The EI Podcast

Stephen Bowd speaks to Paul Lay about why, 500 years after his death, Niccolò Machiavelli remains one of the world’s most vital political philosophers.
Image: Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli (1570). Credit: Alamy

Film critic David Thomson speaks to Paul Lay about his new book, ‘A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies’. 
Image: A sign advertises the opening of the Hollywoodland housing development in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. Credit: Alamy

Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, Michael Auslin speaks to Paul Lay about the document’s powerful yet often strange afterlife. From Philadelphia in 1776, through the Civil War, the Gilded Age, both World Wars and the Cold War, America’s founding document has been a perennial symbol of hope. 
Image: An illustration from ‘Columbia's Courtship: A Picture History of the United States in Twelve Emblematic Designs in Color with Accompanying Verses’ by Walter Crane (1983). Credit: Alamy

What does Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’ have in common with Homer’s poem? Classicist and actor Orlando Gibbs speaks to Alastair Benn about the strangeness of this ancient epic, which depicts a moral world far removed from Nolan’s secular and post-Christian worldview, and discusses whether its popularity will lead to a renewed interest in the classical world.
Image: Odysseus and the Sirens, represented on an ancient Greek vase. Credit: Alamy

Historian Kathleen Burk speaks to Max Mitchell about the long history of humanity's relationship with wine, taking us on a journey from the ancient Near East to modern France.
Image: A vineyard near the Temple of Zeus at Ancient Nemea, Korinthia, Greece. Credit: Alamy