Dr. Max McGuinness is a Teaching Fellow in French at Trinity College Dublin. He previously taught at University College Dublin, the University of Limerick, and Columbia University, where he received his PhD in French in 2019. His first book – published this Spring – is Hustlers in the Ivory Tower: Press and Modernism from Mallarmé to Proust (Liverpool University Press, 2024), which explores how French modernist writers used the press as a forum for literary experimentation. He is currently co-editing a collection about Marcel Proust and Ireland, The Irish Proust, which is forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic. Other publications include articles in the Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, Dix-Neuf, French Studies Bulletin, and Paragraph. Max is also a theatre critic for The Financial Times and has written for many other newspapers and magazines, including The Irish Times, The New European, Air Mail, The Daily Beast, and Private Eye.

Here we delve into this dense, lovingly layered study of the French writing and journalism that arose during a period of intense change and experimentation

Episode Credits:

Host: Luke Sheehan

Episode Music:

Played by: National Philharmonic Orchestra

Conductor: Leopold Stokowski

Danse Macabre (first performed in 1875) is the name of opus 40 by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyknBTm_YyM

Loafing Heroes - ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com

Toby Green is Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at King’s College, London and the author of A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019). He also wrote, along with Thomas Fazi, The Covid Consensus: The New Politics of Global Inequality (2023). This latter work engages with the impact of lockdowns on African countries which were, for the most part, unaffected by the disease itself. In this podcast, Green discusses the application, more widely, of a form of authoritarian capitalism that lingers to this day, with the onset of perma-crises, continued restrictions on civil rights, and the ascendancy of techno-billionaires. He also points to an intellectual failure on the part of many on the left, who failed to recognise there were two versions of accumulation in conflict, one representing traditional forms of small businesses reliant on in-person contact, the other the monopolies which digital capitalism has favoured and whose power is now far, far greater.

Episode Credits

Host: Frank Armstrong

Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

Shakalak - https://shakalak.bandcamp.com/music

Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com

In late 2021, Matt Ridley and Alina Chan published the hardback edition of ‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19’. Well received by many and loathed by some, it remains the most comprehensive book on the origin of the pandemic that leans in the direction of the lab. In a debate that has neither gone away nor gotten more polite over time, there is one thing that both sides tend to agree upon: unanswered questions lead back to China, to Wuhan, the WIV and Zhongnanhai, the leaders’ compound in Beijing – and to the tropical southern borderlands of Yunnan, Burma and Laos. Evidence has trickled into the debate like the steady drops in water torture: by summer 2022, when the paperback of Viral was published, it was necessary to add an update to the epilogue. A genetically closer virus to COVID-19 had been found, this time in Laos. That discovery added to the vast puzzle around the origins, and, like the account of Chinese workers falling sick in a Yunnan cave at the start of the work, directed attention to the tropical south, the home of the bat colonies sampled by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In this conversation, Matt Ridley and Luke Sheehan trace out some of the local particularities of the pandemic’s eruption in China, with the latter’s personal experience there coming to the fore.

Episode Credits:

Host: Luke Sheehan

Music: Loafing Heroes - ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

Produced by Massimiliano Galli - https://www.massimilianogalli.com

Links:

‘Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19’ by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalina-chan?variant=40127936987170

China and COVID origins essay by Luke Sheehan:

https://www.lilliputpress.ie/uncategorized/post-china-post-5-by-%E9%B2%81%E7%A7%91

Associated Press article by Dake Kang:

https://apnews.com/article/china-covid-virus-origins-pandemic-lab-leak-bed5ab50dca8e318ab00f60b5911da0c