Sophie Gee
speaker
10,523 appearances
38 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 3d ago
Sophie Gee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 34 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.
Appearances
When Dickens gets really hit up about something, it means that he's pissed that someone else stole his idea.
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Yes, because he is, of course, the father of English literature.
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And the reason that Chaucer is thought of as the father of English literature, right from the Canterbury Tales, but also Troilus and Crusade that we did a couple of weeks ago, is that he was writing in the vernacular.
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He was writing in ordinary Middle English instead of in Latin or French or one of the other elevated kind of intercontinental languages that he would have known from his work.
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Because as we've said about Chaucer, he
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was extremely cosmopolitan and travelled frequently between England and the continent.
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But what we're now looking at is a painting by Ford Maddox Brown, who is connected to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but he's in some ways was thought of as the most Hogarthian of the Pre-Raphaelites.
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And you can really see it in this image.
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It's a painting called Chaucer at the Court of Edward III.
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So it's sort of the poet as the...
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inspiration and the great champion of the tradition of English monarchy.
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I think the idea that Ford Maddox Brown is getting at in this painting is that monarchy depends on poetry, that power depends on literature, and the court is a pretty sort of heegledy-piggledy, ragtail bunch.
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They're sitting around
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chatting, they're bored, they're kind of going to sleep, they're talking to one another, they're quite distracted.
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There's a little dog down here sitting in a kid's lap.
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There's some flirtation.
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There's some babies who are obviously sort of wanting their dinner.
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The king is paying attention, but he's sort of bored by it.
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here.
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And the friend, for some reason, is writing it down.
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Showing 21–40 of 10,523 · page 2 of 527
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