Solomon & Smith

*- Andrew's list is pasted below -*

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In this video Andrew discusses his favourite works of fiction decade by decade, starting in 1800 and going 200 years, decade by decade, until they reach the borders of our present century. If you would like to be interviewed by us about your favourite books, please ...

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In this conversation, Scott McGill and Susanna Wright join Jack and Milo to discuss their recent translation of Virgil’s *Aeneid*: one of the foundational poems of Roman literature, a work of exile, empire, grief, violence, duty, divine terror, and extraordinary poetic control.

The conversation ...

Harry Potter, the work of a 'socialist', is in love with the trappings of the upper-class. The wizarding world is based entirely on the aesthetics Britain's elite institutions. It is not the story of an outsider, but a fantasy about inheritance, privilege, and belonging to an ancient, racially pure elite.

In this episode, we discuss Harry Potter as a British class allegory.

We discuss

- Hogwarts' resemblance to elite boarding...

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In this episode of Solomon & Smith, Jack and Milo speak with classicist and translator Stephanie McCarter about her acclaimed translation of one of the most influential works in Western literature, Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Ovid retold Greek myths of transformation, and in so doing transformed Greek m...

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In this conversation, Professor Ritchie Robertson joins Jack and Milo to discuss Thomas Mann’s *The Magic Mountain*: one of the great modern European novels, a thousand-page comic-philosophical epic about illness, love, death, time, politics, and the fate of humanism.

Ritchie Robertson is one of...

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This discussion is largely a response to some of the reactions to our most recent DBH interview. We discuss Nietzsche, Chesterton, antisemitism, Christianity, nihilism, morality, Nazism, Darwinism, Schopenhauer, and On the Genealogy of Morals.

We examine Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality, his...

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All My Precious Madness is available at bookshops, both good and evil.

In this conversation, novelist Mark Bowles joins Jack and Milo to discuss his debut novel All My Precious Madness, a voice-driven, rage-filled, lyrical work about Henry Nash: an academic turned telesales worker whose inner life spi...

*- Both out lists are pasted below -*

Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership

In this video Jack and Milo discuss their favourite works of fiction decade by decade, starting in 1800 and going 200 years, decade by decade, until they reach the borders of our present century. If you would like to be interviewed by us about your favourite books...

Please help us to keep having these conversations by supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership

In this conversation, David Bentley Hart joins Jack and Milo to discuss among the most dangerous and controversial of all questions: where does morality come from? Is morality an evolutionary strategy for accruing power, or are love and compassion woven into the structure of being?

In philosophical, th...

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In this long-form conversation, Milo and Jack speak with translator Simon Pare about the challenge of translating The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann for Oxford World’s Classics.

This discussion explores the language, style, and enormous technical challenges behind bringing one of the greatest ...

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This long-form conversation explores the New Testament, the four Gospels, and the problem of biblical interpretation with New Testament scholar John Nelson. Together we examine contradiction, canon, authorship, apocalyptic expectation, and the strange literary texture of early Christian scripture.

A r...

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There is nothing more intimate than reading.

A book is not just paper, ink -- it isn't just an information-convoybelt. Somehow, through a handful of symbols, another consciousness begins speaking inside your mind. Across centuries, across languages, across death — reading allows one soul to inha...

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This long-form conversation explores medieval travel, pilgrimage, and imagination with Professor Anthony Bale (University of Cambridge). We examine how people in the Middle Ages understood a world they knew to be vast, real, and inhabited—yet only partially accessible, navigable, or comprehensible...

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This long-form interview explores the nature of devotional poetry in the 17th century, focusing on major figures such as John Donne, George Herbert, and their contemporaries. Together with Professor Helen Wilcox (Bangor University), we examine how early modern poets grappled with one of the central para...

00:00:00 Introduction

00:06:00 Becky arrives - Cambridge slander

00:11:25 London slander

00:15:45 The Middle Ages

00:19:05 Actual beginning of interview

00:29:05 The intellect, the imagination

00:40:27 Teaching the Cloud

00:53:16 Words for God - Om - Words for Flowers

01:06:00 Many religions stuffed in one big bag

01:20:30 To love language, love the world, yet go beyond it

01:35:00 Meditation as preparation for death

01:...

Please help up to keep these conversations going, and join our reading community, by supporting us over on Patreon

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How much do movies (especially schlocky movies) really shape what we believe?

In this episode of Solomon & Smith, we sit down with religious studies professor Dr. Joe Lacock to talk about how horror films like The Exorcist didn’t just reflect culture&mda...

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In this episode we talk to Professor Sue Niebrzydowski (Bangor) about Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe—two women who claimed to experience intense visions of the divine, but whose lives could not have been more different. Julian's visions drove her into int...

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Modern civilisation: is it best explained by philosophy—or by myth?

In this conversation we talk about Goethe’s Faust, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the everlasting crisis of Western civilization, and the philosophy doomscape of modern academia. Faust c...

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A discussion with composer Samuel Andreyev about one of the central questions in creativity: Should artists refine one definitive style… or constantly try to reinvent themselves?

The conversation introduces the idea of the mono-artist vs the poly-artist. A mono-artist finds a form and spends a ...