John Phipps

A podcast about the literary canon that actually deepens your knowledge (sort of)

The Canon Ball is good on books about which you know a little, but when discussing books I knew something about, my hosts turned into simplistic oafs

Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon. Image: Ted Thai / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images 
issue 29 August 2020

While most of life’s pleasures can be shared, reading is lonely. It’s more than possible for six friends to enjoy an exquisite meal, a bottle of wine and then settle down for a four- or five-hour orgy. Food, drink, sex: these things are better shared. But if, as dawn approached, someone cracked open Chaucer’s ‘Parliament of Fowls’ and intimated that it was time to really get down to brass tacks, it could only spoil the mood.

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