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Novara Media PodcastsThe US Could Abandon Ukraine-Russia Peace Talks, Warns Marco RubioDonald Trump could walk away from Ukraine-Russia peace negotiations within days if no progress is made, warns Marco Rubio.
Plus: David Lammy’s secret visit with the Israeli foreign secretary; and the IMF’s push to keep people working older.
With Michael Walker, Aaron Bastani, Paul Morland and Peter Oborne – author of ‘The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam’.
2025-04-1858 min
Octothorpe127: Hello BuoysJohn is incoherent, Alison is excited, and Liz is romantic.
An uncorrected transcript of this episode is available here. Please email your letters of comment to comment@octothorpecast.uk, join our Facebook group, and tag @OctothorpeCast (on X or on Mastodon or on Bluesky) when you post about the show on social media.
Content warnings this episode: None
Letters of comment
Abigail Nussbaum
Ali Baker Brooks
Andy Openshaw
Chris Garcia
Claire Brialey
David Salter
Ed Morland
Farah Mendlesohn
Irwin Hirsh
Jonny Baddeley
Neil Ottenstein
Roseanna Pendlebury
We also heard from:
Fiona Moore, Ivan Sinha
...2025-01-3045 min
The Canon ClubThe Canon Club: ShostakovichDmitri Shostakovich is considered one of the great composers of the 20th century, and one of the greatest of all Russian musicians. Noted for versatility of style, his work includes 15 symphonies, string quartets, concertos, but also operas, ballets, and a number of works composed for theatre and cinema.His work also became the soundtrack of the Soviet Union and its turbulent existence, first under Stalin's terror and later Nazi invasion. He grew up in the doomed world of the upper middle class, bourgeois intelligentsia in St Petersburg. His father was a chemical engineer. His mother w...2025-01-2945 min
The Canon ClubThe Canon Club: Van GoghVincent Van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherland, the son of a Protestant clergyman and into a family with close ties to the art world. Initially he struggled to find direction, working in various roles in his homeland, in England and France, at one time settling as preacher among Belgian coal miners. But increasingly he dedicated himself to painting, mixing in Paris with leading impressionists and post-impressionists and eventually moving to Arles in the south of France where he achieved a distinct and striking style. Financially reliant on his generous brother Theo, his mental health deteriorated, wit...2025-01-1558 min
The Canon ClubThe Canon Club: Thomas MannThomas Mann was born into an upper-middle class family in Lübeck in 1875, son of a German father and Brazilian mother. After his father's death the family moved to Munich where he and his brother, Heinrich, established themselves as writers. Thomas Mann married into the wealthy Jewish Pringsheim but despite a seemingly happy marriage and sixe children, he had strong homosexual urgings. A nationalist in World War 1, he drifted leftward between the wars and moved to Switzerland then the USA in the wake of the Nazi takeover in Germany. Among his great works are the novella...2025-01-0255 min
Thinking Class#057 - Ed West & Paul Morland - Why Rediscovering Our Cultural Heritage Can Save The WestEd West is a British author, journalist, and blogger known for The Wrong Side of History on Substack and his work with UnHerd, The Catholic Herald, The Spectator, and more. His books include Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, The Diversity Illusion, and Tory Boy.Paul Morland is one of the world’s leading demographers, exploring how population trends shape our world. A former research fellow at Birkbeck and senior member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, his books include The Human Tide, Tomorrow’s People, and No One Left. Together, Ed and Paul host The Ca...2024-12-201h 17
The Canon ClubThe Canon Club: The RomanesqueThis 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.*** The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and...2024-12-1853 min
The Canon ClubThe Canon Club: Anna KareninaThe novel Anna Karenina was published by Count Leo Tolstoy in 1878. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between Anna, a respectably married upper-class woman, and a young army officer, Count Vronsky.Anna, torn between duty and passion, cannot resist the latter and is drawn to her destruction. It is also the story of Count Levin, a character in no small part based on Tolstoy himself, struggling in his estate with the forces of tradition and progress, idealism and pragmatism. Capturing the state of Russia, Anna Karenina was an immediate success and is considered by m...2024-12-0456 min
The Canon ClubThe Canon Club: Anton BrucknerAnton Bruckner was born in 1824 in Ansfelden near Linz in Upper Austria, the eldest of eleven children born to a schoolmaster. He became a teacher then was appointed an organist, eventually moving to Vienna. Bruckner was a late developer as a composer, lacking confidence in his abilities. After various early efforts including two preparatory symphonies he wrote nine fully recognised symphonies, three sacred masses, a Te Deum and motets. Although often mocked as a country bumpkin, he came by the end of his life to be recognised as one of the era's great orchestral composers. He died in 1896. 2024-11-2036 min
The Canon ClubThe Canon Club: MacbethMacbeth is one of Shakespeare’s later and darkest tragedies. Set in eleventh-century Scotland, it tells the story of how Macbeth, triumphant and promoted by the King after triumph in battle, has his future Kingship foretold by three witches and is moved, with the encouragement of his wife, to murder the king and take the throne. Macbeth and his wife are consumed by guilt and madness. Macbeth commits more murder to shore up his position but eventually falls himself to a revolt. To discuss it, Paul and Ed are joined by Neema Parvini, author of over ten books, i...2024-11-0659 min
The Canon ClubThe Canon Club: CaravaggioBorn outside Milan in 1571, Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio trained in a local workshop and then launched himself as an artist in Rome in his early 20s. His striking and highly individual style won him wide acclaim and patronage from high levels in the Church and the aristocracy. But his quarrelsome personality and violence meant he was in and out of jail and culminated in his committing a murder, fleeing to Naples, Malta and Sicily and dying short of forty. Andrew Graham Dixon, one of the UK’s leading art historians, has called Caravaggio ‘the most wildly po...2024-10-2354 minThe Canon ClubComing Soon: The Canon Club with Ed West & Paul MorlandPaul Morland and Ed West are trying to get to grips with the Western canon. Like most of us, they feel under-read and incompetent in the presence of the great Western artistic inheritance. The stuff that shaped our civilisation. From Thomas Mann's Death In Venice, to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. From Macbeth to A Doll's House, Goya to Goethe, Canterbury Tales to The Ring Cycle. It's a world we often neglect, because it feels a little too intimidating, obscure, or dusty. Canon Club is Paul and Ed's attempt to redeem themselves - and their...2024-10-1004 min
"WhatifAlthist" | World History, Philosophy, CultureAre we a New Weimar?Germany's bizarre 1919-1933 "psychedelic trip" between conservative militarism periods offers disturbing parallels to America today. While surrounding decades were prudish and structured, Weimar exploded with sexual degeneracy and cultural chaos—exactly like our current era. This strange historical anomaly wasn't just a random blip—it was the unheeded warning before catastrophe. The similarities are far more extensive and influential than most realize.--SPONSORS:NetSuite: More than 41,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ON...2024-07-1138 min
The EI PodcastWorldview — People power: dealing with demographyIs demography destiny? Shifting patterns in population have marked history, drive political change and sharpen cultural divides.
In our latest episode of Worldview, host Adam Boulton is joined by Paul Morland, the UK's leading demographer, Bill Emmott, former editor of the Economist and author of Japan's Far More Female Future, and Richard Assheton, the Times' and Sunday Times' West Africa correspondent.
Image description: A group of elderly women in Kyoto, Japan. Credit: Trevor Mogg / Alamy Stock Photo.2023-03-0732 min
Narratives106: Paul Morland - Demographics and the Fertility CrisisIn this episode, we are joined by the demographer Paul Morland to discuss his new book Tomorrow's People. We discuss the decline in infant mortality, the lack of population growth in the developed world and what has caused it, urbanization, fertility, population decline in the West, and a whole lot more.Transcript:William Jarvis 0:05 Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways it is worse in the past, where it's a better, more definite vision of the...2022-08-0952 min
Narratives w/Will Jarvis106: Paul Morland - Demographics and the Fertility CrisisIn this episode, we are joined by the demographer Paul Morland to discuss his new book Tomorrow's People. We discuss the decline in infant mortality, the lack of population growth in the developed world and what has caused it, urbanization, fertility, population decline in the West, and a whole lot more.
2022-08-0852 min
New Books in Big IdeasPaul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view...2022-05-251h 00
New Books in EconomicsPaul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view...2022-05-251h 00
New Books in Environmental StudiesPaul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view...2022-05-251h 00
New Books in GeographyPaul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view...2022-05-251h 00
New Books in World AffairsPaul Morland, "Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers" (Picador, 2022)The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global tran...2022-05-251h 00
Listen, Relax and Enjoy the Wonders of Full AudiobookTomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers Audiobook by Paul MorlandListen to this audiobook in full for free onhttps://hotaudiobook.com/freeID: 549536
Title: Tomorrow's People: The Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers
Author: Paul Morland
Narrator: Richard Trinder
Format: Unabridged
Length: 09:08:15
Language: English
Release date: 03-31-22
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Genres: Non-Fiction, Social Science
Summary:
Morland predicts the future of humanity in 10 illuminating statistics (could the Japanese and Italians now go the way of the dodo?) and looks back to how ebbs and flows of population have shaped history - The Daily Telegraph The Best Books for Summer 2022
The great forces of population change the balance of births, deaths and...2022-03-319h 08
The Way71) Dark Side of Rwanda's Regime w/ Michela WrongRwanda has been heralded as an African success story by the international community: its people, ravaged by genocide, have become unified and prosperous under Paul Kagame’s regime. The conventional narrative of Rwanda’s post-conflict development is challenged by today’s guest, journalist and author, Michela Wrong. Her book, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, tells the wild story of Patrick Karegeya, as she reveals the dark and compelling reality of a regime that is extensively commended by the Western World.
Shortened Bio:
Half-It...2022-02-151h 22
Theatre in a Box Trivia Podcast#004: Musical Theatre Drinking Songs with Paul Adderley"I use antlers in all of my decorating" Drinking songs are a staple in musical theatre. Large ensemble songs involving clinking glasses and stumbling around are great fun. Who better than a craft beer connoisseur, Paul Adderley, and a micro brewery owner, Paul, to discuss the best musical theatre drinking songs. Raise a glass and CHEERS!! FANTASTIX BITS IN THE INTERVIEW Inner West the centre of the beer world Paul’s musical theatre origins Characteristics of a good drinking tune ‘drinking’ ensembles Drunken ballads and typecasting Musical theatre fathers Eurobeat 2020 Campaign Les Mis drinking game A...2019-02-1337 min