The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, books, painting, theatre, philosophy. 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 The Divine Comedy to Goya to Ulysses to Beethoven to Ibsen. This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. After all, the Western Canon is everyone's birthright. Even if almost all of us feel woefully under-educated in it. So Paul and Ed are setting 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. Ed is the curious everyman one. Paul is the waspish intellectual one. Consider them like an '80s buddy cop movie - but about Renaissance figurative painting, or the troubled love lives of fugue composers. In Season One, they'll be inducting one thing per episode into The Canon. Namely: Caravaggio Macbeth Anton Bruckner Anna Karenina The Romanesque Thomas Mann Van Gogh