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  • Episode 8: Drugs... and Rock 'n' Roll

    Episode 8: Drugs... and Rock 'n' Roll
    2024/12/20
    The legal situation around drugs was very different in London at the turn of the 20th century from what it is now. Opium was a go-to painkiller. And cocaine and cannabis products were also very widely available. In 1896, London hosted its first hallucinogenic trip when Havelock Ellis boiled up some peyote buttons in his flat. For Bohemian London, the time was ripe for experimentation. Later on, drug taking became a less socially acceptable pastime. But that didn’t stop Aleister Crowley who relished the notoriety. He took every drug going and wrote about it. In so doing, he set the scene for the drug cultures that followed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    44 分
  • Episode 7: Sex Magic

    Episode 7: Sex Magic
    2024/12/14
    Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare are partially responsible for the development of what is known as sex magic. Crowley was, among other things, an occultist, an important figure in the propagation of yoga in the West, a conjurer of demons, and a heroin addict. He enjoyed a licentious, all encompassing sexuality. His law, “Do What Thou Wilt,” has arguably become the dominant way of seeing relationships between consenting adults today. Spare began his career as a child prodigy, an incredibly talented artist who as a teenager was exhibited in the Royal Academy. Yet he claimed to have been sexually initiated by a South London witch, a descendant of the Salem witch trials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    38 分
  • Eccentric Circles: Back soon!

    Eccentric Circles: Back soon!
    2024/11/11
    We'll be covering the modern holy trinity of Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll, along with other more traditional religious devotion. We'll look into the popularity of the occult and its lasting legacy. And we'll be asking: "Where better to escape to: the future, full of progress and space travel, or to the comfort of the past?" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 分
  • Episode 6: Orgasms are Good for Empire

    Episode 6: Orgasms are Good for Empire
    2024/05/03
    WARNING: this episode uses explicit language almost from the start. In 1918, the year that the First World War ended, a slim little book was published. Its title was Married Love, and it was going to change the course of Western sexuality forever. Its author was Marie Stopes. She believed that mutual orgasm was an essential component of a successful marriage. This was a radical, progressive view, at a time when many doctors and scientists ignored or denied altogether the existence of the female orgasm. And yet much of Stopes’ motivation was decidedly reactionary: orgasms made women healthy, and healthy women conceived healthy babies…. and healthy babies were needed to defend and administer the British Empire. The very social fabric of the Empire itself depended on what happened between the sheets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    54 分
  • Episode 5: Blast Off

    Episode 5: Blast Off
    2024/04/25
    London sees the arrival of Italian Futurism with its glorification of machinery, war, and above all, the motor car. The Futurists, in turn, engender Vorticism, possibly Britain’s only homegrown avant-garde movement. The Vorticists believe that artists should be supreme representations of the individual, that they should make challenging art which rattles the cage of bourgeois society, that art could be an agent for change. Chief among their number is Wyndham Lewis, the self-styled bad boy of British art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 時間
  • Episode 4: Stirrings and Straw men, Nude and Naked

    Episode 4: Stirrings and Straw men, Nude and Naked
    2024/04/19
    At the turn of the 20th century, in Britain establishment tastes in art prevailed and leaned traditional. Despite being the heart of a global empire, the country suffered from an island mentality. The fall of Oscar Wilde and his subsequent escape to Paris only added to a suspicion of all things French. Decadence itself had been a French import. The English, according to the painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis, were philistines "in their bones." Paris had brought impressionism and post impressionism to the world. London was lagging badly. But in 1910 the city would finally begin to catch up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    43 分
  • Episode 3: The Edwardians: The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Part 2)

    Episode 3: The Edwardians: The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Part 2)
    2024/04/11
    The Edwardian period tends to get a bad rap - legitimately in the case of human zoos - but is there anything for which we ought to be grateful? Because of how it ended, with the carnage of the First World War, it’s easy to see the time as the quiet before the storm. But as we saw last episode, this was far from the case. There was rampant culture war, a crisis of confidence about the Empire and what it meant to be British. But there was also an increasing willingness to assert individual freedom and challenge taboos. We will see that the period helped give birth to today in fundamental ways: from Eugenics to Psychedelics and even to what has come today to be called intersectional politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    33 分
  • Episode 2: The Edwardians: The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Part 1)

    Episode 2: The Edwardians: The Good the Bad and the Ugly (Part 1)
    2024/04/04
    We tend to think of the Edwardian period as a dull interlude, where a complacent ruling class lazed away in blissful ignorance of what was coming: industrialised warfare and the dissolution of empire. In reality, this was a time of huge upheaval. There was the fight for Irish Home Rule, suffragism, socialism and vegetarianism. Telegraph cables stretched around the world. Darwinism had dealt creationism and the Judaic religions that championed it a severe blow. This left a gap for other faiths to fill, as people turned elsewhere to meet the human need for the mysterious. It was a time of occultism, sex novels and human zoos. It was also when the wheels began to come off the imperial project. And in 1912, this proud maritime nation was able to celebrate a true feat of engineering: the launch of the unsinkable Titanic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    47 分