Amongst other pressing matters, they ask how our subjects hold up against their more famous Bloomsbury contemporaries. How much should individuals be forgiven for being products of their time? And, is anyone too important to be cancelled?

We ask them why it is that our subjects are so much less known than their Bloomsbury Set contemporaries.

We focus on the end of the Machine Age and its anticipation of the Space Age to come, and ask how our subjects fared in the run up to World War 2 when there was a choice of mostly totalitarian futures.

In particular, we return to the artist and writer Wyndham-Lewis and his short-lived sympathy… for Hitler.

Machen was a great influence on HP Lovecraft, and the development of the fantasy and horror genres. Stephen King is a fan. 

There is a direct line from Machen's writing to Dungeons and Dragons, grail quests such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Game of Thrones. 

Machen bemoaned modernity, the mechanised slaughter of the Great War and especially the dreary Church of England, which had lost all sense of magic. Instead he took refuge in the past, a fantastic and eternal realm of changelings, fairies and monstrous beings.

Later on, drug taking became a less socially acceptable pastime. But that didn’t stop Aleister Crowley who relished the notoriety. He took every drug going and wrote about it. In so doing, he set the scene for the drug cultures that followed.

Crowley was, among other things, an occultist, an important figure in the propagation of yoga in the West, a conjurer of demons, and a heroin addict. His sexuality was licentious, all encompassing. Crowley's law, “Do What Thou Wilt,” has arguably become the dominant way of seeing relationships between consenting adults today.

Spare began his career as a child prodigy, an incredibly talented artist who as a teenager was exhibited in the Royal Academy. Yet he claimed to have been sexually initiated by a South London witch, a descendant of the Salem witch trials.

We'll be covering the modern holy trinity of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, along with other more traditional religious devotion. We'll look into the popularity of the occult and its lasting legacy. And we'll be asking: "Where better to escape to: the future, full of progress and space travel, or to the comfort of the past?"

Better sex makes for a better "breed."

In 1918, the year that the First World War ended, a slim little book was published. Its title was Married Love, and it was going to change the course of Western sexuality forever.  

Its author was Marie Stopes. She believed that mutual orgasm was an essential component of a successful marriage. This was a radical, progressive view, at a time when many doctors and scientists ignored or denied altogether the existence of the female orgasm. And yet much of Stopes’ motivation was decidely reactionary: orgasms made women healthy, and healthy women conceived healthy babies…. and healthy babies were needed to defend and administer the British Empire. The very social fabric of the Empire itself depended on what happened between the sheets. 

London sees the arrival of Italian Futurism with its glorification of machinery, war and above all, the motor car. The Futurists, in turn, engender Vorticism, possibly Britain’s only homegrown avant garde movement.

The Vorticists believe that artists should be supreme representations of the individual, that they should make challenging art which rattles the cage of bourgeois society, that art could be an agent for change. Chief among their number is Wyndham Lewis, the set-styled bad boy of British art.

The English, according to the painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis, were philistines "in their bones."

Paris had brought impressionism and post impressionism to the world. London was lagging badly.

But in 1910 the city would finally begin to catch up.

We will see that the period helped give birth to today in fundamental ways: from Eugenics to Psychedelics and even to what has come today to be called intersectional politics.

In reality, this was a time of huge upheaval. There was the fight for Irish Home Rule, suffragism, socialism and vegetarianism. Telegraph cables stretched around the world. Darwinism had dealt creationism and the Judaic religions that championed it a severe blow. This left a gap for other faiths to fill, as people turned elsewhere to meet the human need for the mysterious.

It was a time of occultism, sex novels and human zoos. It was also when the wheels began to come off the imperial project. And in 1912, this proud maritime nation was able to celebrate a true feat of engineering: the launch of the unsinkable Titanic. 

Over the course of this series you will hear from leading writers and academics. But in this first episode you can immerse yourself in Machine Age London. You will meet the characters that populate our episodes. Many are flawed, some deeply. Most are consigned to relative obscurity. Yet their work has changed our lives.