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

We discuss

- Hogwarts' resemblance to elite boarding schools and Oxford colleges

- The contrast between the suburbian pleb Dursleys and the rustic pleb Weasleys

- Harry Potter as an aristocrat trapped in suburbia

- The relationship between magic, bloodlines, and social hierarchy

- JK Rowling's internally conflicting attitudes toward modernity, tradition, and class

- The influence of Charles Dickens and J.R.R. Tolkien on the Pottiverse

- Hogwarts as an escape from modern, middle-class life and cultural rootlessness

00:00 Intro

01:21 The Hype

04:10 Rowling's main weaknesses

08:03 Rowling's main strengths

10:28 HP as Gay Allegory

12:26 HP as Class Allegory

16:01 The disdain for pleb mediocrity and modernity

22:25 British Class - Poshos magic, plebs muggles

25:50 British Elite Public Schools are the model of Hogwarts

28:35 Harry as member of master race aristocracy

32:32 Why isn't mudblood Hermione the main character?

35:55 Parallels with Star Wars and Superheroes

38:55 Harry as posh boy cannot fail

41:18 Malfoy as posh boy purist

44:57 Rowling as a socialist

47:00 Rowling as SJW

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 mythology. We talk about why Roman writers saw translation as an act of cultural conquest, and about what is gained and lost when Latin poetry is brought across into modern English. McCarter discusses her approach to translating Ovid, her decision to render sexual violence explicitly rather than euphemistically, and why she believes no translation can ever be faithful.

We discuss Roman attitudes toward Greece, the philosophy of transformation, the poetic differences between Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, the politics of translation, and why Ovid remains one of the most modern voices from the ancient world.

Topics include:

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Ancient Greek mythology

Roman literature

Classical studies

Translation theory

"To translate is to conquer"

Stephanie McCarter's Penguin translation

The history of Rome and Greece

Mythological retellings

Poetry and meter

Horace, Virgil, and Catullus

The politics of storytelling

Women in classical literature

Sexual violence in ancient texts

The philosophy of change and transformation

00:00:00 Translation as conquest

00:01:28 Introduction

00:05:00 Flux, Rome, and McCarter’s translation

00:10:07 Stephanie McCarter arrives

00:13:04 Poetic epigraph

00:14:34 English poetry, Dickinson, Byron, and Chaucer

00:16:45 Horace and the magic of Latin

00:21:51 Ovid in Latin: speed, play, and rhetoric

00:25:27 Virgil, allusion, and Ovidian style

00:30:30 Epic, epyllion, and the structure of the *Metamorphoses*

00:38:08 Greece, Rome, and translation as conquest

00:42:35 Translating Ovid: negotiation, constraint, and compensation

00:53:38 McCarter vs Mandelbaum: architecture and line

01:00:16 Apollo, Daphne, archaism, and poetic style

01:06:06 Puns, wordplay, Catullus, and the “fuckathon”

01:09:12 Sexual violence, legal language, and Roman readers

01:14:54 Arachne, power, Augustus, and exile

01:20:14 Ovid’s immortality and the final metamorphosis

01:21:27 Nature, flux, Lucretius, and the minded cosmos

01:29:58 Ovid, Shakespeare, and negative capability

01:36:30 First Encounters and Farewells

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 the leading English-speaking scholars of German and European literature. He is the author of a major study of the Enlightenment, general editor of the current Oxford World’s Classics Thomas Mann translations, and translator of Mann’s *Death in Venice* and *Doctor Faustus*. Here, he helps us situate *The Magic Mountain* within Mann’s wider work, German intellectual history, and the political crises of the early twentieth century.

The discussion begins with the Enlightenment, and with the novel’s two great intellectual antagonists: Settembrini, the liberal humanist and advocate of progress, and Naphta, the Jesuit-communist defender of terror, sacrifice, and revolutionary violence. Between them stands Hans Castorp, Mann’s magnificently ordinary hero: a young engineer who travels to a Swiss sanatorium for a short visit and accidentally remains there for seven years.

Much of the conversation centres on Hans Castorp’s education. In the Berghof sanatorium, he is removed from ordinary life and exposed to fundamental experiences: illness, erotic fascination, biology, music, death, philosophical dispute, and visionary solitude. Robertson discusses the “Snow” chapter as the philosophical heart of the novel, in which Castorp sees both the possibility of a golden age and the permanent human possibility of blood, cruelty, and sacrifice.

We also explore why *The Magic Mountain* remains so readable despite its reputation for difficulty. Mann’s novel is undoubtedly a book of ideas, but it is also comic, sensuous, characterful, musical, and full of memorable scenes: Behrens, Joachim, Clavdia Chauchat, Mynheer Peeperkorn, the sanatorium routines, the medical lectures, the erotic charge of biology, and the strange theatricality of life above the “flatland.”

Expect reflections on:

Thomas Mann, music, Wagner, and novelistic composition

The Enlightenment as an unfinished project

Settembrini, Naphta, liberalism, communism, and terror

Hans Castorp’s development from passive mediocrity to individual consciousness

Love, death, illness, and the sanatorium as a school of experience

The “Snow” chapter and its vision of paradise and blood sacrifice

Whether *The Magic Mountain* is really a difficult novel

Rereading, Adorno, and the book’s strange addictive power

Homosexuality, erotic indirection, and Clavdia Chauchat

Russia, the East, Orientalism, Dostoevsky, and revolution

The First World War and the novel’s battlefield ending

Premonitions of catastrophe, and the danger of reading later history backwards

Susan Sontag’s criticism of Mann as an “over-cooperative” novelist

Whether you are already a devoted reader of *The Magic Mountain*, or have been meaning to climb it for years, this conversation offers a detailed, lively, and intellectually generous guide to Mann’s strange, comic, terrifying, and inexhaustible novel.

If you enjoy long-form conversations on literature, philosophy, theology, politics, German thought, and the great novels of European modernism, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below.

Have you read *The Magic Mountain*? And if so: should one read it once, three times, or a thousand?

00:00:00 The Snow chapter: paradise and blood sacrifice

00:01:18 Introduction to Ritchie Robertson and *The Magic Mountain*

00:03:31 What is *The Magic Mountain* about?

00:05:56 Why do people still read *The Magic Mountain*?

00:13:33 Ritchie Robertson arrives

00:14:16 Poetic epigraph: Eichendorff and longing

00:16:19 Thomas Mann, music, and *Doctor Faustus*

00:19:38 The Enlightenment, Settembrini, and humanism

00:25:49 Clavdia Chauchat, love, and Hans Castorp’s education

00:30:07 Illness, death, Joachim, and transformation

00:34:04 The “Snow” chapter explained

00:38:24 Difficulty, rereading, Naphta, and Lukács

00:49:10 Erotic memory, homosexuality, Russia, and the East

00:58:38 Revolution, utopia, and the meaning of life

01:04:03 The ending: war, death, song, and love

01:07:28 Nazism, later history, Sontag, and Mann’s over-explanation

01:12:34 Conclusion

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 relationship to Nazism, the influence of Darwin and Schopenhauer on his philosophy, and why Genealogy of Morals remains so provocative.

00:00 Introduction

02:28 Chesterton's claim that Hitlerism was "Jewish"

05:19 Conspiracy theory that Nazism was a Jewish plot

06:38 Nietzsche, Judaism, and Christianity

08:00 Christianity as the universalisation of ressentiment

10:48 Was Nietzsche a precursor to Nazism?

12:42 Nietzsche, Darwin, and evolutionary thought

13:13 Schopenhauer, the Will, and Darwinism

16:06 First impressions of Genealogy of Morals

18:16 Nietzsche's style

21:16 Reading Nietzsche for the first time

24:39 The power of Nietzsche's literary voice

27:11 The crisis of morality before Nietzsche

31:35 Nietzsche's wordplay and philosophy of affirmation

33:25 Compassion, suffering, and Christian morality

34:06 Christianity as "the most practical form of nihilism"

35:38 Socrates, asceticism, and the origins of morality

38:07 Determinism and the psychology of belief

40:53 Nietzsche's collapse and legacy

41:22 Nazi appropriation - Hitler, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche

43:23 Nietzsche's anti-nationalism and anti-anti-Semitism

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 spills out through invective, memory, fantasy, grief, class resentment, and strange beauty.

The discussion begins with Mark’s early reading life, from Treasure Island and Enid Blyton to the shock of discovering Samuel Beckett. We talk about Beckett’s stripped-down language, floating voices, physical detail, and the formative experience of encountering a literature that seemed to open onto an entirely different world.

Much of the conversation centres on what it means to write a first novel. Mark reflects on the pressure and preciousness of the debut: the sense that a first book announces a voice, discloses something private, and gathers up material that may have been stored for years. We discuss how All My Precious Madness grew out of fragments, notebooks, and an insistent central voice rather than a conventional plot.

We also explore the influence of Thomas Bernhard and Walter Benjamin: rage, repetition, digression, fragments, the “left-handed” approach to thought, and the idea that some truths can only be reached indirectly. Along the way, we talk about autodidacticism, class, Oxford, northernness, high culture, business jargon, academia, and the ways language can be degraded by institutions.

Expect reflections on:

Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and the literature of voice

Writing a first novel and the strange exposure of publication

Rage, lyricism, grief, melancholy, and comic invective

Autodidacticism, class, Oxford, and the labour of acquiring culture

Telesales, corporate language, and soul-destroying work

Academic jargon and the policing of intellectual tribes

Digression as literary method

Reading, audiobooks, and the reader’s role in creating a book

English humour, irony, resignation, and satire

Fantasy, inner life, and the “uncommitted crime” of art

In the later part of the conversation, Mark discusses his next novel, How Do People Stay the Same?, written as a backwards-moving journal across thirty years, as well as a further book inspired by the mysterious case of Peter Bergmann.

If you enjoy long-form conversations on literature, writing, style, philosophy, class, comedy, and the strange private life of fiction, subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below.

00:00:00 Fantasy, fiction, and inner life

00:01:19 Introduction to Mark B. and *All My Precious Madness*

00:04:31 Mark arrives

00:06:18 Poetic epigraph

00:09:24 Childhood reading, *Treasure Island*, and Beckett

00:13:44 Voice, physicality, and literary interiority

00:16:19 Becoming a writer

00:20:26 The pressure of the first novel

00:24:09 Voice, fragments, and Thomas Bernhard

00:30:16 Class, Oxford, and cultural self-invention

00:38:01 Silence, childhood, and imagination

00:40:10 Rage, lyricism, and catharsis

00:42:26 Telesales and soul-destroying work

00:46:24 Corporate language, academia, and jargon

00:54:50 Digression as method

01:01:18 Stream of consciousness and reading rhythm

01:05:55 Books, audiobooks, and the reader’s imagination

01:11:25 Humour, English irony, and resignation

01:18:00 Language, fantasy, and expression

01:22:23 Art as an uncommitted crime

01:24:27 Future novels and publication

01:29:24 Conclusion

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 send an email.

1800s

Jack: Michael Kohlhaas - Heinrich Von Kleist

Milo: Heinrich Von Ofterdingen - Novalis

1810s

Jack: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Milo: Persuasion - Jane Austen

1820s

Jack: Don Juan - George Gordon Byron (If only prose allowed, The Red and the Black - Stendhal)

Milo: The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr - ETA Hoffmann

1830s

Jack: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym - Edgar Allan Poe

Milo - Nevsky Prospect - Nikolai Gogol

1840s

Jack: Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

Milo: Mr. Prokharchin - Fyodor Dostoevsky

1850s

Jack: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Milo: The Whale - Herman Melville

1860s

Jack: War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

Milo: War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

1870s

Jack: Middlemarch - George Eliot

Milo: Middlemarch - George Eliot

1880s

Jack: Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome

Milo: Thus Spoke Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche

1890s

Jack: The Lady with the Dog - Anton Chekhov

Milo: New Grub Street - George Gissing

1900s

Jack: The Man Who Was Thursday - GK Chesterton

Milo: The Man Who Was Thursday - GK Chesterton

1910s

Jack: Of Human Bondage - W Somerset Maugham

Milo: The Great Wall of China - Franz Kafka

1920s

Jack: To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Milo: The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

1930s

Jack: Die Blendung/ Auto de fe - Elias Canetti

Milo: The Hobbit - J R R Tolkein

1940s

Jack: The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery

Milo: The Plague - Albert Camus

1950s

Jack: The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

Milo: The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis

1960s

Jack: Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

Milo: The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster

1970s

Jack: The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch

Milo: Suttree - Cormac McCarthy

1980s

Jack: Extinction - Thomas Bernhard

Milo: Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

1990s

Jack: Before and During - Vladimir Sharov

Milo: Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

00:00:00 Intro

00:04:45 1800s

00:12:52 1810s

00:24:20 1820s

00:30:24 1830s

00:37:38 1840s

00:48:35 1850s

00:55:22 1860s

00:59:29 1870s

01:05:25 1880s

01:10:41 1890s

01:17:42 1900s

01:22:07 1910s

01:28:50 1920s

01:37:22 1930s

01:47:48 1940s

01:53:51 1950s

02:05:49 1960s

02:12:44 1970s

02:19:49 1980s

02:27:15 1990s

02:36:12 Conclusion

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, theological, literary, and evolutionary terms, Hart discusses the origins of moral instincts in humans and animals, the role of altruism and compassion in nature, and why he believes reductive accounts of morality ultimately fail to explain human experience. We talk about Nietzsche, Darwin, Dawkins, cooperation in nature, and the limits of evolutionary psychology.

Hart also reflects on Christianity’s moral revolution and argues that Christ represented a profound interruption in the moral imagination of the ancient world—placing the poor, the rejected, and the vulnerable at the center of ethical life. The discussion also touches on the Resurrection accounts, the Gospels, the Fall, late antiquity, slavery, philanthropy, and the relationship between love, truth, and spiritual transformation.

In the second half of the discussion we discuss literature, and where we put to Hart various author duels: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Chesterton or Wilde, Eliot or Dickens, Mann or Hesse.

Expect reflections on:

The metaphysical origins of morality

Whether animals and nature exhibit genuine moral behavior

Nietzsche, power, and the “discourse of suspicion”

Evolutionary psychology and The Selfish Gene

Christ’s challenge to ancient morality

Love, compassion, and the structure of reality

Cooperation, altruism, and the natural world

Otters, dolphins, crocodiles… and why philosophy should take them seriously

Plus: in the second half of the interview, Hart turns to literature, The Simpsons, baseball as beauty, and debates some of history’s greatest writers.

If you enjoy long-form conversations on philosophy, religion, literature, and metaphysics, subscribe and join the discussion below:

Where do you think morality comes from?

00:00:00 Introduction

00:07:22 DBH arrives

00:08:55 Poetic epigraph

00:13:00 The metaphysical origins of morality

00:18:30 How Christ interrupted late-antique morality

00:32:00 Was Christ necessary to philanthropy

00:42:12 The Nietzschean view of moral origins

00:48:50 Is Ressentiment a Natural Condition, Co-operative Evolution

00:56:00 Otters! Darwinian Reductionaism. Dawkins Bashing

01:00:20 Did we mechanise nature to morally neautralise it?

01:05:12 Terrence Malick - The Tree of Life - Jonh Ford

01:13:30 Walt Disney - Tolkein on Disney

01:21:50 Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky

01:28:18 Oscar Wilde vs. G.K. Chesterton

01:35:49 Charles Dickens vs. George Eliot

01:38:50 Coffee - Balzac - Rodin - England

01:44:00 Thomas Mann vs. Hermann Hesse

01:47:09 Graham Hancock - Atlantis

01:52:25 Decline in reading - Nostalgia

01:55:19 Ecclesiastes vs. The Song of Songs - Swift vs. Defore - Whitman vs. Wordsworth

01:59:09 The Simpsons

02:04:30 Base ball

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 novels of the 20th century into English. Simon discusses his new 2026 translation of The Magic Mountain, the legacy of earlier translators, and the strange experience of living inside Mann’s vast novel while translating it.

Topics include:

• Why Thomas Mann is so difficult to translate

• The challenge of translating The Magic Mountain’s long German sentences

• Hans Castorp, time, and the atmosphere of Davos

• Translation choices, compromises, and literary voice

• Settembrini, Naphta, Behrens, and Peeperkorn’s speech styles

• The legacy of H. T. Lowe-Porter and later English translations

• Translation theory and literary translation in practice

• Switzerland, Thomas Mann, and the culture surrounding the novel

• The relationship between language, rhythm, and character

The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) began as a short novella inspired by Thomas Mann’s visit to a Davos sanatorium and grew into a monumental meditation on time, illness, modernity, and European intellectual life before the First World War.

This interview focuses primarily on translation and language. A separate discussion with Richie Robertson on the novel’s themes and content will follow.

If you enjoy long-form literary conversations on literature, philosophy, translation, and European culture, please consider subscribing to Solomon & Smith.

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 recurring theme throughout the discussion is the idea that contradiction may not weaken scripture, but deepen it. Rather than flattening the Gospels into a single harmonized account, we explore the possibility that their tensions, disagreements, and competing emphases are precisely what make them intellectually and spiritually alive. The Gospels become less a single voice than a conversation unfolding across texts, communities, and centuries.

We also explore:

The collapse of biblical literalism and reconstruction of faith

Why the Gospels disagree on the date of Jesus’ death

The “Messianic Secret” and why Jesus hides his identity in Mark

The strange anonymous figures of the Gospels, including the Beloved Disciple

Apocalyptic expectation in Jesus and Paul

How Christianity adapted after the delayed apocalypse

The development of the biblical canon and pseudonymous epistles

John’s Gospel, mysticism, and accusations of Gnosticism

Whether scripture should be read as history, theology, literature, or all three at once

From Mark’s abrupt ending to John’s cosmic theology, this conversation examines the New Testament as a dynamic and evolving body of texts—one shaped as much by interpretation and argument as by doctrine itself.

Whether you are interested in biblical studies, theology, literary interpretation, church history, or the philosophy of religion, this discussion provides a detailed and nuanced exploration of how the Christian scriptures were written, interpreted, and transformed.

00:00:00 Contradictions in scripture

00:00:55 Introduction

00:03:59 John Nelson and losing fundamentalism

00:12:04 Scripture, literalism, and reading historically

00:17:14 Why the Gospels disagree

00:27:32 The date of Jesus’ death

00:29:48 The strange mysteries of the Gospels

00:32:58 The Messianic Secret in Mark

00:41:05 Why Jesus hides his identity

00:47:21 Apocalypse and the end of the world

00:50:22 John’s Gospel and delayed eschatology

00:56:12 Canon, revision, and rewriting scripture

01:00:48 Gnosticism and non-canonical gospels

01:04:20 Can the biblical canon change?

01:10:47 Pseudonymous epistles and authorship

01:18:00 The Beloved Disciple

01:22:57 Closing poem and conclusion

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 inhabit another.

In this conversation, Professor Brian Cummings joins Jack and Milo to explore the strange power of books, writing, and reading.

What was intended as a discussion about the history of the book — from scrolls and manuscripts to Shakespeare’s First Folio — became something much richer and stranger: a philosophical exploration of consciousness, memory, religion, imagination, and why human beings treat books as almost sacred objects.

We discuss:

• Why reading feels like experiencing another soul

• Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophy of writing

• Shakespeare and the invention of literary immortality

• Why religions become “religions of the book”

• The mystery of language and symbols

• Tolkien, Dostoevsky, Milton, Borges, Beckett, and the first books that changed us

• Why owning books matters psychologically

• Whether books are humanity’s greatest technology

• The strange relationship between writers, readers, and consciousness itself

“If the soul is like a book, then reading is another person walking beside you.”

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.

A central theme is the tension between knowledge and uncertainty. Medieval travellers were often moving through spaces that were both physically real and imaginatively constructed: Jerusalem as both a city and a spiritual landscape; distant regions like Ethiopia or India as places shaped as much by myth as by experience. Travel writing reflects this duality—combining observation, theology, hearsay, and invention in ways that resist modern distinctions between fact and fiction.

We also explore:

* The difference between migration and “travel” as a chosen, meaningful journey

* Pilgrimage as both spiritual discipline and early form of tourism

* The role of Venice, the Franciscans, and the Mamluks in structuring routes to the Holy Land

* The economics of travel: currencies, credit, and material goods

* Language barriers, miscommunication, and strategies for getting by

* Figures such as Margery Kempe and the limits of medieval curiosity

* The persistence of myths like Prester John and their explanatory function

Throughout, the discussion returns to a broader question: how do people make sense of a world that exceeds their knowledge? Medieval travel offers one answer—not through systematic understanding, but through narrative, belief, and selective attention.

Whether you are interested in medieval history, literature, religion, or the philosophy of travel, this conversation provides a detailed and nuanced introduction to how movement shaped the medieval imagination.

00:00:00 Medieval world, mystery, and Prester John

00:01:01 Introduction

00:06:26 Anthony Bale

00:08:40 Becoming a medievalist

00:14:08 Medieval travel and modern tourism

00:23:09 Margery Kempe and pilgrimage inwardness

00:28:57 Jerusalem routes, Mamluks, and pilgrimage structure

00:38:14 Venice, money, and travel logistics

00:46:57 Language, misunderstanding, and communication

00:57:26 Beyond Europe: India, Ethiopia, China

01:00:50 Prester John and the unknown world

01:02:08 Conclusion

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 paradoxes of religious writing: the sense that language is both essential and ultimately insufficient to express God.

A recurring theme in this discussion is the idea that God exceeds language. Even the most inventive and intellectually rigorous poets—Donne with his metaphysical conceits, Herbert with his formal precision—acknowledge a limit to expression. Poetry becomes an act of striving: an attempt to articulate the divine while recognizing that it can never be fully contained in words.

We also explore:

The relationship between devotional poetry and prayer

The overlap between love poetry and religious expression

The influence of the Psalms and biblical translation

The role of music, liturgy, and communal worship

The tension between private faith and public poetry

The cultural and historical context of post-Reformation England

From the metaphysical intensity of Donne to Herbert’s quieter devotional struggles, this conversation offers an in-depth look at how poets used language to approach what lies beyond it—and why they so often felt they failed.

Whether you're interested in literature, theology, philosophy, or early modern history, this discussion provides a rich introduction to one of the most intellectually and spiritually complex traditions in English poetry.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:14:15 Is devotional poetry a form of prayer?

00:30:50 Should we only write to improve people's lives?

00:41:30 You can only remake a religion in a group - not alone

00:47:00 What we most relish in Donne

00:53:15 Can we find poets in their poems?

01:00:40 Devotion in the modern world

01:14:40 Devotional poetry and music

01:26:49 A blind man describing the abyss

01:38:14 The 18th century is a desert

01:46:00 Magnolia trees in full bloom

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

01:43:29 The Cloud as a practice

01:53:30 Bible study as an intense book-club

02:00:10 Give yourself to the void

02:08:30 A single moment of reality is worth eternity

02:11:47 A composition based on Cloud

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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—they changed it.

We speak about the rise of modern exorcisms, figures like the Bradys (infleunce for the Conjuring franchise) the spread of the satanic panic, and other conspiracy theories, such as the Lizard people. We break down the surprising feedback loop between pop culture and real-world belief systems.

How does entertainment quietly influence how millions of people see reality itself?

What We Cover:

How The Exorcist influenced real exorcism practices

Why satanic panic took off in America

The link between horror films and religious belief

How media shapes fear, faith, and conspiracy thinking

Why educated people aren’t immune to these effects

https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership

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 intense isolation as an anchorite—and Margery Kempe's threw her out into the world, to travel, preached, and openly shar her experiences.

The hidden world of anchorites and medieval solitude

Public vs private expressions of faith

Mysticism, madness, and medieval psychology

How society judged female visionaries

The origins of some of the earliest writing by women in English

How people distinguished God visions from Devil visions from mental illness

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 captures the restless drive that defines the modern world: the desire to know everything, experience everything, and reshape reality itself. Nietzsche interrogates the same drive at greater length, in greater depth.

We discuss:

• Faust and modernity

• Goethe, Nietzsche, and nihilism

• Why everyone thinks Nietzsche’s Übermensch is about them

• Whether universities are still the right place for philosophy

• The permanent, everlasting crisis of meaning in the Evening Lands

• Technology and power

• Is Nietzsche optimistic?

If you enjoy conversations about dead German men, consider subscribing and supporting the channel.

Here is a link to Johannes's in depth course on Faust Part II: https://halkyonacademy.teachable.com/p/goethe-faust-part-ii

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 lifetime refining it. A poly-artist evolves across styles, mediums, and artistic languages.

We discuss composers like Stravinsky, Webern, Bach, Carter, and Messaien, as well as a host of examples from other forms, from film, painting, and literature.

The discussion explores:

• Why some artists need constant change to stay creative

• Why others need to deepen a single artistic language

• The pressures artists face from institutions, audiences, and markets

• How commercial and institutional systems shape artistic production

• Why many artists struggle with expectations and “branding”

00:00:00 Preview

00:01:47 Introduction

00:14:58 Bicycle

00:16:34 Samuel arrives

00:20:00 Outline of Mono vs. Poly

00:33:31 Messiaen

00:39:50 Outsider Artists

00:45:50 The Art Music Funding Problem

00:51:10 Should Artists be Subsidised

00:55:32 The Bureaucratic hellscape of funding

01:06:49 You must produce slop

01:10:30 AI and composition

01:16:40 Cultural alienation

01:24:16 Pachelbel, and the tragedy of being a one hit wonder

01:29:00 Love is the soul of art-making - J.S. Bach - Late Style

01:38:29 Being careful, vs. being pedantic - Webern

Napoleon (1927), the monumental silent film directed by Abel Gance is frequently (and correctly) described as one of the most astonishing, awe-inspiring achievements in the history of cinema.

Joined by small-handed essayist and fiction writer (and the sole inventor of Google Maps) Cecily Carver, Milo and Jack discuss why this five-and-a-half-hour epic about Napoleon Bonaparte (a Corsican man) remains insanely electrifying a century later. What makes Napoleon feel less like a historical drama and more like an operatic explosion of cinematic ecstasy? Is it fascist propaganda? Is it a prototype of the modern blockbuster? Is it the final, triumphant eruption of silent cinema before the apocalypse of sound, which murdered the medium forever?

Topics include:

Napoleon as “Great Man” and metaphysical force

The French Revolution (what was all that about?)

Abel Gance’s radical visual experimentation (polyvision, superimposition, handheld camerawork)

Silent film acting and the magic of the human face

The Coppola vs. Carl Davis scores and how music transforms silent cinema

The Josephine interlude and romantic melodrama

Unfinished art, and the beauty/tragedy of abandoned masterpieces

Whether Napoleon belongs to the stolid 19th century, or the avant-garde 1920s, and how it anticipates directors like James Cameron

We also plonk Napoleon within the broader arc of late silent film, alongside the theatrical inheritance of opera and vaudeville.

For viewers interested in film history, aesthetics, political myth, and the philosophy of art, this discussion treats Napoleon (the film) as a heavenly spectacle, and as a majestic historical object.

If you care about silent cinema, epic filmmaking, the French Revolution, or the enduring allure of charismatic power on screen, this conversation is for you.

In this episode, we talk with Sean McCleod about the theological, cultural, and political logic behind contemporary belief in demon possession, spiritual warfare, and deliverance ministries within Third Wave Evangelicalism.

How did demons return to the center of American religious life? What distinguishes Third Wave charismatic Demonology from earlier Pentecostal or Catholic demon-hunting? And how does the language of spiritual warfare intersect with neoliberal ideas about free will, agency, responsibility, and selfhood?

Drawing from the sociology of religion, political theology, and cultural history, this conversation explores:

The rise of Third Wave Evangelicalism and charismatic Christianity

Deliverance ministry and modern exorcism practices

Generational curses and the psychology of spiritual warfare

The legacy of the 1980s Satanic Panic

Prosperity gospel theology and market-oriented spirituality

Neoliberalism and the construction of the “responsible” Christian self

Conspiracy culture, apocalypticism, and American politics

We also look at these developments in the context of a broader media history that includes films like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, which helped reintroduce demonology into mainstream American imagination. From there, we trace how spiritual warfare theology became normalised within evangelical institutions and how it continues to shape contemporary political and religious discourse.

Rather than dismissing belief in demons as irrational or fringe, this episode asks a deeper question: What social, economic, and theological conditions make demonology feel plausible—and even necessary—within late modern America?

For scholars of religion, clergy, graduate students, and anyone interested in evangelical theology, charismatic Christianity, political theology, or the intersection of capitalism and spirituality, this episode offers a sustained, two-hour analysis of one of the most misunderstood features of modern American religion.

In this long-form conversation, we look at how Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence applies to cinema — and what it might reveal about modern filmmakers.

Bloom argued that strong artists are “born in debt,” and must struggle against the overwhelming presence of their creative fathers. What happens when we apply this idea to movies?

From Alfred Hitchcock to David Lynch, from Paul Thomas Anderson to Quentin Tarantino, we trace how directors wrestle with their influences — escaping them, misreading them, and sometimes swallowing them whole.

We discuss:

Bloom’s concept of “creative misprision”

The idea of artistic “fathers” in film history

Whether originality is still possible

The 90s video store generation of directors

The psychological burden of influence

Cinema as an ongoing act of reinterpretation

Is every filmmaker haunted?

Is influence something to escape — or something to transform?

If you’re interested in film theory, auteur studies, literary criticism, or the philosophy of art, this conversation dives deep into the anxiety at the heart of modern cinema.

Welcome back to Solomon and Smith — keep it juicy, large boys.

In this second part of our deep dive into William Blake, we’re joined by Jodie Marley for a rich, wide-ranging conversation on prophecy, vision, mysticism, and the strange, electric Blakeopantheon.

Building on our earlier discussion with Mark Vernon, we explore Blake through the lens of innocence and experience, satire and sincerity, heaven and hell. What does it mean for Blake to “see” something? Did he believe his visions were literal? Or are they poetic frameworks for imagination and revelation?

We dig into:

Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and its critique of Emanuel Swedenborg

Biblical prophecy, including Isaiah’s vision in Book of Isaiah

Millenarian movements of the 18th century

Visionary experience vs prophetic authority

The occult revival and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

W. B. Yeats, Theosophy, and esoteric symbolism

Tarot, symbolism, and the language of spiritual correspondences

We also touch on visionary figures like Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and the wider mystical tradition that influenced (and reacted to) Blake’s work.

Is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell satire? Revelation? Both?

Can everyone become a visionary — or does prophecy require terror, descent, and transformation?

And what happens when imagination becomes indistinguishable from revelation?

If you’re interested in Romanticism, mysticism, biblical symbolism, esotericism, the occult revival, or the philosophy of imagination — this episode is for you.

William Blake still awes and unsettles us. In this long-form discussion, Mark Vernon — psychotherapist, author, and former Anglican priest — joins Milo and Jack for a deep exploration of Blake’s religious imagination, visionary cosmology, and misunderstood relationship to Christianity.

Together we explore Blake’s prophetic works Milton and Jerusalem. We ask whether Blake changed his mind after the French Revolution, or whether a single spiritual vision runs through his entire oeuvre. We examine Blake’s critique of deism, mechanistic science, and moralism, his engagement with numbers and eternity, and his insistence that imagination is not fantasy but a mode of truth.

This conversation moves through Blake’s theology, his rejection of the theological currents of his day, his fascination with prophecy (including failed prophecy), and his enduring relevance in a disenchanted modern world. Along the way, we touch on Newton, Milton, Jesus, revolutionary politics, Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, Tolkien, and the strange power of beauty as a marker of truth.

This is the first of two conversations on William Blake on the channel, with a contradictory companion discussion 'Was William Blake an Unorthodox Christian?' following soon.

If you’re interested in Blake studies, Christian mysticism, Romantic poetry, prophecy, imagination, or the spiritual crisis of modernity, this conversation is for you.

00:00:00 Introduction

00:05:31 Conversation Begins

00:09:10 Blake and Christianity

00:29:33 Did Blake change over time?

00:40:00 Blake and Mormonism

00:52:26 True vs. False visions

01:01:25 Problem of Evil

01:11:35 Blake and Mathematics

01:22:19 Blake and the Enlightenment

01:29:02 Blake and the Body

01:37:49 Blake and Painting

01:47:59 Mark Vernon taken up in a whirlwind

01:50:04 Mark Vernon brought back down in a whirlwind

01:58:45 1,000,000,000 monkeys

02:00:44 Blake and Tolkein

02:07:30 Is sensation meaningless?

02:12:53 Conclusions

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In this long-form literary conversation, Emma Smith—Shakespeare scholar at Oxford (Hertford College)—joins us for a broad discussion of Shakespeare, with a special focus on Othello and Timon of Athens.

The conversation explores why Iago has been imbued with such psychological complexity, how Othello is often denied the same interpretive generosity, and what race, rhetoric, and language do inside Shakespeare’s plays. We look at magic, words as world-making, jealousy, authorship, and power, and ask whether Othello might be read as a magician?

We also turn to Timon of Athens: its survival through the First Folio, its collaborative authorship, its absence of women and family structures, and why the play has been neglected in England but embraced by Marx, Brecht, and German Romantic thinkers. Is Timon unfinished—or just radically experimental? What does it mean to imagine Shakespeare not as a solitary genius, but as a collaborative playwright working inside a theatrical system?

Along the way, we discuss:

Iago’s language, silence, and the meaning of “I am not what I am”

The handkerchief, contradictory histories, and narrative instability in Othello

Words as magic, rhetoric as spell-casting, and Shakespearean speech acts

Race, identity, and the limits of character psychology

Dual authorship, collaboration, and the myth of Shakespearean genius

Why Timon of Athens still feels strange, unfinished, and modern

How political, structural readings differ from psychological ones

Shakespeare, biography, and why we want authors to “believe in something”

Intro: 00:00

Opening general Shakespeare discussion: 18:29

Timon of Athens: 31:54

Othello: 1:06:30

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What is satire for — laughter, outrage, moral attack?

In this conversation, we explore the evolution of English satire from the 17th and 18th centuries, examining how writers like Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, and the Earl of Rochester used anger, wit, and self-induced misanthropy to critique politics, religion, art, and human nature itself.

Opening with a powerful reading from Pope’s The Dunciad, the discussion moves into questions of righteous vs unrighteous anger (Aristotle’s ethics), the role of masks and persona in satire, and how satire shifted from vicious moral attack to modern comedy. We compare the biting invective of Restoration satire with the refined irony of Pope and Swift, and trace how censorship, politics, and religion shaped the genre.

Topics covered include:

📜 The meaning of satire in the Renaissance and Restoration period

⚡ Righteous anger vs unrighteous anger in literature and philosophy

✒️ Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, Essay on Man, and The Rape of the Lock

🌍 Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and political irony

👑 John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and political allegory

🍷 Rochester’s libertinism, misanthropy, and shocking satire

🧠 Hobbes, Epicureanism, moral philosophy, and pessimism

🎭 Masks, persona, irony, and cruelty in satirical writing

🔥 Why satire became associated with comedy in the modern era

📚 Connections to modern writers like Thomas Bernhard

If you’re interested in classic literature, philosophy, literary criticism, political satire, or the history of ideas, this episode offers a thoughtful and sometimes hilarious exploration of how writers use anger and humor to tell uncomfortable truths.

👍 If you enjoyed this discussion, like the video, subscribe for more literary conversations, and share your thoughts in the comments.

In this wide-ranging literary conversation, Jack and Milo sit down with David Constantine — acclaimed poet, short story writer, and one of the leading English translators of German literature — to explore poetry, translation, Goethe’s Faust, Hölderlin, language, education, and the shaping power of reading.

Constantine reflects on his childhood in post-war northern England, the transformative impact of the 1944 Education Act, and the moment he discovered poetry through the work of Wilfred Owen. From there, the discussion moves into his academic journey, learning German, studying at Oxford (Wadham College), and developing a lifelong engagement with German poetry and philosophy.

A major focus of the conversation is Goethe’s Faust — its moral ambiguity, the contrast between Part I and Part II, irony, redemption, and why the second part remains less popular in the English-speaking world. Constantine offers deep insight into Faust as a character, challenging romanticized interpretations and examining questions of responsibility, power, and human contradiction.

The interview also dives into the art of literary translation:

✔️ How to translate rhyme, meter, and musicality

✔️ When to prioritize meaning versus sound

✔️ Why “foreignness” in translation can be productive

✔️ Translating Hölderlin’s difficult syntax and estranged language

✔️ The creative limits and freedoms of poetic form

Along the way, the conversation touches on Blake, Keats, German Romanticism, classical meters, modern language education, cultural change, AI, and the future of human creativity — making this a rich discussion for students, writers, translators, and lovers of literature.

If you’re interested in poetry, philosophy, German literature, translation theory, or the enduring legacy of Goethe and Hölderlin, this episode offers rare depth and personal insight from one of today’s most respected literary translators.

🔔 Subscribe for more long-form conversations on literature, philosophy, poetry, and culture.

00:00 Introduction Milo and Jack

03:52 Opening discussion on Constantine's childhood

24:42 Faust

50:58 Hölderlin

1:02:18 The Greek Anthology

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What does it take to translate the entire Hebrew Bible — and what happens when it happens almost by accident?

In this long-form conversation, we speak with Robert Alter, legendary literary scholar and translator of the Hebrew Bible, about language, beauty, storytelling, and the strange path that led him to complete one of the greatest translation projects of our time.

Alter reflects on how he began translating Genesis as an experiment — never intending to translate the whole Bible — and how one book quietly led to another until the entire project was complete. Along the way, we explore how biblical narrative works as literature, why repetition in the Bible often carries deep artistic meaning, and how characters like King David evolve across time in ways that resemble the modern novel.

We also discuss:

• Why translation is a creative and literary act

• What makes the Hebrew Bible one of the great works of world literature

• How language shapes meaning and rhythm in translation

• The relationship between the King James Bible and modern translations

• Biblical poetry, sound, and alliteration

• Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the role of commentary and interpretation

• Why ancient texts still speak powerfully to modern readers

Robert Alter is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Hebrew at UC Berkeley and the acclaimed translator of The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. His work has reshaped how readers encounter the Bible as a literary masterpiece rather than only a religious text.

If you’re interested in literature, philosophy, translation, biblical studies, or deep conversation, this episode offers a rare window into the mind of a remarkable scholar.

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Philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart joins Milo and Jack for a wide-ranging long-form conversation on screens, smartphones, cinema, dreams, Gnosticism, and the spiritual consequences of modern technology. We explore Hart’s latest fiction collection Prisms and Veils, the nature of illusion and reality, prophetic dreams, David Lynch, Kurosawa, memory palaces, and what it means to live in an increasingly virtual world.

In this discussion, David Bentley Hart reflects on how digital screens shape consciousness, attention, and the soul — comparing smartphones to “magic mirrors,” demonic distractions, and modern forms of Gnostic illusion. Drawing on theology, philosophy, literature, and film, the conversation ranges across:

• The spiritual and psychological effects of smartphones and algorithms

• Cinema as a dream-world and modern myth-making

• Gnosticism, illusion, and layered realities

• Dreams, prophetic experience, and the porous boundaries of consciousness

• Memory palaces and the architecture of the mind

• David Lynch, Kurosawa, Hitchcock, and cinematic transcendence

• The themes of Hart’s fiction collection Prisms and Veils

• Culture, attention, modernity, and technological acceleration

We also touch on Hart’s early influences, favorite films and authors, childhood cinematic obsessions, and how imagination mediates reality itself.

This episode is ideal for viewers interested in philosophy podcasts, theology discussions, metaphysics, media theory, film analysis, digital culture, and long-form intellectual conversation.

This is a relaxed, exploratory conversation rather than a formal interview — expect digressions.

👍 If you enjoy thoughtful long-form discussions, please like, subscribe, and share.