Category: Podcasts

This month’s selection is book I of Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. If you think this title refers to a dry academic commentary on an ancient historian, think again. Machiavelli is one of the most brilliant and original political thinkers in human history, and this is his by far best work. I first read it at the suggestion of (or rather under orders from) my friend Sam Francis, who (like James Burnham and other political analysts) viewed it as the political equivalent of sacred writ. Machiavelli takes the first ten books of Livy’s History of Rome...

The book is the classic written by our inspiration and patron, Boethius: On the Consolation of Philosophy. For well over 1000 years, this book—the reflections of a condemned man on what makes life worth living—was required reading for anyone who pretended to the smallest degree of literacy. It was translated by two English monarchs (Alfred and Elizabeth I) and represented the introduction to philosophy that people in the Medieval period received. It is that rare gift of literature—a profound book addressed not to specialists and geniuses but to everyday men and women. As luck would have it, our discussion will...

Our November book is comparatively short: Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus. This is Sophocles last play that we know of: He wrote it as an old man, who—according to tradition—was being sued by his own sons, who wanted to prove the old man non compos mentis. It is something like Sophocles’ King Lear, but instead of concentrating on ingratitude. the Greek poet gives us an image of filial piety in his daughters and in the aged protagonist he depicts a man transformed by suffering and filled with gratitude toward the Athenians who gave him hospitality. This is a play about loyalty,...

One of Shakespeare’s less familiar masterpieces is Measure for Measure. This is a serious play, certainly not a comedy, and yet it ends happily without a full complement of corpses on the stage. It was written about 1605, during the same period in which he composed his greatest works. In Measure for Measure Shakespeare takes up serious moral and political questions: the nature of justice, the quality of rulers, and, perhaps most significantly, the debate over marriage that raged between, on the one hand, Catholics and Anglicans, and, on the other, Calvinists. It is not too much to say that...

This early work by one of the masters of the novel is the introduction to his magnificent series of novels set in or near the mythical cathedral town of Barchester. We meet some of the enduring characters—Mr. Harding and his daughter Eleanor, and that model of “stupid” conservatism, Archdeacon Grantly . The humor is broader than it is in later books, and in his portrait of the ardent liberal John Bold, Trollope lays his cards on the table as he never will again. The Warden is a wonderfully entertaining novel, but it is only one that raises very important moral...