Eccentric Circles

By: Evergreen Podcasts
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  • Summary

  • Some periods, some cities give rise to ideas and circles of thinkers, that are both of the time and outside it. Machine Age London has had a deep legacy on all our lives - on matters as disparate as education, sex, drugs, yoga and rock ‘n’ roll.
    Evergreen Podcasts 2024
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Episodes
  • Episode 6: Orgasms are Good for Empire

    Episode 6: Orgasms are Good for Empire
    May 3 2024
    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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    52 mins
  • Episode 5: Blast Off

    Episode 5: Blast Off
    Apr 25 2024
    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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    58 mins
  • Episode 4: Stirrings and Straw men, Nude and Naked

    Episode 4: Stirrings and Straw men, Nude and Naked
    Apr 19 2024
    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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    41 mins

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