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Philosophy

Essays and videos on philosophy, the history of ideas, ethics and life’s big questions
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Art

More than breathtaking, ‘The Birth of Venus’ signalled an aesthetic revolution

19 minutes

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Meaning and the good life

Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave’s letter on the threat of computed creativity

5 minutes

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Art

The overlooked polymath whose theatrical oeuvre made all of Rome a stage

30 minutes

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Beauty and aesthetics

The grit of cacti and the drumbeat of time shape a sculptor’s life philosophy

11 minutes

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Music

‘Dun dun dun duuun!’ Why Beethoven’s Fifth sticks in the head and stirs the heart

5 minutes

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Film and visual culture

The truth of photographs

It’s often said that a successful picture ‘captures the essence’ of a subject. But a great photograph does so much more

Daniel Star

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Art

Inside the unique creative space where ‘outsider’ artists find their form

14 minutes

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Stories and literature

What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?

10 minutes

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Politics and government

Models of antiquity

Radicals in the Age of Revolution saw the classical world as a common inheritance that could aid their fight for liberty

Francesca Langer

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Art

The art of rules

Conceptual art often confounds. The key is to understand the rules of the artwork and the aesthetic experiences they yield

Sherri Irvin

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Stories and literature

The sonnet machine

A sonnet contains an emotional drama of illusion and deception, crisis and resolution, crafted to make us think and feel

Timothy Hampton

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Love and friendship

When drawing your muse hundreds of times becomes an exercise in love

7 minutes

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Beauty and aesthetics

Patterns of the lifeworld

Machine learning theory is shedding new light on how to think about the mysterious and ineffable nature of art

Peli Grietzer

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Art

Tracing Goya’s ‘dark’ journey from Spanish court painter to macabre visionary

51 minutes

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Animals and humans

Where went the wolf?

The very attributes that make small dogs cute and popular are slowly strangling their ability to function as real animals

Jessica Pierce

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Architecture

The radically impractical 18th-century architect whose ideas on beauty endure

19 minutes

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Chemistry

A square inch in a Petri dish becomes a grand stage for chemical transformations

4 minutes

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History of ideas

The first Romantics

How a close group of brilliant friends, in a tiny German university town, laid the foundations of modern consciousness

Andrea Wulf

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Beauty and aesthetics

Attuned to the aesthetic

The ultimate value of the world can be discovered if you are sensitive to what is beautiful

Tom Cochrane

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Evolution

Symmetry rules life on Earth – but it comes with many fascinating exceptions

9 minutes

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Beauty and aesthetics

What does art do?

Good art, laced with irony, ambiguity and suspense, is not obviously political. That’s what makes it politically interesting

Vid Simoniti

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Ageing and death

‘It’s not beautiful, but it’s interesting’ – an ageing nude model surveys her body

4 minutes

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Art

Can art in a swanky restaurant ever be transcendent? On Rothko’s Seagram Murals

15 minutes

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Film and visual culture

At the movies with Pauline Kael – in the arthouse cinema where she got her start

19 minutes