I’ve recently become a devotee of the New Books Network podcasts.

Cooking, gardening, house tidying, even exercise, has suddenly become much less boring – and I’m getting through the equivalent of eight or so academic seminars a week.

Being me the focus is on eclectic. I’ve found very few interviews I haven’t considered intellectually exciting (the selection is clearly on most channels really rigous) – although I have downloaded a few that went too deep outside my areas of knowledge of interest to hold me. The only problem is of course I want to read about half of the books, which would only be achievable if I did nothing else.

But been thinking about keeping a record so I can find them again and recommending what I think are the good ones to others. I’ve long done that with Philobiblon with books, so it seemed like a logical addition.

Notes of what is said are not necessarily agreement – I may be noting interesting thoughts rather than things I 100% agree with.

A good place to start is White Freedom, belonging to what might be considered the “criticism of the Enlightenment” genre.

“Stovall explores how French and American thinkers defined freedom in racial terms and conceived of liberty as an aspect and privilege of whiteness. He discusses how the Statue of Liberty—a gift from France to the United States and perhaps the most famous symbol of freedom on Earth—promised both freedom and whiteness to European immigrants. … challenges the notion that racism is somehow a paradox or contradiction within the democratic tradition, demonstrating how white identity is intrinsic to Western ideas about liberty.”