What's on my bedsde table: AC Grayling
Show 14: The Philosophy professor on what keeps him awake at night...
Anthony Clifford Grayling is a philosopher and author whose most recent publications include Towards the Light and The Choice of Hercules. He is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, and a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts. Here’s what currently keeping him up at night…
On Ugliness by Umberto Eco
Much like his acclaimed History of Beauty, renowned cultural critic Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellent in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of the sordid and the scandalous come from? Is ugliness also in the eye of the beholder? Taking in Milton, Goethe, Bosch, Breugel and Goya, this is an ingenious study of the Ugly, revealing that what we often shield ourselves from and shun in everyday life is what we are subliminally most attracted to.
Inside the Whale by George Orwell
George Orwell is best remembered for Animal Farm and 1984, but it is his essays – such as this 1940 essay in three parts – that launched him. In them he not only demonstrated how he thought, but proposed a rule as to how thinking ought to proceed. The first part of this essay examines Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, while the second and third parts examine a number of other authors. Tracing his arguments and their development in these essays is a rich and rewarding exercise.
The Fictions of Bruno Schulz: the Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schultz
A collection of the short stories of Polish schoolteacher, writer, literary critic and graphic artist Bruno Schultz, who is widely considered to be one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. His brief career ended tragically during World War II, but he remains best known for his short stories, which combine autobiographical elements with mythical, fantastical settings.
