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  • The Beaufort Scale: The Poetic British Way of Measuring What Happens at Sea

    The Beaufort Scale: The Poetic British Way of Measuring What Happens at Sea
    2026/09/18
    Suzanne enlightens Muriel about the Beaufort Scale and explores the remarkable story of its creator, hydrographer Francis Beaufort, who went to sea as a boy, was shipwrecked in the Far East, took part in Napoleonic sea battles against the French and in 1805 devised a brilliant empirical scale full of poetic language to evoke the changeable quality of the wind and its effect on the sails of a ship and the surface of the sea. How should one assess a breeze, a gale, a hurricane and learn to survive at sea without Beaufort's system, which even the French adopted? Daniel Defoe guest stars. Beaufort's unorthodox private life, recorded in his ciphered journal – using the Beaufort cipher – adds a layer of intrigue.

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    54 分
  • Camus’s L’Etranger: literature, murder and Absurdism in a French colony

    Camus’s L’Etranger: literature, murder and Absurdism in a French colony
    2026/09/11
    Camus’s terse 1942 novel about an enigmatic killing won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1957. It is entrenched as a French literary classic and as a gateway to Philosophy in French schools. But what, asks Muriel, do the book and its recent film adaptation by François Ozon tell us about morality, justice and the complicated history of the French in Algeria?

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    57 分
  • Summer Postcards: Ginger Beer

    Summer Postcards: Ginger Beer
    2026/09/04
    Lashings of ginger beer all around and nostalgia galore as Suzanne explains the refreshing drink's quasi-parodic Famous Fives connection and unpicks the origins and history of ginger beer, taking in the trading of the exotic ginger root, its feeding into the British obsession with beer, fermenting and experimentation, some Victorian tales of temperance leagues, brown bottles, scoby and vinaigrières, the investigations of distinguished botanist Henry Marshall Ward into the alien entity of the ginger plant, the great split between ginger beer and ginger ale, Henry Crabbe's brewing dynasty and its connection to whisky, and finally, above and beyond nostalgia, the irrepressible resurgence of the craft and savoir-faire of ginger-beer brewing today. Anyone for a Moscow Mule?

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    40 分
  • Summer Postcards: Bonjour Tristesse

    Summer Postcards: Bonjour Tristesse
    2026/08/28
    Muriel faces up to the melancholy that comes to us all towards the end of summer, and find a Gallic expression of it in the 1954 novel Bonjour Tristesse, a huge bestseller and succès de scandale set on the French Riviera. The book launched the career of its teenage author Françoise Sagan – herself an iconic forerunner of the rebellious French youthquake of the 1960s. Is the story – a timeless Greek-style tragedy charting the catastrophic consequences of deregulated insouciance – immoral or was Sagan actually a moralist? And then there is the book's 1958 Hollywood film adaptation by Otto Preminger starring Jean Seberg. which, with its mix of Technicolor and black-and-white, brings to life a dark story set in the sunniest, most colourful place.

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    34 分
  • Summer Postcards: Summer Pudding

    Summer Postcards: Summer Pudding
    2026/08/21
    Suzanne presents Muriel with the magnificent dome of scarlet studded with berries that is summer pudding and reveals the dessert's intriguing origins, which lie in 19th-century hydropathy. What inspired the British to deploy a plain, uncompromising pudding made of bread and native fruit as a health food? Suzanne seeks out the original recipe of the pudding, which turns out to be the tip of the iceberg of a history of spa towns and hydropathic hotels powered by the idea of water as a cure-all, and its eccentric and sometimes fanatical Victorian promoters. Fashionable in the 1920s, summer pudding then fell into obscurity until its triumphant restoration to the British repertoire in the 1980s. An asphalt inventor, a knitwear manufacturer and a colonial missionary guest star.

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    34 分
  • Summer Postcards: Melons

    Summer Postcards: Melons
    2026/08/14
    What is the quintessential French summer food? Melon, of course, of the orange-fleshed and deeply aromatic variety. In the summer, Muriel explains, the French go into a sort of melon frenzy, chasing the perfect ambrosial experience, and this brings with it the agony of choice. Selecting the right melon is an inexact science, at once thrilling and anxious-making. Weighing up a melon in the palm of your hand is a Gallic ritual as old as time. Melons also come with a rich cultural hinterland: they have long inspired poets and moralists. To the French, there is something subtly existential about the promise of delight and the repeated quest for excellence in a sea of indifferent fruit.

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    32 分
  • Summer Postcards: Ice Cream Vans

    Summer Postcards: Ice Cream Vans
    2026/08/07
    Can you hear the clarion call of a tinny version of 'Green Sleeves'? That familiar cheery chime is calling us to the ice cream van, plying its way all over the UK in the summer. Suzanne explores its history, its British-American mash-up of creativity, crucial Italian connection, technical challenges and complex regulations. Who invented Mr Whippy? How did the 99 chocolate flake come to be? Who is best at converting an ordinary van into a magical driving machine that dispenses ice cream? And should Suzanne and Muriel consider an alternative career ? The Garlic & Pearls theme tune would make an irresistible chime for their van...

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    33 分
  • Summer Postcards: Topless Sunbathing

    Summer Postcards: Topless Sunbathing
    2026/07/31
    The golden age of topless sunbathing in France lasted a little over a decade, from the 1970s to the tail end of the 1980s. French women pioneered it and were also first to abandon it. But how and why? Muriel retraces the story of a particular aspect of Gallic art de vivre which was highly codified and attempted to recast the social contract between women and society. How natural was it? How cultural? Did it have more to do with feminism – of the French kind – or with fashion? And what would Coco Chanel have made of it?

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    33 分