The Socrates of Prague film explores the life and thought of philosopher Jan Pato?ka with several students and friends who in the 1960s and 70s witnessed Pato?ka’s intellectual and political efforts, and shared with him the intense desire for a social and political renewal after the dramatic end of the Prague Spring in 1968.

David Hunter talks about the French soldier poet Guillaume Apollinaire, explore how his poetry provided a different vocabulary for writing about the Great War and what it can tell us about France’s distinctive experience of the conflict.

The Decadent Movement in arts and literature was at its height in the 1890s and early 1900s and was characterised by fin de siècle style and a questioning of accepted values and norms, social, political and sexual. Its most famous representatives include French poets like Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Verlaine, but its influence spread rapidly to the English-speaking world thanks to the tireless advocacy of Arthur Symons and figures such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and WB Yeats. Its impact was also felt across the arts including fine art, architecture and music.

Before he had turned 21, Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) upended the house of French poetry and left it in shambles. What makes Rimbaud’s poetry important, argues Seth Whidden, is part of what makes his life so compelling: rebellion, audacity, creativity and exploration. Almost all of Rimbaud’s poems were written between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Against the backdrop of the crumbling Second Empire and the tumultuous Paris Commune, the poet took centuries-old traditions of French versification and picked them apart with an unmatched knowledge of how they fitted together. Combining sensuality with pastoral, parody, political satire, fable, eroticism and mystery, Rimbaud’s works range from traditional verse forms to prose-poetry and include the two first free-verse poems written in French.

David Hunter talks about the French soldier poet Guillaume Apollinaire, explore how his poetry provided a different vocabulary for writing about the Great War and what it can tell us about France’s distinctive experience of the conflict.