Words To That Effect: Episodes on 19th Century Literature

March 8, 2022February 14, 2024 Conor19th Century Literature, British Literature

A Word To That Effect: Cliffhanger (Bonus Ep)

A Word To That Effect is a new series of bonus mini-episodes about a single word or phrase with a distinctly literary origin. This week: cliffhanger! Find out about the cliffhanger story. Hint: it’s related to all that sensation fiction that was featured in the last WTTE episode There will read more…

February 22, 2022February 14, 2024 Conor19th Century Literature, British Literature, Crime

Ep 57: The Sensation Novel

The sensation novel was a phenomenon of the 1860s. The novels were incredibly popular with the reading public and just as passionately derided by many critics. Sensation fiction was so called for a number of reasons. Firstly, the stories, in serialized and then in book form, were a publishing and pop read more…

March 9, 2021February 14, 2024 Conor19th Century Literature, Crime, Detective Fiction

Ep 50: Arsène Lupin

In 1905 in Paris, the publisher Pierre Laffite had an idea. His new journal Je Sais Tout (I Know Everything) had just launched and he was looking for an author who could do for his magazine, what Arthur Conan Doyle’s phenomenally popular Sherlock Holmes had done for The Strand magazine, read more…

March 11, 2020March 11, 2020 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, British Literature, History

Ep 43: Lost Books

There are countless great works of literature we have tantalising glimpses of, works we know exist but, as far as anyone can tell, have been lost to history. Huge swathes of ancient Greek literature, a vast Chinese encyclopedia, a lost Shakespeare play based on the story of Don Quixote. And read more…

February 26, 2020February 26, 2020 Conor19th Century Literature, Literature and Science, Science Fiction

Ep 42: The Missing Link

The Hunt for the Missing Link Sasquatch. Bigfoot. The Abominable Snowman. Yeti. The Yowie, the Yeren, the Almas Ape-men, cave men, wild men. The Missing Link. The idea of the missing link came about in the mid-19th century, with the rise of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. In 1859 Darwin read more…

January 30, 2020January 30, 2020 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, Science, Science Fiction

Ep 40: Time Travel Tales

Time travel fiction is a small subgenre of science fiction. Science fiction is a small subset of all the many genres and types of literature. Time machines and time travellers are a niche interest. And yet, in another way, all fiction is time travel fiction. All stories rely on time read more…

December 23, 2019December 23, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, Supernatural

Christmas Bonus Episode: A Victorian Christmas Ghost Story

Normal episodes will resume in the new year but, in the mean time, I have made a very special Christmas episode. The Christmas before last I released an M.R. James story, following a Christmas tradition of ghost stories going back to Victorian times. So, I’ve decided to do it again, read more…

October 29, 2019October 30, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, Horror, Supernatural, Victorian

Ep 36: Blood, Death, and Varney the Vampire

There is no pop culture monster more written about, more critiqued and analysed, more portrayed and adapted and reimagined, than the vampire. So this episode is not about most vampires. There are no discussions of Dracula or Nosferatu, no True Blood or Twilight or Buffy, no Anne Rice or Stephen read more…

October 15, 2019October 22, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, British Literature, Horror, Literature and Science, Medicine

Ep 35: Jekyll and Hyde

For most people today, I think it’s fair to say, the story of Jekyll and Hyde is a rough outline of a tale, a fairly straightforward allegory of the potential dark side within us all. Read Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novella, however, and you immediately realise there is so much read more…

June 4, 2019September 12, 2024 Conor19th Century Literature, 20th Century Literature, 21st Century Literature, Irish Literature, Short Stories

Ep 34: The Art of the Short Story

There are the celebrated authors: Checkov, Joyce, Mansfield, Munro. There are the big questions: “what makes a truly great short story?”. “Where does the form originate?” “What can short stories do that other forms of literature can’t?” But before any of this, there’s a question that’s not that easy to read more…

April 23, 2019April 23, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, Detective Fiction, Popular Culture, Science Fiction

Ep 31: Steampunk, Pt 2 (Even Greater London)

Note: Part 1 of this double episode is here One way of thinking about steampunk is to divide it into two parts: the steam and the punk. The steam is the Victorian element: the fascination and engagement with the 19th century – whether satirizing or poking fun at Victorian conventions read more…

Four-dimensional space (Words To That Effect Ep29)

March 11, 2019March 11, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, History, Religion, Science, Science Fiction, Supernatural

Ep29: Travels in Four-Dimensional Space

We have no problem thinking mathematically about four-dimensional space. Where a 3-d cube has 8 vertices, a 4-d hypercube has 16 vertices. Where a cube has 6 faces, like a dice, a 4-d hypercube has 24 faces. The problem is imagining what that actually looks like. We live in a read more…

February 11, 2019February 11, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, 21st Century Literature, Science Fiction

Ep 27: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

What Happens after the End of the World? What would happen if humanity ceased to exist? Well, assuming, of course, that earth itself has not been destroyed in this hypothetical apocalypse, the world would continue quite happily without us. People have long speculated about what would happen in the weeks, read more…

January 28, 2019February 7, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, British Literature, History, Horror, Supernatural, Victorian

Ep 26: Unwrapping the Egyptian Mummy

In the 19th century, a very popular form of entertainment was the mummy unwrapping party. You could go to a private or public event at which an ancient Egyptian mummy would be unrolled and examined. Bandages would be passed around, touched and smelled, ancient jewellery would be admired, and a read more…

Ep25 Dinosaurs in Fiction - Words To That Effect

January 14, 2019January 15, 2019 Conor19th Century Literature, Film, History, Literature and Science, Popular Culture, Science, Victorian

Ep25 – Dinosaurs: Palaeontology To Pyjamas

In 1842 a Victorian anatomist looked at some unusual fossils and, noticing they had something in common, he decided we needed a word to describe these strange creatures. He called them dinosaurs. Cut to the present day and there are dinosaur films, TV shows, books, songs, toys, and anything else read more…