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  • Jigsaw Puzzles: The amazing British invention that went from geographical 'dissection' to universally popular form of meditation

    Jigsaw Puzzles: The amazing British invention that went from geographical 'dissection' to universally popular form of meditation
    2025/04/25
    Suzanne tells Muriel the riveting story of an invention devised in London by one inspired man, in an 18th-century world of map-making, mezzotints and early industrial machinery, and explores what jigsaw puzzles do for us, what they mean, and why they are more popular than ever.

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    55 分
  • The Metric System: Born of a perfect storm of Enlightenment and Revolution

    The Metric System: Born of a perfect storm of Enlightenment and Revolution
    2025/04/18
    Muriel tells Suzanne how the French dream of the metric system became realised when the Enlightenment scientists' desire for reliable measurements met the French Revolutionaries' decision to remodel the nation according to Reason.

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    53 分
  • Bluebells: Why does this enchanting native blue flower make the British giddy?

    Bluebells: Why does this enchanting native blue flower make the British giddy?
    2025/04/11
    Suzanne explores the complex botanical, mythical and poetic aspects of the British bluebell cult. Hope and death, secrecy and display and even asparagus all come into it, and Tilda Swinton, Diana, Princess of Wales and Margaret Thatcher all guest star.

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    51 分
  • Glamour: What – and who – do the French find so bewitching about Britain?

    Glamour: What – and who – do the French find so bewitching about Britain?
    2025/04/08
    Happy Entente Cordiale! It is, Muriel explains, when at their most conventional that the British are at their most glamorous to French eyes. And we reveal the British winner of the title of Full Cordiale Corker!

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    18 分
  • Panache: How a French king's white feather came to define a Gallic core value

    Panache: How a French king's white feather came to define a Gallic core value
    2025/04/07
    Suzanne digs for the roots of French panache, encountering kingly pageantry, Cyrano de Bergerac and the emblem of the cockerel.

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    15 分
  • Eccentrics: Why do they grow in Britain and not in France?

    Eccentrics: Why do they grow in Britain and not in France?
    2025/04/06
    It's Muriel's turn to express admiration of the vivid anarchic creativity of British eccentrics, and to ask if there is something in the water.

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    16 分
  • Insouciance: What is it and can the British ever achieve it?

    Insouciance: What is it and can the British ever achieve it?
    2025/04/05
    Suzanne's first choice of French word du jour. Vanessa Paradis embodies it. A paradox: there is nothing harder to pull off than insouciance, the art of not caring.

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    19 分
  • The Theatre of Horrors: How the visceral Grand-Guignol thrilled Paris to the core

    The Theatre of Horrors: How the visceral Grand-Guignol thrilled Paris to the core
    2025/04/04

    In which Muriel tells Suzanne about the rise and fall of the once ultra-fashionable Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, where, not far from the Moulin-Rouge, the fears of the Belle-Epoque and interwar years – from crazed surgeons and escaped lunatics to the Modern Woman wielding sulphuric acid – were staged with an immersive, hallucinatory intensity.


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    1 時間 4 分