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 under Stalin's terror and later Nazi invasion. 

He grew up in the doomed world of the upper middle class, bourgeois intelligentsia in St Petersburg. His father was a chemical engineer. His mother was a piano teacher.

A schoolboy when the Bolsheviks seized power, he came to survive life in the Soviet Union until the Brezhnev years, despite denunciation, threat of execution, rehabilitation, a second denunciation, and the death of his father, and eventual conscription into the party. His popularity in the West, because of his second fall from grace, has only continued since his death, and today his popularity has never been greater. 

In this episode, Ed West is talking to his co-host, Paul Morland, about the life and times of an artist close to his heart. 

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 impressionists and post-impressionists and eventually moving to Arles in the south of France where he achieved a distinct and striking style. Financially reliant on his generous brother Theo, his mental health deteriorated, with him first cutting off his ear and eventually killing himself in 1890, aged just 37.

Repute came shortly after his death and today he is one of the world's most popular artists, his works of art attracting some of the highest prices in the art world. Martin Gayford is a distinguished art critic who has written about Van Gogh's period in Arles living with Gaugin.

***

The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. 

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. 

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. 

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. 

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. 

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. 

Paul Morland is an expert in demographics, and the author of several books. 

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: 

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford

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 strong homosexual urgings.

A nationalist in World War 1, he drifted leftward between the wars and moved to Switzerland then the USA in the wake of the Nazi takeover in Germany. Among his great works are the novella Death in Venice and his novels Buddenbrooks, Magic Mountain and Dr. Faustus. Mann won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 and died in Switzerland in 1955.

Professor Tobias Boes is an expert on German cultural history in general and Thomas Mann in particular; he teaches at Notre Dame University.

***

The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. 

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. 

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. 

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. 

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. 

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. 

Paul Morland is a nationally-renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books. 

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: 

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford

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 expert and prolific writer on the subject.

***

The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. 

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. 

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. 

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. 

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. 

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. 

Paul Morland is an expert in demographics, and the author of several books. 

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: 

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford

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 himself, struggling in his estate with the forces of tradition and progress, idealism and pragmatism.

Capturing the state of Russia, Anna Karenina was an immediate success and is considered by many the greatest novel ever written. Rosamund Bartlett has written a biography of Tolstoy and has translated Anna Karenina.

***

Links:

https://profilebooks.com/work/tolstoy/

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/anna-karenina-9780198748847

https://www.amazon.com/Tolstoy-Russian-Life-Rosamund-Bartlett/dp/0151014388?dplnkId=b985f495-affb-4800-8256-faaaf6961efb&nodl=1

https://www.amazon.com/Anna-Karenina-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0198748841?nodl=1&dplnkId=7435dc38-1b68-4394-adb9-61995363ffca

***

The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. 

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. 

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. 

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. 

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. 

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. 

Paul Morland is an expert in demographics, and the author of several books. 

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: 

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford

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, three sacred masses, a Te Deum and motets. Although often mocked as a country bumpkin, he came by the end of his life to be recognised as one of the era's great orchestral composers. He died in 1896.

Dr. Bryan Gilliam is an emeritus professor of Duke University and an authority on the music of Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss among others.

***

The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. 

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. 

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. 

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. 

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. 

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. 

Paul Morland is a nationally-renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books. 

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: 

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford

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 madness. Macbeth commits more murder to shore up his position but eventually falls himself to a revolt.

To discuss it, Paul and Ed are joined by Neema Parvini, author of over ten books, including Shakespeare's Moral Compass, and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Heterodox Studies, the University of Buckinghamshire.

***

The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. 

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. 

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. 

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. 

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. 

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. 

Paul Morland is a nationally-renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books. 

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: 

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford

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 committing a murder, fleeing to Naples, Malta and Sicily and dying short of forty. 

Andrew Graham Dixon, one of the UK’s leading art historians, has called Caravaggio ‘the most wildly popular of all the old masters’.

In this episode, he details how, plague claimed his father, grandfather, and grandmother in quick succession. Caravaggio’s mother raised the remaining children in poverty, but she, too, died when the future artist was in his early teens.

We learn of how he developed the technique chiaroscuro, the sharp contrast between light and dark, to create a more lurid, cinematic perspective on religious art. Once he moved to Rome, Caravaggio became box office, producing works that shocked and captivated audiences.

His paintings were notable for their realism—biblical figures were depicted not as distant, ethereal beings but as ordinary people, often poor and rough, with dirt under their nails and wrinkles on their faces.

Yet despite his success, Caravaggio’s volatility unsettled those around him. He was arrested multiple times, and, in 1606, when killed a man in a duel, likely over a woman. Forced to flee Rome, Caravaggio sought refuge in Naples, then in Malta, with the infamous Knights of Malta, before dying tragically young.

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 neglect, because it feels a little too intimidating, obscure, or dusty.

Canon Club is Paul and Ed's attempt to redeem themselves - and their listeners. Every alternate week, for an initial season of seven episodes, Paul and Ed take on a different cultural behemoth, talking to a world expert, to explore the deep story.

Ed West is the author of the Wrong Side Of History Substack, and a prominent journalist.

Paul Morland is a demographer and the author of several books.

This is the series trailer.