The Canon Club
by Ed West & Paul Morland
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
Episodes
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The Canon Club: Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich is considered one of the great composers of the 20th century, and one of the greatest of all Russian musicians. Noted for versatility of style, his work includes 15 symphonies, string quartets, concertos, but also operas, ballets, and a number of works composed for theatre and...
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The Canon Club: Van Gogh
Vincent Van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherland, the son of a Protestant clergyman and into a family with close ties to the art world. Initially he struggled to find direction, working in various roles in his homeland, in England and France, at one time settling as preacher among Belgian coal...
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The Canon Club: Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was born into an upper-middle class family in Lübeck in 1875, son of a German father and Brazilian mother. After his father's death the family moved to Munich where he and his brother, Heinrich, established themselves as writers. Thomas Mann married into the wealthy Jewish Pringsheim...
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The Canon Club: The Romanesque
This week, Paul and Ed discuss the emergence of a style of building which represents the birth of the western architecture, namely the Romanesque. Across Europe there remain thousands of buildings which are still categorised are Romanesque, but what does the term mean, where does it come from and...
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The Canon Club: Anna Karenina
The novel Anna Karenina was published by Count Leo Tolstoy in 1878. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between Anna, a respectably married upper-class woman, and a young army officer, Count Vronsky. Anna, torn between duty and passion, cannot resist the latter and is drawn to her...
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The Canon Club: Anton Bruckner
Anton Bruckner was born in 1824 in Ansfelden near Linz in Upper Austria, the eldest of eleven children born to a schoolmaster. He became a teacher then was appointed an organist, eventually moving to Vienna. Bruckner was a late developer as a composer, lacking confidence in his abilities. After...
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The Canon Club: Macbeth
Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s later and darkest tragedies. Set in eleventh-century Scotland, it tells the story of how Macbeth, triumphant and promoted by the King after triumph in battle, has his future Kingship foretold by three witches and is moved, with the encouragement of his wife, to...
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The Canon Club: Caravaggio
Born outside Milan in 1571, Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio trained in a local workshop and then launched himself as an artist in Rome in his early 20s. His striking and highly individual style won him wide acclaim and patronage from high levels in the Church and the aristocracy. But his...
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Coming Soon: The Canon Club with Ed West & Paul Morland
Paul Morland and Ed West are trying to get to grips with the Western canon. Like most of us, they feel under-read and incompetent in the presence of the great Western artistic inheritance. The stuff that shaped our civilisation. From Thomas Mann's Death In Venice, to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. From...
About this show
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
Hosted by
Ed West & Paul Morland