The Canon Club
- No. of episodes
- 9
- Latest episode
- 2025-01-29
Where can you listen?
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Podtail
Google Podcasts
RSS
The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature.
It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna.
An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen.
This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon.
The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience.
Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack.
Paul Morland is a renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books.
In Season One, they'll be discussing one person or movement per episode:
E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon
E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini
E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam
E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett
E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill
E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes
E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford