Van de Schoonheid en de Troost

The African Nobel Prize winner for literature 1986 reflects on beauty and consolation during the civil war and his imprisonment during the military coup in Nigeria (1966) in which...

Reactionary, contrary, controversial: all labels that have been stuck on the British philosopher Roger Scruton over the years. Once a modernist philosopher, Scruton is now averse t...

Interview with Jane Goodall, British writer and ethologist (in a studio). Goodall left for Africa at the age of 23 and has since been studying a group of wild chimpanzees in Gombe...

Interview with George Steiner, British literary critic and writer (in his home in Cambridge, Great Britain). Steiner talks about beauty, solace, fear, wonder, memory, his photograp...

Interview with Vladimir Ashkenazy, Russian pianist and conductor (in the large rehearsal hall of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in the building of the Sender Freies Berlin on Ma...

Interview with Steven Weinberg, American theoretical physicist (in his office at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas). Weinberg talks about the demythologization of the world...

Interview with Martha Nussbaum (in her Chicago apartment, located on Lake Michigan, near Harold Washington Park). Nussbaum talks about what philosophy means to her, the book she is...

Interview with Karel Appel, Dutch painter. Appel has specially selected eight of his paintings for the interview as symbols of beauty and comfort. Appel talks about these eight pai...

Interview with Edward Witten, American theoretical physicist (in a room at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey). Witten talks about solving physics riddles, d...

Interview with Elizabeth Loftus, American psychologist (in her home in Seattle, overlooking Union Bay, a bay in Lake Washington). The interview is preceded by the story of a couple...

Interview with Rutger Kopland, Dutch poet (pseudonym of Rudy van den Hoofdakker, psychiatrist) (in his garden house/study in Glimmen, located on the Assen - Groningen railway line)...

Interview with Gary Lynch (in a converted workspace trailer next to the buildings of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine,...

Interview with Stephen Jay Gould, American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist (in his office at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, part of the Harvard Museum of Natural Hist...

Interview with Dubravka Ugresic, Croatian writer. Using photos and excerpts from her books, Ugresic talks about the role of photos and photo albums in her life (it's about personal...

Interview with Simon Schama, British historian (in a room at The Ritz hotel on Piccadilly in London, overlooking Green Park). Schama talks about the beauty of history that he recog...

Interview with Catherine Bott, British soprano and interpreter of medieval songs and operas (in the Main Hall of the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam). Bott talks about the acoustics of...

Interview with John Coetzee, South African writer (in a hotel room in downtown Cape Town and on Diaz Beach, South Africa). Coetzee talks about the complexity and meaning of beauty,...

Richard Dufallo, American conductor, gave a concert entitled 'The concert of beauty and consolation' for 'Of beauty and consolation' on February 6, 2000 in Muziekcentrum Vredenburg...

Interview with Leon Lederman, American experimental physicist (in the main building of the Fermi Laboratory near Batavia, Chicago area). Lederman talks about his passion for his wo...

Interview with Rudi Fuchs, art historian (in the study of his home). Fuchs shows various postcards that he has collected over the years and talks about the beauty and comfort of po...

Interview with Tatjana Tolstaja, Russian writer and granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy. Tolstaja talks about her deceased father, who was a physicist and with whom she still keeps in tou...

Interview with Freeman Dyson, British/American theoretical physicist (in the living room of his home in Princeton, New Jersey). Dyson talks about gamma-ray bursts, the secrets of t...

Interview with Richard Rorty, American philosopher (in a studio and in nature). Rorty talks about his childhood memories, escaping the "outside world" by reading books, his educati...

Interview with György Konrád, Hungarian writer (standing in a room of a canal house on the Zeedijk and looking out over the Oudezijds Voorburgwal in Amsterdam). Konrád talks about...

Germaine Greer, Australian writer, captures her native Australia with a camera for 'Of Beauty and Comfort', for her the only answer to the question of what beauty and comfort mean....

Interview with Yehudi Menuhin (at his home in Chester Square, London, and at a concert hall). Menuhin talks about the moment that represents the now and moves with us through time,...

This episode consists of the gathering. Twenty of the portrayed guests come together for an evening-filling exchange of thoughts in the De Zaaijer gallery on the Keizersgracht in A...