterstones.com/book/where-the-music-had-to-go/jim-windolf/9781399627849

Help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear

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An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review. Read it here: https://yalereview.org/article/shakespeare-and-company-interview-david-szalay

This week Adam Biles sits down with Booker Prize–winner David Szalay to discuss his novel Flesh — a work that begins in post-Soviet Hungary and expands into a stark portrait of Europe over the last three decades.

Szalay describes writing a book that takes almost nothing for granted, grounding experience in the physical body rather than psychology. They explore the novel’s emotionally charged yet morally unresolved relationships, its refusal of overt judgment, and its spare, withholding prose style.

The conversation covers masculinity, violence, agency, and the seductive fantasy of “the West,” asking whether István is passive — or simply shaped by forces larger than himself. What happens when a novel resists explanation? When language reaches its limits? And how can restraint intensify emotional impact rather than diminish it?

Buy Flesh: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/flesh-2

*

Winner of the Booker Prize 2025 for Flesh. David Szalay was born in Canada, grew up in London and now lives in Vienna. He is the author of six works of fiction that have been translated into over 20 languages, as well as several BBC radio dramas. His debut novel, London and the South-East, won Betty Trask and Geoffrey Faber Memorial prizes. All That Man Is was awarded the Gordon Burn Prize and Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. 

He was selected for the 2013 edition of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and in 2010 appeared in the Telegraph’s list of the top 20 British writers under 40. In November 2025, Flesh won the Booker Prize.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this show Robert Harrison and Dr. Miles Osgood from The Ho Center For Buddhist Studies discuss the figure of Ulysses as he appears in Homer and many subsequent incarnations, especially in literary modernism. Songs in this episode: “Nausicaa” by Glass Wave, and “Calypso” by Suzanne Vega.

This episode is presented by Mercury, the banking platform that makes this show possible. I can’t imagine trying to run my business without them. Learn more at https://mercury.com

Steven Pressfield is a master in the art of storytelling. He spent decades studying what great stories have in common. So that's what we're going to talk about: the principles of storytelling and character building.

I want to know the things that transcend genre and culture, and speak to the heart of the human condition. I want X-ray vision into what makes stories great. I want to know what makes you get to the end of the story and just say "wow". That's what this conversation is all about.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup.

Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's conviction that great literature is where ideas "walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world" in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry's book Second Act "one of the very best books written on talent," sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly.

Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke's proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play's connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it's a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says "I did yield to him," before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn't, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand's villains are more relevant now than ever, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded January 12th, 2026.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Other ways to connect

• Follow us on X and Instagram
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• Join our Discord
• Email us: [email protected]
• Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:40 - What Shakespeare is really saying in Measure for Measure

00:29:17 - The best way to consume Shakespeare

00:32:26 - Jane Austen, Adam Smith, and Jonathan Swift

00:39:29 - Advertising that works

00:44:37 - Things that are under- and overrated in literature

00:51:24 - Late bloomers

00:58:36 - Outro

 Image Credit: Sam Alburger

The “lost time” of In Search of Lost Time can connote “wasted time,” and Marcel Proust’s narrator does confront wastes of time, through pretentious conversations and moments when habit takes control. But the novel makes much of this waste, and we glimpse something beyond wasted time when involuntary memory prompts the narrator to consider existence beyond a drably habitual scheme.

Christine Smallwood reads here from her book La Captive, where, reflecting on concepts of art and wasted time that the narrator considers, she writes, “Art is a record of the waste. It holds the waste, and changes it. Its material is time, and it makes time material.” In this episode, you'll hear how wasted time, the time of dull habits, gets remixed and reworked by Proust. And you’ll hear readings from the third and fourth volumes of the novel: The Guermantes Way and Sodom et Gomorrah.

Guests this season include: The New Yorker’s Alex Ross—see especially "Imaginary Concerts"; Christine Smallwood, author of La Captive; Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm; Hannah Freed-Thall, author of Modernism at the Beach; and Joshua Landy, author of The World According to Proust.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

“If we let things continue in the direction that they are taking now, I think it is more likely than not that we will end up in some kind of Great Power war within the foreseeable future.” — Arne Westad

This conversation was recorded before the invasion of Iran, which makes what you are about to hear even more chilling. In his new book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History, Yale historian Arne Westad warns that the structural parallels between our multipolar 2020s and the world before the First World War are too striking to ignore—and he names the Middle East as one of the flashpoints that could spark a much broader conflagration.

Westad argues that the structural parallels between our multipolar 2020s and the world before the First World War are “striking.” A dominant power (USA) withdrawing from the international system it created. Rising inequality and globalization backlash. New technologies that speed up time and shrink the window for decision-making. A rising Great Power—China—that, like Wilhelmine Germany, simply cannot stop growing. And a declining empire—Russia—that, like Austria-Hungary, has quarrels on every border and an alliance with the rising power next door.

The cast of characters, Westad warns, is also uncomfortably familiar. Trump is Joseph Chamberlain—the British conservative who turned his party against the free trade system it had championed. Putin’s Russia is Austria-Hungary: an empire in long-term decline that acted in 1914 because it believed Germany would back it up. And nuclear weapons? Before 1914, people wrote long books about how new military technologies made war unthinkable. We are taking refuge in that same bad logic today.

The difference, Westad insists, is that we know how 1914 ended. We have international institutions built to prevent it. And we still have time—but not much, he warns—to forge the kind of Great Power compromise that could pull us back from the brink. Whether we will is another question entirely. Especially given our current historical amnesia. So might Archduke Ferdinand be Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this time around? Stay tuned. It’s squeaky bum time once again in world history.

Five Takeaways

•       We’re Living in a Pre-1914 Moment: A multipolar world. Rising inequality. Globalization backlash. New technologies that speed up time and reduce the window for decision-making. A dominant power withdrawing from the international system it created. The structural parallels between the early 20th century and the 2020s are, in Westad’s word, “striking.”

•       China Is the New Germany: A rapidly rising Great Power that can’t stop growing, generating dissonance in an established international system. As the British told the Germans: “If you could just stop growing, little Hans, all would be fine and dandy.” That’s exactly what China cannot do. And it takes two to tango on compromise.

•       Russia Is the New Austria-Hungary: An empire in long-term decline with quarrels on every border, allied to the most rapidly rising Great Power next to it. Austria acted in 1914 because they believed Germany would back them up. The parallel to the China-Russia relationship today is uncomfortably close.

•       Trump Is Joseph Chamberlain: The British conservative who turned his party against the free trade system it had championed. Chamberlain never made it to prime minister, but he came close and reshaped his party in ways no one foresaw—exactly what Trump has done to the Republicans.

•       Nuclear Weapons May Not Save Us: Before 1914, people wrote long books about how new military technologies—poison gas, battleships, aerial bombardment—made war unthinkable. We are taking refuge in the same logic today. Westad is not so sure the deterrent fully holds anymore.

About the Guest

Odd Arne Westad is the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. He is the author of The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History as well as The Cold War: A World History, The Global Cold War (winner of the Bancroft Prize), and Restless Empire (winner of the Asia Society Book Award).

References

Books and authors mentioned:

•       Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, on how Europe stumbled into the First World War (previous Keen On guest)

•       Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900–1914, on technology and cultural disruption before the war

•       Paul Kennedy, on the rise of British-German antagonism and Great Power rivalry

•       Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (referenced in the Sutton episode the previous day)

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

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Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters: