When an anarchist attempted to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, an idea exploded in the mind of Joseph Conrad. This program re-creates the world of The Secret Agent, the first great novel of political intrigue, in all its suspense and sinister irony. In addition, author and critic V. S. Pritchett and Keith Carabine, of Kent University (England), explore Conrad’s concern that the very fabric of society was being jeopardized by the growing violence and moral corruption—a concern as timely today as it was then.

A novel of ideas at once serious and comic, The Magic Mountain offers a bird’s-eye view of the political, philosophical, and social landscapes of pre-World War I Europe. This program uses provocative dramatizations of key scenes from Thomas Mann’s grotesque bildungsroman and employs the character of Mann himself, in a re-creation of a 1939 lecture, as a guide to the story’s heights and depths. In addition, Mann’s biographer, Nigel Hamilton, inquires into the story’s manipulation of time and the effects of environment on identity.

Read by noted actors Michael Gough, Edward Fox, and Eileen Atkins, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land powerfully expresses the disillusionment and disgust of the post–World War I era in Europe. In this program, Professor Frank Kermode, of Cambridge University; Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd; and poets Sir Stephen Spender and Craig Raine examine the complex nature of Eliot’s influential poem, analyze its appeal, and trace the reasons why it became one of the best-known emblems of the 20th century.

A suppressor of his own writings, Franz Kafka even requested that upon his death all his extant works be destroyed—yet those very works accurately prefigured the anxieties and alienation so commonly associated with the latter part of the 20th century. This program delves into Kafka’s fictional world, primarily through a gripping dramatization of The Trial, a combination of simple tale and complex parable describing Joseph K.’s bizarre arrest and execution. Professor George Steiner, of Geneva University, sheds light on the wellsprings of Kafka’s disturbingly prescient vision.