Babette’s Feast, released in 1987, was the first Danish submission to win the Oscar for best foreign language film and it’s the subject of Julian Baggini’s recent book in the BFI Film Classics series, a short, engaging essay on the film that won’t take you much longer to read than the film’s running time.

Babette’s Feast is based on a short story by Karen Blixen, best known as the author of Out of Africa. It’s set in the 19th century an austere part of northern Denmark in an equally austere Christian community, into which comes Babette, once a celebrated Parisian chef, now fleeing the counter-revolutionary violence of the Paris Commune in 1871...

Julian Baggini on Babette's Feast

Last November, I spoke to Christopher E. Forth about his book, Fat: A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life (Reaktion Books, 2019), which he describes as a ‘study in the formation of stereotypes’, and in particular the negative stereotypes that have accreted round fat, and fat people, over time.

Those stereotypes may have gone into overdrive in the latter part of the 20th century, but Chris shows that there was already ambivalence about corpulence in the ancient world: the building blocks of later stereotypes were fashioned early.

Christopher Forth on Fat: A Cultural History

This week, we have a returning guest to the podcast, Oxford professor of geography Danny Dorling, who spoke to me recently about his new book Slowdown. Danny has given his book one of those subtitles that clearly map out the terrain he intends to cover: The End of the Great Acceleration—and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives.You may currently be feeling at best ambivalent about the idea of slowdown, with so many of us  enduring a Covid-19-enforced pause and desperate to know when we might get back up to normal speed. Danny’s message is not that humanity collectively needs to slam on the brakes, but that slowdown in many aspects of modern life (though not quite all) is already happening, and we need to think about its consequences, and potential.

Danny Dorling on Slowdown

Why is it so hard to concentrate? How can we do it better? Dutch psychologist Stefan van der Stigchel has some suggestions...

Stefan van der Stigchel on Concentration

A young man inherits a house on an island in the middle of the raging waters of a mighty river from a mysterious great-uncle. But to satisfy the conditions of the will, the man must remain on the island for three months, with no other human company save his great-uncle Malicroix’s taciturn servant. And then there will be a further obligation to fulfil…
The book is set in the Camargue in southern France in the early 19th century and was written in the 1940s by French novelist Henri Bosco. Despite Bosco being a major figure in mid-century French literature, the book remained unpublished in English until this year, when my guest Joyce Zonana’s translation appeared in the New York Review of Books Classics series.

Conversations with Translators: Joyce Zonana

An ancient Greek poet once said: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." These podcasts pursue questions large and small in the spirit of the hedgehog and the fox...

Hedgehog&Fox

Popular tracks