The application process will 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, questions, thoughts, preferences, hesitations etc.

1. Choice of Articles

Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method by Carlo Ginzburg, introduction by Anna Davin.

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

Politics in the Consulting Room: Adam Phillips in conversation with Devorah Baum

‘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 ... and Anger: From Freud to Feminism by Kathleen Woodward

"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)

Contra Arendt, by Dylan Riley

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

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."

"Nous lisons pour redevenir les auteurs de nos vies." (We read to become once again the authors of our own lives.) — Hélène Cixous, L’Heure de Clarice Lispector

"The fourth class of readers may be compared to the slave of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, preserves only the pure gem, and is himself profited by his labours and profiting others." — Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures on Shakespeare, 1811

"The unconscious is that chapter of my history which is marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood: it is the censored chapter. But the truth can be rediscovered; usually it has already been written down elsewhere." — Jacques Lacan, Écrits, 1966

"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer."— Simone Weil

"The revolutionary spirit is a social creative power... it is the soul of the collective, the intellect that gives the mass its direction and its eyes." — Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918

“A community of readers engaged with serious books becomes as individuals respond to the book and define its cultural and individual meaning, a community of inquiry” - In Defense of Reading, Daniel R. Schwarz

"The space of literature is not only that of an institution... it is also the space of a resistance, the place where a democratic 'right to say everything' is exercised." — Jacques Derrida, Passions, 1993

"We need a 'Community of Christians'—not a body of thinkers, but a body of people who are able to think."— T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939

"I call experience a journey to the end of the possible... This experience is not a matter of isolated individual study; it is essentially a communication." — Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, 1943

"I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards... the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, 'Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.'" — Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?

"Men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do." — 1 Chronicles 12:32 Sons of Issachar

"Discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but is the thing for which and by which there is struggle; discourse is the power which is to be seized." Discourse on Language, 1970, Foucault