The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. Paul Morland is his friend, a nationally-renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books. In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford