Monocle on Culture
Robert Bound and guests explore what’s new in art, film, books, and media. Expect lively discussions, in-depth interviews, and expert insights.
Latest Episodes
What on earth has happened to the news?
When journalists, columnists and commentators have news flying at them from all angles, and it feels a little bit like the world is going mad, how do they begin to make sense of it…
Beach versus seaside: part two
In our quest to investigate the difference between the seaside and the beach, we take to the latter for a spot of surfing in Australia and California. Plus: we head to Belgrade and Madrid…
Beach versus seaside: part one
In the first of a two-part episode we investigate the difference between the beach and the seaside, two coastal cultures that are quite different despite both involving sand and sea. This week it’s the…
Summer holiday hits
As the Culture team heads on its summer holiday, we recap some of our favourite moments from 2016 so far, from cruising the Mediterranean with acrobats aplenty to the local newspaper of the Canadian…
The Switch House
We visit the brand new wing of the Tate Modern to find out how architecture firm Herzog & De Meuron extended the art institution into a giant ziggurat. Plus: we assess the success of…
How do you sell a natural history museum?
We profile a rather unique auction house, Summers Place Auctions, as they put the entire collection of a Dutch natural history museum up for sale, including the skeleton of a seven-metre-tall duck-billed dinosaur called…
Hay Festival
This year’s Hay Festival of literature, which takes place in the beautiful town of Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border, has just wrapped up. We take a look at the festival’s international ambitions and its…
Why are books in translation such big business?
Robert Bound investigates the recent rise in translated fiction with sidekicks Anne Meadows, commissioning editor at Portobello and Granta, and Lisette Verhagen, foreign-rights agent at David Godwin Associates. Plus: we hear from Deborah Smith,…
Culture goes cruising
Robert Bound is on board the ‘MSC Preziosa’, somewhere between Rome and Marseille, to find out about the most misunderstood area of the arts: cruise-ship entertainers.
How do you write about nature?
As city populations rise there seems to be a new generation of writers turning to the natural world, a trend that might have been spearheaded by Helen Macdonald’s 2014 memoir ‘H is for Hawk’.…
