"The application process" will, naturally, involve some reading on your part - two novels and an article - to be discussed together with one or more of the other "applicants" and Robin. And of course talking about the programme, your thoughts, questions, preferences, hesitations etc.
But most important of all is your own thought-feeling process:
What's going on for you at the moment?; How do you see your current juncture? Widen that lens to your close circle, your communities and workplaces; society, the world. Where is your place, what is your calling?
And how have books, reading and readers played their part in any of that?
And those people, hopefully including yourself, who are they that have been able to respond and to act, individually and as part of collectives?
And so on.... really the question is whether you can see yourself as actively part of a project, rooted in study in a group/collective context, that culminates in a shared outward facing project of putting on a play.
1. Here are a list of novels that can be borrowed for a two-way discussion on the same book. I'll highlight in green when one has been chosen, and preferably the next person will opt for that.
2. Re-read a "classic" you read at an earlier stage of your life, and make some notes. Italo Calvino's gives you a definition in the introduction to his 'Why Read the Classics'. In point 3 he says:
"The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.
There should therefore be a time in adult life devoted to revisiting the most important books of our youth. Even if the books have remained the same (though they do change, in the light of an altered historical perspective), we have most certainly changed, and our encounter will be an entirely new thing."
3. A choice of articles
In this article ... Ginzburg is centrally concerned with how people see the world, how knowledge is acquired and organised, the frameworks into which they fit information, beliefs, or observations, and the social structure which contains, influences and is influenced by these aspects of knowledge. He examines the relationship between formal' and 'informal' knowledge, 'high' and 'low', lore and science. His concern, in short, is historical epistemology -the history and theory of the construction of knowledge.
Published in the History Workshop Journal, March 1980
‘In politics people think they know what they want, and in psychoanalysis the assumption is that they don’t know.’
Granta 146, 14th February 2019
"Anger is the 'forgotten' passion of psychoanalysis. Or more accurately, it is the 'translated' passion, the emotion that is almost immediately converted into the more stable—and more manageable—categories of aggression, hostility, or hate.
Originally published in Freud and the Passions, edited by John O'Neill (1996)
The essay opens by challenging the "dog-eared copies of The Origins of Totalitarianism" currently being dusted off by activists: "Among the many lessons of Trump’s return to the White House, a crucial one concerns civil society: a mushy and frustrating, but nevertheless inescapable, concept."
New Left Review, Sidecar, 03 October 2025
Roger Caillois (1913–1978), polymath, aesthetic philosopher, historian of science, and social analyst of ritual and belief, was friends with André Breton and a fellow Surrealist; but in 1934 they parted over the Surrealist commitment to mystery for its own sake
Article in Cabinet magazine, issue 29, Spring 2008
"Late in 2016, Molly Worthen lauded the great books idea as an antidote to liberalism’s ills in the Age of Trump. In “Can I Go to Great Books Camp?” Worthen notes that studying the history of ideas is always connected to great books. One assumption of Worthen’s, which I endorse, is that intellectual traditions matter for movement building and identity formation. Studying those traditions makes liberalism, or the Left, more than a mere anti-Right movement. I read her piece enthusiastically and, initially, wanted to promote it. But I couldn’t. Indeed, after considerable reflection it irked me. Why?..."
Public Seminar, April 2017
A speech given by VW in 1931 to a conference on the employment of women where she speaks about the barriers, beyond the material ones, facing women as they approach page.
"There is a surprising confluence in the philosopher Deleuze, the psychoanalyst Bion, and phenomenological psychologist Gendlin on what Deleuze terms the immediate “sense” of understanding and Gendlin calls “felt meaning.” Beneath its more differentiated propositional articulations, all three understand this phenomenon as a felt sense of constantly shifting coherence and incoherence, and based in often tacit metaphoric, figural, and/or synesthetic processes. For Deleuze and Bion, in particular, psychotic thought disorder is understood as the exaggeration of this incoherence potential within all felt meaning. Correspondingly, the expansion or enhancement of the felt coherence aspect of ordinary thought becomes the basis for the mystical states of consciousness that become a major concern of the later Bion and Deleuze. The Indian spiritual teacher Krishnamurti, known for his use of an ordinary language of deceptive simplicity to describe spiritual enlightenment, offers a striking confirmation of Deleuze and Bion on numinous states as latent within all felt meaning...."
- Good Aristocrats / Bad Aristocrats: Thomas Hobbes and Early Modern Political Culture, Michael Walzer
"... Good aristocrats are very few in number. The bulk of mankind, matter rather than makers, Hobbes divides into two groups, best described, I think, in his brief justification of preventative war: “there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their own security requires; if others, that otherwise, would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defense, to subsist”. This suggests that the “general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” has a twofold psychological origin. For what I take to be the larger number of men and women, the inclination arises out of fear. These people are not by nature competitive. Left to themselves, their aversion to risk would consistently outweigh their appetite for power, and they would rest content within the modest bounds of their families and their possessions. But they are forced into the war of all against all by a smaller group of people who pursue power, not as an instrumental good, but for its own sake. This second group competes simply for the sake of winning, and it is to its own members above all that Hobbes’ famous account of life as a race applies: we are to conceive of them as having “no other goal, no other garland, but being foremost”..."