The application process will, naturally, involve some reading on your part - an article and two novels - 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.
1. 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.
2. A list of novels that can be borrowed for a two-way discussion on the same text. I'll highlight in green when one has been chosen, for the next person to preferably opt for that.
3. 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."