Tom McCarthy
speaker
238 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 2 Aug
Tom McCarthy’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think making lists is the perfect alternative to, you know, thinking.
He crops up three times.
I think it's becoming more and more clear to us as this series progresses that the whole of Western literature is basically the afterlife of Don Quixote unfolding over the centuries.
He's mentioned three times
in Middlemarch.
So chapter two of the first book is prefaced by an excerpt of the episode where Quixote sees the barber's basin and says, this is Mambrino's helmet and so on and so on.
And it begins and ends, it's bookended by this very quixotic figure, St.
Teresa, who as
Elliot points out, grew up reading chivalric books, set out as a child with her brother to go out on crusades and fight the Moors, but was, you know, collared by their uncle and carried back home and sent to bed.
But she did succeed in becoming a...
A visionary, a reformer, and of course a saint.
And Eliot, right from the off, sets her up as this kind of, in the same way as Quixote idolizes Amardus of Gaul and Don Belianus of Greece and so on.
Eliot sets Teresa up as this...
epic kind of model, an unattainable ideal for her heroine, Dorothea Brooke.
So Dorothea Brooke, in the same way as Quixote kind of exemplifies the modern Spanish, you know, citizen who lives in a no longer epic world, Dorothea serves Elias as a perfect example of a whole generation of what she describes as would-be Terezas.
who, like Quixote, lack the kind of symbolic framework that would, you know, redeem and organize their experience according to the conventions of some kind of almost transcendingly meaningful framework, you know, that would snap them to grid, as it were, or snap them to that grid.
There is no grid to be snapped to anymore.
So, Eliot writes of these modern day Therese's, she writes, with dim lights and tangled circumstances, they tried to shape their thoughts and deed in noble agreement, but after all, to common eyes, their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness.
for these later-born Teresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.
I mean, that's right in the first couple of pages, but the whole book really is the kind of the trajectory describes the arc, the trajectory of this kind of unmoored ardor, this passion, not just in Dorothea's case, but more expansively through the whole of society, this kind of
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