Garlic & Pearls

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Garlic & Pearls

Muriel Zagha and Suzanne Raine

74 episodes

8 hours ago

Suzanne and Muriel examine a series of very different things – from a film to a kitchen utensil, a model train to a bar of soap – that define British or French attitudes, each explaining her cultural background to the other and trying to get to the essence of what makes the British British and the French French.

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Society & Culture

All content for Garlic & Pearls is the property of Muriel Zagha and Suzanne Raine and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

Suzanne and Muriel examine a series of very different things – from a film to a kitchen utensil, a model train to a bar of soap – that define British or French attitudes, each explaining her cultural background to the other and trying to get to the essence of what makes the British British and the French French.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Show more...

Society & Culture

Episodes (20/74)

Garlic & Pearls

Greatest Play Ever! Britain vs France, part 1. The Mousetrap - Agatha Christie's Not So Cosy West End Whodunnit

Suzanne and Muriel consider the brilliance, longevity and significance of Agatha Christie's murder mystery play The Mousetrap, which has been running since 1952. Set in a country house isolated by bad weather, the play is a model of distinctly British sweet-and-sour eruption of violence in a cosy setting, and replete with red herrings and eccentric characters. The police inspector arrives on skis! It also taps into wider postwar unease: Christie evokes a newly unstable world, a shifting class structure and an air of paranoid watchfulness. But can Muriel and Suzanne guess the culprit? Can you?

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8 hours ago

53 minutes 23 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

The Paris Catacombs: palace of death, gigantic memento mori and a way of solving the problem of excess bones

It's Halloween and Muriel encourages Suzanne to think about the Gallic bones displayed and staged in the Paris Catacombs in a neo-classical early-19th-century mise-en-scène at once macabre and meditative. We also discover a contemporary underground scene of fun-loving secret explorers and hear about the time Suzanne dug up a medieval monk in Hampshire.

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1 week ago

1 hour 2 minutes 21 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

The Real Making of Britain and France: A myth-busting, panoramic trip through time and space with our guest, the historian Graham Robb!

Following on from his book The Discovery of France, Graham Robb has produced another fascinating work of exploration, The Discovery of Britain. Graham's observations are rooted in extensive travel all over both countries on a Victorian invention, the bicycle, reconnecting with old pathways, landscapes and forgotten people. He shares with Suzanne and Muriel what he discovered about nomads and tribes, hedgerows and standing stones, Ptlolemaic maps and the corporal punishment of saints with nettles. How did France gradually colonise itself into a centralised nation? How many beacons were needed to communicate from Cornwall to Sunderland? And what can you learn at ground level about two countries where so much of the past is visible in front of you?

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2 weeks ago

58 minutes 22 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Rhyming Slang: A distinctly British and creative code that's definitely not 'brown bread'

Would you Adam and Eve it? Suzanne tutors her 'old China' Muriel in a coded language that is full of wit, inventions and surprises. Rooted in old street cant and secret words identified in the 1850s, rhyming slang expresses the earthiness and supple playfulness inherent in the ways in which the British use their language. Does a French equivalent exist? And what's rhyming slang for Garlic & Pearls?

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3 weeks ago

57 minutes 51 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Brigitte Bardot: Top French Icon and The Face of France

Where Muriel explains the mythology of the actress, singer, animal activist and all-round contrarian. How did Bardot re-invent French femininity for the 20th century?

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4 weeks ago

1 hour 7 minutes 18 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Giant Redwoods in the UK: A story of intrepid botanists and explorers, and a Victorian British craze

Is there a Californian landscape growing in Britain to the tune of half a million Giant Redwoods? Suzanne recounts the 19th-century story of adventurous plant collectors, explains how the seeds they brought home went to create the Victorian British landscape that surrounds us, and imagines a dizzying future, 3,000 years away, where thriving Redwoods reach colossal maturity in the British Isles. Alfred Hitchcock and a man called Sequoia are part of the cast.

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1 month ago

1 hour 3 minutes 32 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

How to Eat Everything in Paris: Our guest, food writer Chris Newens, shares revelatory findings!

Muriel and Suzanne hop around the arrondissements of Paris explored by Chris Newens in his food memoir Moveable Feasts, comparing and contrasting cuisines, history, sociology and atmosphere. They also learn the logistics of making your own Belleville-style doner kebab. And what is the etiquette of eating brunch at a sex club in Pigalle?

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1 month ago

1 hour 4 minutes 27 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Conkers: from Victorian pastime to urban Battle Royale

Where Suzanne ushers in autumn and educates a baffled Muriel in the great British game of conkers, at once nostalgic, ruthlessly competitive and controversial.

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1 month ago

1 hour 13 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

An Evening with Garlic & Pearls: where Muriel and Suzanne make their first live appearance!

As guests of the Durning Library at the Lambeth Readers and Writers Festival, Muriel and Suzanne discuss Frenchness, Britishness and their podcast adventure.

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1 month ago

46 minutes 15 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

French Roundabouts: are they about safety, strategy or symbolism?

Muriel introduces Suzanne to the surprisingly whimsical world of French roundabouts. Why does France have so many? Why are the rules so maddening? And are they eyesores or ornaments?

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2 months ago

56 minutes 41 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Shinty: 'Quite a violent version of hockey'

Camans at the ready! Suzanne and our special guest from the Isle of Skye, the skipper, photographer and shinty player Izzy Law, delve into the origins of the ancient Highland game of shinty or camanachd, evoking close historical ties between Irish and Scottish kingdoms and the hardy nature of a game that was traditionally played as a warm-up before battle between chieftains and clans and also used to settle love rivalries. Today it is a vibrant modern game and the subject of Celtic rock anthems. And, Muriel asks, was it also the inspiration for the fictional game of Quidditch?

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2 months ago

1 hour 1 minute 55 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Summer Shorts: The 'Sorry' and 'Pardon' face off

Suzanne and Muriel thread their way through how the British and the French apologise and ask for forgiveness. What does it reveal about attitudes to personal space, guilt and pleasure? Which nation is more courtly? Why do the British say sorry all the time? How aggressive is passive aggression? And who, ultimately, gets it right about manners – Tatler Magazine or the Académie Française? 17th-century moralists and the Japanese also put in an appearance.

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2 months ago

26 minutes 23 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Summer Shorts: The béret and bobble hat face off

In a story of sheep, sailors, Royals, Résistants, football fans and actresses, practicality spars with glamour as Suzanne spots Welsh Monmouth caps in Shakespeare and unfurls 15th- and 16th-century Acts of Parliament that may have conditioned the British to reach for their woolly hats, while Muriel salutes the gigantic headgear of Alpine regiments and the French tête à chapeaux (head for hats). Plus: what happened when President Macron was hijacked by a beret and some singing shepherds.

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2 months ago

33 minutes 6 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Summer Shorts: The high vis jacket and gilet jaune face off

Fluorescent high-vis clothing - beacon of hope or luminous nightmare? Suzanne has embraced high vis as a liberating garment and analyses its uses in preventing harm and in signalling authority. But is the generalised wearing of it in Britain getting out of hand? Muriel looks through the political prism of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement, which in France appropriated the garment and turned it into a banner for the disenfranchised. Surprise guest star: Karl Lagerfeld.

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3 months ago

37 minutes 17 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Club Med: From campsites in Spanish pine groves to Tahitian 'villages' in Morocco, how the French brought their edenic dream holiday to life

Muriel recounts the story of Club Méditerranée, 'the antidote to civilisation' born in traumatised postwar France as a socialist-inflected dream of sporty egalitarianism in the sea and sun, its gradual drift into exoticism leaning into Enlightenment ideas of the state of nature, and its evolution from philanthropic utopia to deluxe multinational business.

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3 months ago

1 hour 5 minutes 42 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

British Camping: How Britain devised a distinctively gruelling kind of holiday which is part dream and part nightmare.

Seasoned camper Suzanne has survived plagues of horseflies and finding ice on the inside of her tent. She revisits memories of the testing, yet strangely enjoyable camping and caravaning trips that the British cherish and retraces the story of the Victorian-Edwardian pioneers to fell in love with camping and rose to the challenge of its practicalities, revealing a surprising backstory of tailoring and American prairies. Scott of the Antarctic guest stars.

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3 months ago

1 hour 4 minutes 13 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

The Revolutionary Calendar: How French utopians tried to recalibrate time and reshape Republican humanity

Muriel takes Suzanne back to a time when a coalition of Enlightenment poets and scientists and radical political reformers drew a line under the Ancien Régime and Christianity and imagined a brand new way of thinking about time and the calendar.

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3 months ago

1 hour 4 minutes 29 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

1217: The French Invasion You Never Knew About (Part 2)

It's D-Day, helmets are glinting and everything hinges on William Marshall – and on formidable Lincolnshire sheriff Nicola de la Haie – as the troops gather on both sides outside Lincoln Castle. Will you, like Suzanne, be heaving a sigh of relief as the covetous French are finally defeated, or bemoan, like Muriel, a tragic missed opportunity?

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3 months ago

1 hour 8 minutes 25 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

1217: The French Invasion You Never Knew About (Part 1)

On the occasion of President Macron's state visit to Britain, Suzanne retraces the background to a momentous clash between France and England – the definitive repelling of the French on 20th May 1217 at the Battle of Lincoln – throwing light on fierce rivalries for succession to the throne of England and for ownership of territories on the Norman side of the Channel, with much switching of allegiance, and on such formidable figures as Philip-Augustus, first to call himself King of France, and William Marshall, former child hostage and greatest English knight.

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4 months ago

59 minutes 57 seconds

Garlic & Pearls

Orangina: How a home-grown Algerian drink became a French icon

Muriel takes Suzanne – shaken, not stirred – back to the origins of the odd little yellow bottle, from sun-drenched Algerian orange groves to the smartest Parisian cafés, and into the heart of French escapism

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4 months ago

1 hour 1 minute 44 seconds