The Canon Club: The Romanesque

The Canon Club

This week, Paul and Ed discuss the emergence of a style of building which represents the birth of the western architecture, namely the Romanesque. Across Europe there remain thousands of buildings which are still categorised are Romanesque, but what does the term mean, where does it come from and what defines building of this kind? To help us find out we are joined by John McNeill, an Oxford expert and prolific writer on the subject.

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The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature.

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna.

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen.

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon.

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience.

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack.

Paul Morland is an expert in demographics, and the author of several books.

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon:

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford