This course is designed around the series ‘The History of Ideas: The Great Essays’, released on our podcast in 2023/24. The course is made up of eleven units, and each unit will ask you to begin by listening to the relevant episode from the series. The episode will be followed by a short recall quiz, so you may wish to take notes while listening, although you could also choose to go for a walk. At the end of each recall section, you can reveal our suggested answers and compare them with your own.

After you’ve answered the recall quiz, we’ve provided some suggested readings, which should help when considering the list of broader questions we've posed in the Reflections section for each essay. Usually, the readings will be a mixture of primary texts by the author we’re discussing, and a series of secondary texts written about the author or relevant to ideas they discussed. Occasionally these secondary texts will have been mentioned in the episode.

The questions at the end of each unit are yours to approach as you like. If you’re taking this course as a group, we hope they will be useful to prompt discussion. If you’re working alone, you could use them to start writing essays yourself, or to consider your thoughts about an episode.

Essay competition

The course concludes with a set of broader questions about essay writing, which we hope will draw out some of the ideas and themes across the series. You can write in response to these questions, or to the previous questions about each author, if you would like to take part in our essay competition.