Paul Cooper
speaker
254 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 5 Jun
Paul Cooper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's a great pleasure to be here.
My PhD focused on the idea of the ruin in literature and film, and also how various ruins have become figures of importance for culture throughout history.
So I've always been drawn to the idea of the ruin, what they mean, and what they've meant for people who are creating works of art.
Ruins are amazing spaces.
Yeah, it's an old poem called The Ruin, which is found in the collection known as the Exeter Book.
And it's a marvellous rendition of a person writing in Old English, a kind of Anglo-Saxon, early medieval British person, wandering through a ruined bathhouse and viewing the crumbling pillars, the baths now overgrown with weed, with frogs jumping in and out of the pools.
And
As they're walking these shattered bath halls, they're imagining the place as it used to be, feasts that might have gone on here, bright warriors in their armour who might have come to celebrate their victories, the kings and the great society that once built this.
And it's believed that this poem is written about the Roman baths in the town of Bath.
One example of many of
a person in history wandering through the ruins of a society that came before, and having that amazing experience that people always seem to have in these ruined places, which is a moment of contact with the people of the past, a sudden appreciation not only of the power of time and its immense size, but also the ability of human monuments to survive the ravages of that very same force.
Yeah, that we have in common.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, there's a human fascination with disaster, isn't there?
You know, traditional...
view of history as one of monuments and great men and victorious battles, but actually the story of failure is one that's completely ingrained in the human epic.
These stories of societal failure are as much a part of us as those of success and triumph.
Well, that's right.
Yeah, any empire is by definition a violent undertaking.
But also some empires who build their power, build their territory through this bellicose approach, this excessive expansionist, aggressive violence, are actually sowing the seeds of their own destruction in doing so.
Showing 1–20 of 254 · page 1 of 13
Next →