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In this episode, Jasper and Murray are joined by Dr Nicolas Wiater and Dr Alice K\\xf6nig who lead the Visualising War project at St Andrews University.

"War is a topic of perennial importance to people from all sectors of all societies, and battle narratives play a major role \\u2013 in many different forms \\u2013 in shaping and mediating responses to war. Think of Homer\\u2019s Iliad, the histories of Livy, the Bayeux Tapestry, Shakespeare\\u2019s history plays, Tolstoy\\u2019s War and Peace, Picasso\\u2019s Guernica, Shostakovich\\u2019s Stalingrad Symphony and Francis Ford Coppola\\u2019s Apocalypse Now \\u2013 to name just a few. At first glance these representations of battle are all strikingly different. Whether we are conscious of it or not, however, they have long been interacting with each other \\u2013 in different ways, and to different extents \\u2013 in artists\\u2019, authors\\u2019, viewers\\u2019 and listeners\\u2019 minds, adjusting the ways in which war is visualised and canonising broader ideas about (e.g.) gender, leadership, \\u2018success\\u2019 and sacrifice\\u2019.

The aim of the project is to foreground these interactions and explore their impacts. In a nutshell, we ask: how do battles narratives from different media, communities and historical periods both shape and differentiate themselves from each other? How do their interactions reflect and shape broader attitudes to war? And how do the attitudes and ideologies which they generate influence the ways in which people think, feel and behave in their day-to-day lives?"