The LRB Podcast: Recent Episodes
The London Review of Books
The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Hosted by Thomas Jones, it also features regular contributions from US Editor Adam Shatz and the ongoing ‘Close Readings’ series, which explores the lives and works of writers through the pieces about them in the LRB archive.
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For the second episode of our series on the UK election, James Butler is joined by Sam Freedman to talk about the enormous challenges facing the next government. From hospital waiting lists to criminal court backlogs and even potholes, the fabric of the British state seems to be beyond repair. It’s not simply a problem of funding: poor management, a lack of scrutiny and extreme centralisation combined with the almost total destruction of local government have all played a part. James and Sam consider whether there’s anything to be done about this chronic dysfunction, and whether the next official opposition could in fact be the Liberal Democrats.
Sam Freedman is co-author of the substack Comment is Freed. His book Failed State: Why Britain’s Institutions are Broken and How We Fix Them will be released in July 2024.
Read more from James Butler the LRB:
James Butler on the crisis in care: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/james-butler/this-concerns-everyone
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In the first in a series of episodes on the UK general election, James Butler is joined by Ann Pettifor and Adrienne Buller to discuss climate policy and its apparent absence from the campaign so far. Several years ago the Labour Party was committed to a Green New Deal but has since backed away from that promise, while the Conservatives have decided that abandoning their own climate commitments is a vote-winner. Ann, Adrienne and James consider why political leadership and courage have disappeared on this issue, what environmental policy might look like with a Labour government, and how Chinese bicycles demonstrate the problem of international climate action.
Read James's latest blog post on the election: https://lrb.me/butlersunakpod
And more on climate in the LRB:
Will Davies on why capitalism won't save the planet: https://lrb.me/daviesclimatepod
James Butler on Andreas Malm and ecoterrorism: https://lrb.me/butlerclimatepod2
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From the ghetto's creation in 1516 until its dissolution at the end of the 18th century, Jews in Venice were confined to a district enclosed by canals, patrolled by guards and locked at night. Yet its residents were essential players in Venetian life, and in practice the ghetto saw far more traffic through its gates than its founders intended. Erin Maglaque joins Tom to discuss what life in the ghetto was like, and why an open-air prison could be considered relatively tolerant by the standards of early modern Europe.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/ghettopod
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The D-Day planners said that everything would depended the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days'. But who would make the forecast? The Meteorological Office? The US Air Force? The Royal Navy? In the event, it was all three. In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence Hogben, a New Zealand-born meteorologist and Royal Navy officer, describes the way this forecasting by committee worked, and why they very almost chose the wrong day.
Read by Stephen Dillane
Find the article and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/ddaypod
Watch the short film based on this piece: https://lrb.me/ddayyt
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J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the Daily Mail and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appealing to both Spielberg and Cronenberg. In a recent piece, Edmund Gordon unpicks the contradictions and contrarianism in Ballard’s non-fiction writing, and he joins Tom to continue the dissection. They explore Ballard’s strange combination of ‘whisky and soda’ conservatism and the avant-garde, what he was trying to achieve through his fiction, and how ‘Ballardian’ Empire of the Sun really is.
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Marilyn Nance was 23 when she photographed Festac ’77, a global celebration of Black and African art that she described as ‘the Olympics, plus a Biennial, plus Woodstock’. In his review of Nance’s book, Sean Jacobs traces a more fraught history of the festival than her photographs would suggest. Sean joins Tom to discuss what Festac meant for politicians, attendees and the proponents of négritude, third worldism and pan-Africanism.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/festacpod
Find out more about Serious Readers: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb
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Rebecca Solnit has lived in San Francisco since 1980, but the city she used to know is fast disappearing, ‘fully annexed’, as she puts it, by the tech firms from Silicon Valley. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Solnit reads her piece from the 8 February issue of the paper, both a eulogy for the city that’s been lost and a dissection of the dystopia that’s replacing it, ‘returning us’, as she puts it, ‘to a kind of feudalism’.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/solnitpod
Find out more about Serious Readers: https://www.seriousreaders.com/
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The recovery of history’s ‘lost’ women is often associated with the advent of feminism, but, Sophie Smith writes, women’s contributions to Western philosophy have been regularly rediscovered since at least the 14th century. She joins Tom to discuss this cycle of forgetting and what we can learn from the women who held their own alongside Plato, Descartes and Hume.
Find Sophie’s piece and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/sophiesmithpod
Find out more about Pace Gallery’s upcoming exhibitions here: https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/
Find out more about Coram Boy at Chichister Festival Theatre here: https://www.cft.org.uk/events/coram-boy
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James Pratt and John Smith were the last men hanged in England for the crime of sodomy, reported to the authorities by nosy landlords who later petitioned for clemency. Tom Crewe joins Thomas Jones to explain how exceptional – and unexceptional – the case was, the historical forces that led to the death sentence and the surprising ambivalence many Londoners felt about ‘unnatural crimes’ in the 1830s.
Find out more about Bluets at the Royal Court theatre here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
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The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. In the closing LRB Winter Lecture for 2024, Terry Eagleton examines various aspects of that history – culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology – in an attempt to broaden the argument and understand where we are now.
Terry Eagleton delivered this lecture as part of the LRB's Winter Lecture series at St James's Church, Clerkenwell, London on 27 March 2024.
Read Terry Eagleton’s lecture in the LRB: https://lrb.me/eagletonwl
Watch the lecture on YouTube: https://lrb.me/eagletonwlyt
Find out more about Bluets here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
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In her recent LRB Winter Lecture, Hazel V. Carby discussed ways contemporary Indigenous artists are rendering the ordinarily invisible repercussions of ecocide and genocide visible. She joins Adam Shatz to expand on the artists discussed in her lecture, and how they disrupt the ways we’re accustomed to seeing borders, landmasses, and landscapes empty – or emptied – of people.
Find the lecture and further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/carbypod
Watch the lecture on YouTube: lrb.me/carbyyt
Find out more about Bluets at the Royal Court theatre here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
Listen to the We Society Podcast here: https://acss.org.uk/we-society-podcast/
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Since the 2010 earthquake, ordinary life in Haiti has become increasingly untenable: in January this year, armed gangs controlled around 80 per cent of the capital. Pooja Bhatia joins Tom to discuss Haitian immigration to Chile and the US, the self-defeating nature of US immigration policy and the double binds Haitian refugees find themselves in. Should you pay a bribe if it marks you out as a candidate for kidnapping? Can you be deported to a country without an operating airport? And if asylum laws protect people who are being persecuted, what happens when that covers an entire nation?
Find Pooja's Haiti coverage on the episode page: lrb.me/haitipod
Find out more about Bluets at the Royal Court theatre here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
Listen to the We Society Podcast here: https://acss.org.uk/we-society-podcast/
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Modern English speakers struggle to find sexual terms that aren’t either obscene or scientific, but that wasn’t always the case. In a recent review of Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue, Mary Wellesley connects our linguistic squeamishness to changing ideas about women and sexuality. She joins Tom to discuss the changing language of women’s anatomy, work and lives.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/gurletalk
Listen to Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu on medieval humour: lrb.me/millerstale
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When Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher sends a huge flotilla on an 8000-mile rescue mission – to save a forgotten remnant of the empire, and her premiership. Onboard the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror, Lieutenant Narendra Sethia starts to keep a diary.
This is an extract from the first episode. To listen to the rest of it, and the full series, find 'The Belgrano Diary' in:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Archive:
‘Good Morning Britain’/ITV/TV-Am, ‘Newsnight’/BBC/BBC News, ‘Falkands War – The Untold Story’/ITV/Yorkshire Television, ‘Leach, Henry Conyers (Oral history)’/Imperial War Museum, ‘President Regan’s Press Briefing in the Oval Office on April 5, 1982’/White House Television Office, ‘Diary’/James M. Rentschler, TV Publica/Radio y Televisión Argentina S.E, The Falklands War: Recordings from the Archive/BBC Worldwide, Parliamentary Recording Unit
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Rosemary Hill, reviewing Steven Brindle’s Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530-1830, celebrates his approach to architecture as a social, collaborative endeavour, where human need (and human greed) stymies starchitectural vision. Rosemary takes Tom on a tour of British and Irish architecture, from the Reformation through industrialisation, featuring big egos, unexpected outcomes and at least one architect she thinks it’s ‘completely fair’ to call a villain.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/brindlepod
Listen to Rosemary on the design of Bath: lrb.me/stonehengepod
And on Salisbury Cathedral: lrb.me/salisburypod
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On 2 May 1982, the British submarine HMS Conqueror sank the Argentinian warship, the General Belgrano, killing 323 men. It was the bloodiest event of the Falklands War – and the most controversial.
The account of the sinking given by Thatcher's government was inaccurate in every crucial detail – and the truth would only emerge from the pages of a private diary, written by an officer onboard the submarine.
The Belgrano Diary is a story of war in the South Atlantic, iron leadership, cover-ups and conspiracies, crusading politicians and competing journalists, and an unlikely whistleblower.
A new six-part series from the Documentary Team at the London Review of Books, hosted by Andrew O’Hagan.
Episode One coming 28 March. Find it wherever you're listening to this podcast.
Archive:
‘Good Morning Britain’/ITV/TV-Am
Parliamentary Recording Unit
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Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss his recent LRB Winter Lecture, in which he explores Israel’s instrumentalisation of the Holocaust. He expands on his readings of Jean Améry and Primo Levi, the crisis as understood by the Global South and Zionism’s appeal for Hindu nationalists.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/aftergazapod
Watch the lecture on YouTube: lrb.me/mishrayt
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Between 1988 and 1994, the UK scrambled to make sense of acid house, with its radical new sounds, new drugs and new ways of partying. In a recent piece for the paper, Chal Ravens considers a reappraisal of the origins and political ramifications of the Second Summer of Love. She joins Tom to unpack the social currents channelled through the free party scene and the long history of countercultural ‘collective festivity’ in England.
Read more, and listen ad free, on the LRB website: lrb.me/acidhousepod
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When is giving up not failure, but a way of succeeding at something else? In his new book, which began as a piece for the LRB, the psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips explores the ways in which knowing our limitations can be an act of heroism. This episode was recorded at the London Review Bookshop, where Phillips was joined by the biographer and critic Hermione Lee in a conversation about giving up and On Giving Up, his approach to writing and the purpose of psychoanalysis.
Find Phillips’s 2022 piece On Giving Up and further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/ongivingup
Find future events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod
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When Deborah Friedell and Adam Thirlwell met twenty years ago, they started a discussion about Jewish identity they are still puzzling over today. Revisiting Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1986), an American take on British antisemitism and the escapist allure of aliyah, Adam and Deborah discuss the nuances of Jewish experience and novel-writing across the Atlantic.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/jewishnovelpod
Watch Judith Butler’s 2011 Winter Lecture: ‘Who owns Kafka?’
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Gerontologist, pacifist, novelist, medical doctor and mollusc expert – Alex Comfort was far more than just the author of the staggeringly popular Joy of Sex. In her review of a new biography, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite navigates the convictions and contradictions of this bewilderingly polymathic thinker. She joins Tom to trace Comfort’s life from evangelical child prodigy to the anarchist free love advocate who became emblematic of the sexual liberation movement.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/comfortpod
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Enheduana was a Sumerian princess who lived around 2300 BCE and composed what is now regarded as the earliest poetry by a known author. Her father, Sargon of Akkad, is said to have created the world’s first empire, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and as part of his imperial mission he installed his daughter as the high priestess of the temple of the moon god, Nanna, in the city of Ur. In that capacity, Enheduana composed hymns of remarkable beauty, often governed by a powerful authorial voice.
Anna Della Subin joins Tom to discuss a new translation of Enheduana’s complete poems, read some of them in the original Sumerian, and consider the ways in which they challenge our ideas of authorship and literary history.
Read more, and listen ad free, on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/enheduanapod
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From the Egyptian Revolution to Extinction Rebellion, the 2010s were marked by a global wave of spontaneous and largely structureless mass protests. Despite overwhelming numbers and popular support, most of these movements failed to achieve their aims, and in many cases led to worse conditions. James Butler joins Tom to make sense of the ‘mass protest decade’, sharing historical examples, theoretical approaches and first-hand experiences that help explain the defeats of the 2010s.
Find further reading and listen ad free on the episode page: lrb.me/protestdecade
Find the Close Readings podcast in Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or just search 'Close Readings'.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen to all our series in full:
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In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, described by Frank Kermode as ‘braced against folly by the power and intelligence that make it possible to think it the greatest political poem in the language’.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:
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Read the poem here
Further reading in the LRB:
Blair Worden: Double Tongued
Frank Kermode: Hard Labour
David Norbrook: Political Verse
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Ethiopia is one of the world’s most populous countries, and yet the 2020-22 Tigray War and ongoing suffering in the region has been largely ignored by the world at large. Tom Stevenson joins the podcast to break down the history of the conflict, and explore why Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel laureate, has come to preside over such a brutal civil war. He also considers Abiy’s future intentions, both within and beyond his country’s borders.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/tigraypod
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Were the Middle Ages funny? Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their series in quest of the medieval sense of humour with Chaucer’s 'Miller’s Tale', a story that is surely still (almost) as funny as when it was written six hundred years ago. But who is the real butt of the joke? Mary and Irina look in detail at the mechanics of the plot and its needless but pleasurable complexity, and consider the social significance of clothes and pubic hair in the tale.
Find the Close Readings podcast in Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or just search 'Close Readings'.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen to all our series in full:
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Did the foundational event of Proust’s great novel really happen? Michael Wood talks to Tom about several English translations of In Search of Lost Time, old and new, and what they reveal about different ways of reading the novel. If the dipping of the madeleine in his tea conjures an overwhelming memory of the narrator’s childhood, it is also a challenge to the conscious mind, a product of chance that Proust suggests might easily not have occurred at all.
Find more by Michael on Proust here: lrb.me/woodproustpod
Sign up to Close Readings Plus: lrb.me/plus
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James Meek joins Tom to talk about a recent book by Peter Biskind on ‘the New TV’, reviewed by James in the latest issue of the paper. They discuss the rise of cable TV in the 1990s, the emergence of the streaming giants, the power of the showrunner and whether the golden age of television drama is really coming to an end.
Read James's piece: https://lrb.me/meektvpod
Sign up to Close Readings: lrb.me/closereadingspod
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Tom Crewe, Patricia Lockwood, Deborah Friedell, John Lanchester, Rosemary Hill and Colm Tóibín talk to Tom about some of their favourite LRB pieces, including Terry Castle’s 1995 essay on Jane Austen's letters, Hilary Mantel’s account of how she became a writer, and Alan Bennett’s uncompromising take on Philip Larkin.
Read the pieces:
Terry Castle on Jane Austen
Wendy Doniger: Calf and Other Loves
Hilary Mantel: Giving up the Ghost
Angela Carter: Noovs' hoovs in the trough
Penelope Fitzgerald on Stevie Smith
Alan Bennett on Philip Larkin
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/now
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Byron’s early poems – his so-called ’dark tales’ – have been dismissed by critics as the tawdry, slapdash products of an uninteresting mind, and readers ever since have found it difficult not to see them in light of the poet’s dramatic and public later life. In a recent piece for the LRB, Clare Bucknell looked past the famous biography to observe the youthful Byron’s mind at work in poems such as The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814) and Lara (1814), where early versions of the Byronic hero were often characterised by passivity, rumination and choicelessness.
Clare discusses the piece with Tom, and talks about her new Close Readings series, On Satire, with Colin Burrow, which features Don Juan alongside works by Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, John Donne, Muriel Spark and others.
Read Clare's piece on Byron: https://lrb.me/byronpod
Join Clare and Colin Burrow for their series on satire next year, and receive all the books under discussion, access to online seminars and the rest of the Close Readings audio, with Close Readings Plus: https://lrb.me/plusyt
To subscribe to the audio only, and access all our other Close Readings series:
Sign up directly in Apple here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
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In Renaissance Venice, Aldus Manutius turned his mid-life crisis into a publishing revolution, printing books that permanently changed the way we read. In a recent review, Erin Maglaque celebrates Aldus as the progenitor of the paperback and a model for late bloomers. She tells Tom about Aldus’s achievements, his monumental ego and his part in the creation of one of the most bizarre books in publishing history.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/manutiuspod
Subscribe to Close Readings Plus here: https://lrb.me/plus
Or just sign up to the Close Readings podcast subscription:
In Apple Podcasts: lrb.me/camusapple
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/camussc
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Feverish, homesick, bored, awed and on rollerskates: Albert Camus’s travel diaries are a fascinating window into an easily mythologised life. Camus visited the New World twice, and a new translation of his journals reveals his struggle to make sense of his experiences. Adam Shatz joins Tom to explain the ways Camus’s ambivalence towards the Americas sheds light on his tumultuous personal life, his conflicted stance on colonialism and where his humanism deviates from his existentialist peers.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/camuspod
If you want to join Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards on revolutionary thinkers next year, and receive all the books under discussion, access to online seminars and the rest of the Close Readings audio, you can sign up to Close Readings Plus here: https://lrb.me/plus
Or just sign up to the Close Readings podcast subscription:
In Apple Podcasts: lrb.me/camusapple
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/camussc
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In June, the pope invited dozens of artists to Rome for the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum’s contemporary art collection. Patricia Lockwood, the author of Priestdaddy and a contributing editor at the LRB, was one of them. She tells Tom more about the surreal experience and why irony, in the words of Pope Francis, is ‘a marvellous virtue’.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/popepod
Read John Lanchester’s pick from the archive: lrb.me/lanchesterpick
Subscribe to the LRB here: lrb.me/now
Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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George Orwell wasn’t afraid to speak against totalitarianism – but what was he for? Colin Burrow joins Tom to unpick the cultural conservatism and crackling violence underpinning Orwell’s writing, to reassess his vision of socialism and to figure out why teenagers love him so much.
If you want to join Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell for their series on satire next year, and receive all the books under discussion, access to online seminars and the rest of the Close Readings audio, you can sign up to Close Readings Plus here: https://lrb.me/plus
Or just sign up to the Close Readings podcast subscription:
In Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/orwellapple
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/orwellsc
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/orwellpod
Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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For the final introduction to next year’s full Close Readings programme, Emily Wilson, celebrated classicist and translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, returns for a second season of Among the Ancients, to take on another twelve vital works of Greek and Roman literature with the LRB’s Thomas Jones, loosely themed around ‘truth and lies’ – from Aesop’s Fables to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
Authors covered: Hesiod, Aesop, Herodotus, Pindar, Plato, Lucian, Plautus, Terence, Lucan, Tacitus, Juvenal, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius.
First episode released on 24 January 2024, then on the 24th of each month for the rest of the year.
How to Listen
Close Readings subscription
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Close Readings Plus
In addition to the episodes, receive all the books under discussion; access to webinars with Emily, Tom and special guests including Amia Srinivasan; and shownotes and further reading from the LRB archive.
On sale here from 22 November: lrb.me/plus
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In the second of three introductions to our full Close Readings programme for 2024, Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’ll be talking separately to three guests – Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards – about some of the most revolutionary thought of the 20th century.
Judith, Pankaj and Brent will each discuss four texts over four episodes, as they uncover the inner life of the 20th century through works that have sought to find freedom in different ways and remake the world around them. They explore, among other things, the development of arguments against racism and colonialism, the experience of artistic expression in oppressive conditions and how language has been used in politically substantive ways.
Authors covered: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, V. S. Naipaul, Ashis Nandy, Doris Lessing, Nadezhda Mandelstam, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka and Audre Lorde.
First episode released on 14 January 2024, then on the fourteenth of each month for the rest of the year.
How to Listen
Close Readings subscription
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Close Readings Plus
In addition to the episodes, receive all the books under discussion; access to webinars with Adam and his guests; and shownotes and further reading from the LRB archive.
On sale here from 22 November: lrb.me/plus
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the first of three introductions to our full 2024 Close Readings programme, starting in January, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell present their series, On Satire. Over twelve episodes, Colin and Clare will attempt to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in English literature, as they ask what satire is, what it’s for and why we seem to like it so much.
Authors covered: Erasmus, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Earl of Rochester, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark.
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and regular contributors to the LRB.
First episode released on 4 January 2024, then on the fourth of each month for the rest of the year.
How to Listen
Close Readings subscription
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Close Readings Plus
In addition to the episodes, receive all the books under discussion; access to webinars with Colin, Clare and special guests including Lucy Prebble and Katherine Rundell; and shownotes and further reading from the LRB archive.
On sale here from 22 November: lrb.me/plus
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the 1970s and '80s, thousands of haemophiliacs in the UK were infected with HIV and hepatitis C through blood products known to be contaminated. In a recent piece, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithewaite outlines the magnitude of the scandal, exacerbated by carelessness, corporate greed and, in one instance, deliberate human experimentation. She joins Malin to discuss the findings and what they mean for survivors. They are joined by Tom Crewe, who reckoned with the Aids crisis in his 2018 article ‘Here was a plague’.
Find Florence and Tom’s articles on the episode page: lrb.me/bloodinquirypod
Read Colm Tóibín's pick from the LRB archive: lrb.me/colmpod
Subscribe to the LRB here: lrb.me/now
Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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When Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of fraud last week, the only surprise was how quickly the jury reached their verdict. John Lanchester joins Tom to discuss how the former crypto billionaire ended up facing a life sentence, from his early career in finance and embrace of Effective Altruism to the simple but audacious nature of his crime, and why he found himself in a US court, even though US citizens were banned from using his trading company, FTX.
Read John Lanchester on Sam Bankman-Fried: lrb.me/sbfpod
Read Rosemary Hill's pick from the LRB archive: lrb.me/rosemarypod
Subscribe to the LRB here: lrb.me/now
Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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Anglophiles abroad love the British sense of humour – but what does that actually mean? In a recent review for the paper, Jonathan Coe takes a scalpel to the satire boom and its aftermath to find out what, if anything, sets British comedy apart. He joins Malin for a serious chat about comedy and its double-edged role in the UK’s political life.
Further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/coecomedy
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Nineteenth-century Britain is often imagined as gloomy and dark, epitomised by Dickensian grime and Queen Victoria’s prolonged state of black-clad mourning. But in reality this period saw an explosion of colour, following a number of scientific discoveries.
In this short discussion, Charlotte Ribeyrol, co-curator of Colour Revolution, a major new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, talks about some of those technical advances and the dazzling objects visitors will find on display at the show, from jewel-like Pre-Raphaelite paintings to bookcases and socks, as well as some of the debates of the time – between Ruskin, Darwin and others – about the meaning of colour in nature and society.
Colour Revolution runs at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford until 18th February 2024. Find out more here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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Compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a seventy-year endeavour that called on thousands of volunteers from all walks of life. The Dictionary People, reviewed by Daisy Hay in the LRB, is a recent attempt to track down the various characters who made the OED possible. Daisy joins Tom to discuss how contributors and their enthusiasms shaped the dictionary to this day.
Further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/dictionarypod
Learn more about the Irish Pages Press: irishpages.org/
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As the siege on Gaza intensifies, many observers are describing the current Hamas-Israel conflict as a complete overhaul of the region’s status quo. Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 Magazine, and Michael Sfard, a leading human rights lawyer, join Adam Shatz to discuss the roots and ramifications of the current crisis. This conversation was recorded on 17 October.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/waringazapod
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Crass, violent, misogynistic, dumb, fake – and irresistible. Tom Crewe was one of many unlikely diehards who fell sway to the theatre of pro-wrestling, despite and because of its excesses. Here, he reads his 2021 piece unpacking his youthful obsession with a sport both ‘hideous’ and ‘Homeric’.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/wrestlingdays
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Between 1630 and 1944, Mount Vesuvius was continually erupting, and remains one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes. Yet, as Rosemary Hill explains in a recent piece, the volcano exerted an irresistible pull on poets, tourists and statesmen. She tells Tom how the 19th century’s obsession with Vesuvius spawned scientific disciplines, artistic innovations and nude intracrater picnics.
Further reading and listening on the episode page: lrb.me/intothevolcano
Listen to Rosemary’s recent series on Stonehenge: lrb.me/stonehengepodone
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For many on the right, Arif Naqvi epitomises the idea of the 'woke capitalist'. The private equity multimillionaire has promoted sustainable development and donated heavily to the Gates Foundation to invest in healthcare, but now awaits possible extradition to the US on fraud charges. Laleh Khalili joins Tom to discuss Naqvi’s story, and what goes wrong when private equity firms look to profit from public services.
Read Laleh's piece here: https://lrb.me/khalilipod2
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In a world where communication is only as effective as its ‘truthiness’, numbers are vital to political success. But, as John Lanchester explains on this week’s episode, some of the most influential stats in UK politics are ‘pants’. John joins Tom to discuss why GDP, immigration numbers and English Premier League odds are so frequently misleading, and how we can be better attuned to the misuse of data.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/thinkofanumber
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Adolfo Kaminsky, a first-class forger while still a teenager, saved thousands of lives as an agent of the French Resistance. After the war, he turned his counterfeiting skills towards anticolonialist causes while building his reputation as a photographer. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Adam Shatz reads his piece on Kaminsky, whom he met in 2019. 'Forgery wasn‘t just an art he perfected,' Shatz writes, 'but a vocation and an ethics.'
Find more by Adam Shatz at the episode page: lrb.me/beyondborders
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Armed with Thom’s Directory, James Joyce strove to recreate 1904 Dublin as accurately as possible, down to the last solicitor and street railing. But, as Colm Tóibín explains in a recent piece, the novel is pockmarked with errors, only some intentional. Colm joins Tom to discuss Joyce’s deliberate and accidental mistakes, Trieste’s essential influence on the novel, and why a queer reading of Ulysses really does hold water.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/factcheckingjoyce
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‘Octopuses,’ Amia Srinivasan writes, ‘are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.’ In our third summer reading, Srinivasan explores the paradoxical nature of octopus lives, and the difficulties humans have in understanding them.
Read more by Amia Srinivasan in the LRB: lrb.me/srinivasanpod
Let us know your thoughts: lrb.me/podsurvey
Produced by Zoe Kilbourn; editing by Sarah Sahim
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Agatha Christie, writes John Lanchester, ‘is the only writer by whom I’ve read more than fifty books. So – why?’ In the second of our summer readings, Lanchester dissects Christie’s compulsive readability, and considers why, despite her brazen lack of style, she was a great experimental formalist.
Read more John Lanchester in the LRB: lrb.me/lanchesterpod
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Produced by Zoe Kilbourn; editing by Sarah Sahim
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In the first of our summer readings, Terry Castle reads her 2005 piece about her “on-again, off-again, semi-friendship” with Susan Sontag. She remembers Sontag as a “great comic character”: a high-minded hobnobber, a moralist and a gossip, seductive and snobbish and a catalytic force for modern feminism.
Read more Terry Castle in the LRB: lrb.me/castlepod
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Almost eighteen months since Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv residents have resumed something resembling pre-war life. James Meek recently returned to the city, and joins Tom to discuss the new normal: how language is changing and ravers are rebuilding destroyed villages, and what we can expect in the coming months of warfare.
Find further reading, and an example of Repair Together in action, on the episode page: lrb.me/lifeinkyiv
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Irina Dumitrescu joins Tom for a Close Readings fusion episode looking at Chaucer’s classical mind, and in particular his use of Ovid’s Heroides in The Legend of Good Women, in which the poet does penance for his poor depictions of women by retelling the stories of Ariadne, Phaedra, Lucrece and others in a more sympathetic light. They discuss Chaucer’s playful attitude to his sources and his mix of humour with serious observations on the presentation of women and their suffering in the classical tradition.
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As Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover exercised a dictatorial influence over the department – and, it seems, everyone else. Meticulous and vindictive, he frequently weaponised secrets while carefully guarding his own. Deborah Friedell grapples with his overwhelming and disturbing legacy in her sweeping review of G-Man, the first Hoover biography in thirty years. She joins Tom to discuss some of the most puzzling features of Hoover’s personality and approach to policing. Should he have known about Pearl Harbor? Was he in cahoots with the Mafia? And what was his problem with bald men?
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/hooverpod
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In her recent piece for the paper, Patricia Lockwood revisits David Foster Wallace’s work in the light of posthumous publications and the shadow of #MeToo. Lockwood joined Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the paper, to discuss Wallace’s troubled status as Saint Dave, where his writing was at its best and whether a novel can benefit from being left unfinished.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/dfwpod
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As inflation continues to outstrip wage growth for all but the top ten per cent of earners, interest rates look set to keep rising at least until February 2024. The political economist William Davies joins Tom to consider the reasons for high inflation and the Bank of England’s response, what government policies could alleviate the crisis and whether next year’s general election will lead to any significant change.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/inflationfixation
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Last month, the UK government appointed their first “free speech tsar”, whose stated mission is to protect free speech and academic freedom in universities. But, as Amia Srinivasan argues in a recent article, there's an inherent conflict in those goals. Amia joins Malin to discuss the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) act, whether students are increasingly leaning left and how activists across the political spectrum weaponise the concept of harm.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/cancelled
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For her final leg across Salisbury Plain, Rosemary Hill is joined by folklorist Jeremy Harte to look at the many groups and stories that have emerged throughout the 20th century to challenge the narratives about Stonehenge presented by archaeologists. From astro-archaeology to the Earth Mysteries Movement, they look out how colonial models of Stonehenge’s history have been overturned and the whole notion of public ownership repeatedly tested, sometimes with violent consequences, since the stone circle was gifted to the nation in 1918, and why it (almost) always comes back to druids.
Buy Rosemary Hill's book Stonehenge: lrb.me/stonehengebook
For the third episode in her short series on Stonehenge, Rosemary Hill is joined by Seamus Perry to experience the stone circle through the mind and eyes of a Romantic, with the likes of Wordsworth, Blake, Turner and Constable. For these poets and artists, Salisbury Plain took on a gloomy and richly psychological presence, lit with intense personal and political drama, and animated with revolutionary thought.
Buy Rosemary Hill's book Stonehenge from the LRB Bookshop here: lrb.me/stonehengebook
Sign up to the LRB's Close Readings podcast here: lrb.me/closereadingspod
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Kevin Okoth and Jeremy Harding join Tom to discuss two recent books reassessing decolonisation. Textbook histories used to describe African independence as more or less complete by the mid-1960s, but millions of people were fighting white minority rule into the 1970s and 1980s, while Cold War rivalry between the US, the Soviet Union and China played out across the continent, often with catastrophic consequences. As countries continue to vie for Africa’s natural resources, its postcolonial future remains, at best, unresolved.
Find further reading, and listen ad-free, on the LRB website: lrb.me/africascoldwarpod
Sign up to the LRB's Close Readings podcast here: lrb.me/closereadingspod
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In the second episode of her short series looking at why Stonehenge has occupied such an important place in the story of Britain, Rosemary Hill talks to Kate Bennett about the two antiquarians, John Aubrey and William Stukeley, who first treated the stone circle as a material object whose secrets could be revealed through careful measurement, observation and comparison, and so pioneered many of the practices of modern archaeology.
Find further reading on the LRB website: lrb.me/stonehengepodtwo
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Following the Turkish president’s success in the run-off election on Sunday, Izzy Finkel and Tom Stevenson join Tom to discuss whether Erdoğan’s victory was ever in doubt, why the recent devastating earthquakes and economic turmoil seem to have had so little impact on his support, the challenges faced by the opposition, and the growing importance of xenophobia in Turkey’s politics.
Find further reading, and listen ad-free, on the LRB website: lrb.me/erdoganpod
Sign up to the LRB's Close Readings podcast here: lrb.me/closereadingspod
Rosemary Hill begins a new four-part series looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge over the past few hundred years, and why it’s come to matter so much in the story of Britain. In the first episode she talks to architectural historian Vaughan Hart about how Inigo Jones and John Wood were inspired by Stonehenge in their designs for Covent Garden and Bath, and how those in turn had an enormous influence on the way British towns and cities look today, from squares and circuses to oversized acorns and the idea of architecture itself.
Buy Rosemary Hill's book Stonehenge here: lrb.me/stonehengebook
Vaughan Hart is the author of numerous books on the history of architecture, including Inigo Jones: the Architect of Kings; Christopher Wren: In Search of Eastern Antiquity and Nicholas Hawksmoor: Rebuilding Ancient Wonders.
Sign up to the LRB's Close Readings podcast here: lrb.me/closereadingspod
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Rory Scothorne joins Tom to discuss the evolution of Scottish politics over the past century or so, and how best to understand a country that’s shifted from a centre right electoral majority in the 1950s to a Labour stronghold in the 1980s, to being governed by the SNP since 2007. Is Scotland’s left-wing tradition a myth? And with the loss of Nicola Sturgeon as SNP leader, and the recent scandals hitting the party, what are the prospects for Scottish independence?
Read Rory's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/scothornepod
Sign up for the LRB's Close Readings podcast here: lrb.me/closereadings
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Spotify, a company worth $23 billion, has come out on top of the streaming wars, and yet it’s never made a profit. Daniel Cohen joins Malin to discuss the history of the platform and how it's changed the way music is made and listened to, and the strangeness of streaming culture, rife with ethical dilemmas.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/spotifypod
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Accused of ‘the largest con in corporate history’, Indian magnate Gautam Adani has lost half his net worth and the indulgence of financial journalists. As Adani comes under increasing scrutiny, so do his troubling political connections – not least with India's prime minister, Narendra Modi. Pankaj Mishra joins Tom to discuss Adani and Modi’s intertwined careers, and their shared role in shaping an increasingly ethnonationalist, plutocratic India.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/modipod
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Two worlds collide in this Close Readings fusion episode in which Mary Wellesley talks to Mark Ford about the medieval in Thomas Hardy and the wider Victorian imagination. They discuss why Hardy liked to present himself as an Arthurian knight, his satirisation of the chivalric ideal in his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, and the way his training as an architect influenced his devotion to poetic spontaneity and experimentation.
Sign up for Close Readings here: https://lrb.me/closereadings
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Past Present Future is a new weekly podcast with David Runciman, host of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter.
Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future.
Brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
New episodes every Thursday. Just subscribe to Past Present Future wherever you get your podcasts.
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In his introduction to our twelfth collection of LRB archive pieces, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and Andrew O’Hagan, both younger sons in big families. Their conversation considers the examples of the brothers Mann, Yeats, James and Windsor, and why, as Evelyn Waugh observed, when there’s a writer in the family, that family is finished.
You can buy Sisters Come Second from the LRB Store for just £5.99: lrb.me/siblings
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/siblingspod
Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Zoe Kilbourn, Anthony Wilks and Sam Kinchin-Smith
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Miranda Carter joins Tom to talk about the life and historical fiction of Mary Renault, whose popular and ingenious retellings of stories from Ancient Greece have never been out of print. They discuss her eventful life, which took her from Edwardian East London to apartheid South Africa, and her meticulous classical reconstructions.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/maryrenaultpod
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In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising to do to alleviate (or exacerbate) them.
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Francis Gooding joins Tom to discuss Pirate Enlightenment,David Graeber’s posthumously published study of 17th- and 18th-century piracy. Golden Age pirates maintained surprisingly egalitarian working practices, Graeber argues, and legendary pirate republics may have been run on similar grounds. Tom and Francis talk about Graeber’s Madagascar-centred research, sift through myth and fact, and ask: was piracy a bullshit job?
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/pirateenlightenment
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With the future of TikTok increasingly uncertain in the US and other countries, Malin Hay talks to Tom about the app’s powerful reading-focused corner, BookTok: what it is, how it works, and the tropes which dominate its favourite genre, romance fiction. They also look at some recent emails from listeners.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/booktokpod
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Expanding on her recent Winter Lecture, Clair Wills talks to Tom about the stories people tell about abortions – stories conditioned by tradition, coerced by the courts, compelled by politics and shared in solidarity. They discuss some of the radical reframings and reimaginings of abortion in art, literature and private life.
Find further reading, including the lecture, on the episode page: lrb.me/clairwillspod
Watch the lecture on YouTube: lrb.me/abortionplot
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In the final episode of this series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to the feminist scholar Jade Sasser. Jade discusses how advocates for population control harness the language of social justice, her students’ highly personal responses to climate change, and the ways scholarship on climate anxiety has neglected questions of race.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/jadesasserpod
Read the lecture that inspired this series: lrb.me/meehancristlecture
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William Davies talks to Tom about his recent LRB Winter Lecture, looking at why reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – have become the main currency of the digital public sphere. Ubiquitous surveillance and smartphones have made the spontaneous reaction a thing to be cultivated, collected and stored. How did we come to endow reaction with such significance, and what might an escape from the reaction economy look like?
Watch the lecture here: https://youtu.be/bNCYo_mEzfQ
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In the third episode of a four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to historian Alison Bashford. Alison discusses the history of efforts to control population size, how population is thought about in the Anthropocene, and how suspending critique of the past can give valuable insight into the present.
Find the full conversation and further reading at the episode page: lrb.me/bashfordpod
Attend our Winter Lectures in person or online: lrb.me/winterlectures
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The screen legend and salad dressing philanthropist Paul Newman recorded hundreds of personal interviews before destroying the tapes. The surviving transcripts, worked into a recent memoir and documentary series, reveal a more complex Newman than his on-screen laconicism would suggest. Bee Wilson speaks to Malin Hay about Newman’s mystique – his passivity, his domesticity and his irresistible blue eyes.
Find Bee's article and further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/paulnewmanpod
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In the second episode of a four-part series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to Banu Subramaniam, the evolutionary biologist and feminist science scholar. They discuss the global persistence of Malthusian thinking, why the focus of policymakers on population often means focusing on the bodies of poor and marginalised women, and how historical anxiety about ‘invasive’ plant species has mirrored the formation of national borders and attitudes towards human migrants.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/banusubramaniam
Attend one of our Winter Lectures in person or online: lrb.me/winterlectures
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Long before Margaret Thatcher told her cabinet that The Constitution of Liberty was “what we believe”, neoliberal poster boy Friedrich Hayek had been denounced by his mentor as a socialist. Following his review of a new biography, Jonathan Rée speaks to Tom about Hayek’s celebrity and infamy, and the ways close reading reveals surprising nuance in his work.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/hayekree
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In the first episode of a four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist talks to activist and feminist scholar Loretta J. Ross. Ross discusses how she's worked to prevent sexual violence by talking to perpetrators, the problems with today’s call out culture, why the Clinton administration’s healthcare plan prompted the development of the reproductive justice movement in the 1990s, and how to challenge arguments that link fertility with environmental crisis.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/lorettaross
Learn more about SisterSong on their website: https://sistersong.net
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In 1939, Dorothy Thompson was on the cover of Time, the ‘First Lady of American journalism’ and a major celebrity. By 1945, she’d been widely dismissed as a crank.
Deborah Friedell joins Tom to discuss Thompson’s enormous influence in interwar America, and her idiosyncratic mix of prescience and short-sightedness.
See further reading on the podcast page: https://lrb.me/dorothythompson
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Laleh Khalili, a former management consultant, talks to Tom about how firms such as McKinsey, Accenture and Bain go about their business, the consequences of their relentless quest for ‘efficiency’, and the role these ‘class war mercenaries’ have played in supporting various governments all over the world.
Find further reading on the podcast page: https://lrb.me/mckinseypod
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Michael Wood talks to Malin Hay about the recent list from Sight and Sound of the ‘greatest films of all time’ (in which he voted), and what considerations could, or should, go into compiling such a chart. They also discuss Wood’s most recent review for the LRB, of Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, and whether there is such a thing as a Christmas movie.
Find more from Michael Wood in the LRB on the episode page:
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Alan Bennett reads his 2022 diary (with some extra bits), in which he buys his dad a violin, goes to Venice with a goat, and tries to make the queen laugh.
Listen without ads, and find more from Alan Bennett, on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/2022diarypod
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Mark Ford and Seamus Perry return for the final episode in their Close Readings series looking at 19th and 20th century poetry. On the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in book form, Mark and Seamus consider how revolutionary the poem was, the numerous meanings that have been drawn out of it, and its lasting influence.
Mark and Seamus will return in January for a new, twelve-part series, The Long and Short, examining short stories and long poems from the 19th and 20th centuries. Find details of how to sign up that here: https://lrb.me/longshort
The Long and Short is one of three Close Readings series we’ll be running throughout next year, all starting in January. The other two are on Classical literature and Medieval literature, and you can find details of how to sign up to those on the link below or at https://lrb.me/closereadings
Find related reading at the episode page: https://lrb.co.me/crlive
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Thomas B. Edsall, a columnist for the New York Times, talks to Adam Shatz about the landscape of US politics following the recent elections. They consider some of the historic causes for the apparent polarisation of today’s electorate, and look ahead to the vote in 2024. Will Biden be a credible candidate for re-election? And what would a Trump or DeSantis (or even a Youngkin) candidacy mean for both the Republican and Democratic parties?
Sign up to the LRB's new Close Readings series here: lrb.me/closereadings
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Listen to a sample from the first episode of our twelve-part Close Readings series, Among the Ancients, with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones, which we'll be re-running from January next year. With a new episode each month, Among the Ancients will consider some of the greatest works of Ancient Greek and Roman literature, from Homer to Horace. In this sample Emily and Tom discuss the Iliad.
Subscribers to the full series will receive copies of the books discussed in each episode and access to online seminars with Emily and Tom, and special guests Katherine Harloe and Mary Beard, throughout the year. Audio-only options are also available.
Find out more here: lrb.me/ancients
Find out about all the Close Readings series here: lrb.me/closereadings
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Roald Dahl's key skill, as Colin Burrow puts it, 'was his ability to repress nastiness while keeping it visible'.
Following his review of a new biography, Burrow talks to Tom Jones about Dahl’s limitations, his successes, and his 'marvellous medicine' approach to fiction.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/dahl
Subscribe to Close Readings Plus before the end of the year: https://lrb.me/closereadings
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Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley return with a new twelve-part Close Readings series, Medieval Beginnings, exploring the strange and wonderful literary landscape of the Middle Ages. Starting in January 2023, the series will consider well-known works such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as many lesser-known texts, from across the European continent, that have all helped to lay the foundations of English literature. Listen to a sample here from their first episode, on Beowulf.
In addition to the twelve episodes, released monthly, subscribers to the full programme will receive copies of all the key texts accompanying the series and access to online seminars with Irina and Mary throughout the year, with special guests including Simon Armitage. Audio-only options are also available.
Subscribe to the series here: https://lrb.me/beginnings
Find out about other Close Readings series here: https://lrb.me/closereadings
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Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, was murdered with strychnine in 1905. Her killer was never discovered – until now (perhaps). James Lasdun talks to Malin Hay about a new book by Richard White that investigates the story and looks into the extraordinary history of the Stanford family.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/stanfordpod
Subscribe to Close Readings Plus: lrb.me/closereadings
Buy Perry Anderson's book on Powell and Proust here: lrb.me/samefuries
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford return with a new twelve-part Close Readings series, The Long and Short, taking a fresh look at 19th and 20th-century literature through the lens of short stories and long poems. Starting in January 2023, the series will look at twelve writers, from Tennyson and Henry James to Elizabeth Bowen and Alice Oswald, with a new episode appearing each month. This sample is from the first episode, on Tennyson’s ‘Maud’.
Subscribers to the full series will receive copies of the books discussed in each episode and access to online seminars with Seamus and Mark throughout the year. Audio-only options are also available.
Subscribe to the series here: https://lrb.me/longshort
Find out about other Close Readings series here: https://lrb.me/closereadings
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Katherine Rundell has been writing about endangered animals in the LRB since 2018. Her new book, The Golden Mole, gathers those essays and new pieces into a bestiary of unusual and underappreciated creatures.
Katherine was joined by LRB editor Alice Spawls in a discussion touching on Elizabethan celebrity bears, Amelia Earhart’s bones, and the greatest lie we’ve ever told: that the world is ours for the taking.
You can read Katherine’s work in the LRB archives: lrb.me/rundell
And you can find a copy of The Golden Mole at the LRB Bookshop: lrb.me/goldenmole
Corals have held our fascination for thousands of years, but much of what we know about them has only been discovered recently. Liam Shaw talks to Tom about what corals are and how they form, and their extraordinary variety (over two thousand species have so far been described). They look at some of the milestones in our knowledge of this flower-animal, including Darwin’s account of coral atoll formation, and the importance of the oral history of Indigenous peoples around the coast of Australia in understanding the development of the Great Barrier Reef. As coral reefs now face almost total destruction from climate change, they also consider some of the fixes people have come up with to protect them, and whether it’s possible to put a monetary value on such natural phenomena.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/coralpod
Book livestream tickets for Seamus Perry and Mark Ford live here: https://lrb.me/closereadingsevent
Book livestream tickets for Wallace Shawn live here: https://lrb.me/shawnevent
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The writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh talks to Adam Shatz about his recent memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, which reflects on Shehadeh’s relationship with his father, Aziz, a lawyer who, before his murder in 1985, fought numerous cases for Palestinian rights and was one of the first to advocate a two-state solution.
Find pieces by Raja Shehadeh for the LRB on the episode page: https://lrb.me/shehadehpod
Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b
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Azadeh Moaveni talks to Tom about the demonstrations in Iran following the killingof Mahsa Amini in September. They discuss the degree to which the protesters have a shared purpose, the history and significance of the veil in Iranian state policy, the effects of government oppression in the border areas of the country, and how Iran might change after Ayatollah Khamenei.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/iranprotestspod
Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b
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Sheila Fitzpatrick talks to Tom about the perils of doing archive research in the Soviet Union, how she used Moscow telephone directories to investigate Stalin’s purges, and the multiple passports and identities she’s gone through in her academic career.
Find further reading in the LRB on the episode page: https://lrb.me/fitzpatrickpod
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Following Nasa’s Dart mission, which successfully fired a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos last month, Chris Lintott talks to Tom about what asteroids can tell us about the history of our planet, how scared we should be of them, and why you should be grateful if one hits your car (so long as you aren’t inside it at the time).
Find further reading, or listen ad-free, on the episode page: https://lrb.me/asteroidpod
Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b
More information about the Nine Dots Prize: https://ninedotsprize.org
Forrest Hylton talks to Tom about the presidential elections in Brazil, where former president Lula faces the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, in the final round of voting. They consider the history of both candidates, their supporters and campaigns, and what’s at stake in the contest.
Find further reading, and listen ad-free, on the episode page: https://lrb.me/brazilpod
Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b
Daniel Soar talks to Tom about Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Lessons – how it fits with his earlier fiction, the relationship between world events and private histories, and McEwan’s addiction to ‘moments of maximum thrill’.
Find further reading, and listen ad-free, on the episode page: https://lrb.me/mcewanpod
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Claire Denis and J. Hoberman join Adam Shatz to talk about the work and legacy of Jean-Luc Godard. They discuss Godard’s early fascination with American cinema, his extraordinary run of films in the 1960s from À bout de souffle to Week-end, and subsequent periods of restless experimentation which continued to confound both audiences and critics until his death this month.
Find further reading on Godard in the LRB on the episode page: https://lrb.me/godardpod
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Writer and filmmaker Jonathan Meades introduces and reads his review of Tina Brown's book about the royal family, The Palace Papers, from April this year.
Read the piece here: https://lrb.me/meadespod
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As Britain acquires a new king and new prime minister, and ordinary people are arrested for expressing dislike of the royal family, James Butler and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite join Tom to consider whether this might be a perilous time for the monarchy, and how the Truss government will go about selling its old-fashioned Thatcherite vision in an era of increasing demands on the state.
Find James's and Florence's pieces via the episode page: https://lrb.me/griefpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Zoe Kilbourn and Anthony Wilks
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Jon Day talks to Tom about the history and psychology of the accumulation of objects, from Anglo-Saxon treasure to the Collyer twins of Harlem, by way of Freud, Marie Kondo and Day’s own father. When does clutter become a hoard? Are we all digital hoarders now? And should we worry about it?
Read Jon Day's diary, and see the Clutter Image Rating, here: lrb.me/hoardingpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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In the 20th century, the pursuit of economic growth became central to political decision making. As the environmental consequences of this obsession have become increasingly clear, ideas of ‘green growth’ and ‘degrowth’ have emerged as ways of re-organising economies to try to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. Geoff Mann talks to James Butler about these related but often competing approaches, and whether the political structures exist for them to be implemented.
Find further reading, and listen ad free, on our website: lrb.me/degrowthpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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This week, a guest episode from the London Review Bookshop Podcast, featuring Elif Batuman talking to Merve Emre about her latest book, Either/Or. The London Review Bookshop podcast comes out every week and has hundreds of events in its archive. Find it wherever you get your podcast.
Some events from the London Review Bookshop are broadcast online as well as in person, so you can watch live from anywhere in the world. On Wednesday this week, you can watch food writers Rebecca May Johnson and Jonathan Nunn.
Buy tickets here: https://lrb.me/eventspod
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James Meek, recently returned from Mykolaiv, talks to Tom about the area of southern Ukraine that has become a crucial battleground in the war, as Russian forces seek to maintain control of the land they’ve occupied west of the Dnieper, and the Ukrainians try to push them back across the river.
Read James's report from Mykolaiv here: https://lrb.me/mykolaivpod
Watch the short film here: https://lrb.me/mykolaivfilmpod
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John Lanchester talks to Tom about the recent scandals involving two DAX-listed companies, Volkswagen and Wirecard, and the ways in which they challenge the stereotypes of German business.
Find further reading, and listen ad free, on our website: lrb.me/fraudpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Emma John and Natasha Chahal join Tom to discuss England’s victory in Euro 2022, the long history of women’s football – mentioned in a poem by Philip Sidney in the 16th century, banned by the FA for half of the 20th – and what may happen next.
Find further reading, and listen ad free, on the episode page: https://lrb.me/euro22pod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Miranda Carter talks to Tom about the history of the world’s longest-running interview show, Desert Island Discs, from its early scripted days on the BBC Forces Programme in the 1940s, in the hands of its creator, Roy Plomley, to the more probing and revealing styles of Sue Lawley and Kirsty Young. They also consider some of its more memorable guests, including Marlene Dietrich, Tony Blair, Enoch Powell, Hugh Grant and Margaret Thatcher.
Find further reading and a list of LRB castaways here: https://lrb.me/carterpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Andrew Liu talks to Tom about the Chinese workers who followed the gold rush to California, Australia and South Africa, the racial stereotypes about them promoted by local politicians, and their role in the huge economic shifts of the late 19th century, as described in a new book by Mae Ngai, The Chinese Question.
Find further reading, and listen ad free, on the episode page: https://lrb.me/goldrushpod
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Find Andrew's piece in n+1 here.
Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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James Butler joins Tom to consider the fall of Boris Johnson, the candidates hoping to replace him, and what the next few years of British politics might look like.
Find more pieces on Boris Johnson in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/afterjohnsonpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Laura Beers and Deborah Friedell talk to Tom about the recent decision by the US Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson, which removed the constitutional right to abortion. They consider the history of Roe v. Wade and its legal arguments, how abortion became such a partisan issue, and the possible consequences both of the ruling itself and the willingness of the current court to overturn precedent.
Find further reading, and listen ad free, on the episode page: https://lrb.me/roevwadepod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic, hedonistic poetry, freeing themselves from the puritan American tradition.
Find further reading, and listen ad free, on the episode page: https://lrb.me/oharaashberypod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Bee Wilson talks to Tom about palm oil, which can be found in everything from pot noodles to shaving foam. In its purest state, squeezed from the fruit and kernels of the oil palm, it has a deep red colour and rich fragrance. By the time it reaches our supermarkets, in ultra-processed foods and cosmetics, it’s been refined, bleached, deodorised and relabelled, appearing in multiple different forms. Bee and Tom look at the reasons for its ubiquity, the consequences for those involved in its production and whether a sustainable palm oil industry is possible.
Find more to read on the episode page: https://lrb.me/palmoilpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Adam Shatz, the LRB’s US editor, talks to Sindre Bangstad and Reza Zia-Ebrahimi about the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, from its origins in the high tide of French colonial expansionism in the 19th century and propagation through writers such as Jean Raspail and Renaud Camus, to its influence on mass murderers in Norway, New Zealand and the United States.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/grtheorypod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Madeleine Schwartz talks to Tom about the trial of twenty men accused of involvement in the Paris terrorist attacks of 13 November 2015, which left 130 dead. It’s the largest criminal trial France has ever seen, and its scope has ranged far beyond the guilt or innocence of the accused. With thousands of plaintiffs, and witnesses including the former president François Hollande, are expectations for what the proceedings might achieve realistic? And how have the attacks, and the trial, changed French politics?
Find further readings and listening here: https://lrb.me/bataclanpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Ahead of the NBA finals next month, LRB contributor, novelist and former basketball player Benjamin Markovits talks to sports journalists Ben Cohen and Kevin Arnovitz about the role of data in the game. Why did it take teams so long to realise the value of the three-point shot? What's the difference between a 32% shooter and a 37% shooter? And is there anything more exciting in sport than watching Steph Curry’s pre-game warm-up?
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/nbapod
Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: https://mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b
Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
James Romm talks to Tom about the site of the Ancient Greek games, the subject of a new book by Judith Berringer, Olympia: A Cultural History. They discuss the various contests in which athletes competed, the punishment for those found cheating, the importance of the games as a political platform, and the colossal statue of Zeus in whose honour they were held.
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Rupert Beale returns to the podcast to talk to Tom about the current state of SARS-CoV-2 in the UK. They discuss what ‘living with Covid’ means, the chances of future waves and lockdowns, the different experiences of long Covid, and whether we’re better placed to tackle another pandemic.
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Azadeh Moaveni talks to Tom about the situation on the Polish border, where women and children fleeing Ukraine face numerous dangers, including kidnapping, trafficking and forced labour. Moaveni describes the way social media has changed the way traffickers work, the dramatic range of conditions refugees face in Poland, and how this displacement crisis compares to others she’s seen.
Read Azadeh's piece: https://lrb.me/moavenipod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Julian Barnes reads his memoir about a lifetime of reading Flaubert.
Read the piece, and listen to the reading without ads, here: https://lrb.me/flaubertpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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In the final episode in our series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Neil MacGregor joins Rosemary Hill to discuss the circulation of artefacts throughout Europe in the years after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and the growth of public collections. They consider how the questions that museums grapple with today – concerning ownership, restitution and the role ordinary people should play in the stories they tell – were inherent in their creation in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Buy Rosemary Hill's book, Time's Witness, from the London Review Bookshop here: https://lrb.me/hill
Subscribe to the LRB and get 79% off the cover price plus a free tote bag: https://lrb.me/history
Andrew O’Hagan talks to Tom about the power of defunct objects, from the life-enhancing gadgets of his childhood to Seamus Heaney’s fax machine, and the role lost things play in fiction.
Find Andrew O'Hagan's pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/mixtapespod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Who put the arrow in Harold’s eye? Why did Dick Whittington have a cat? Where did the pointed arch come from? These are all questions that the curious and energetic antiquarians of the late 18th and early 19th centuries asked, and often managed to answer.
In the third episode of her series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill talks to Roey Sweet about the new breed of multi-disciplinary investigators, who, in the years after the French Revolution, studied everything from woollen threads to tombstones in their efforts to imagine the past.
Buy Rosemary Hill's book, Time's Witness, from the London Review Bookshop here: https://lrb.me/hill
Subscribe to the LRB and get 79% off the cover price plus a free tote bag: https://lrb.me/history
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Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite talks to Tom about how events in the 1960s, including the Aberfan disaster and a shift in strategy by the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, helped pave the way for devolution in Wales, where the Labour-led administration now has one of the most progressive policy agendas in the world.
Read Florence's piece here: https://lrb.me/walespod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Tom Stevenson talks to Thomas Jones about the situation in Ukraine, the effectiveness of some of the weapons in use, from anti-tank missiles to economic sanctions, and the risk of nuclear escalation.
Find Tom Stevenson's recent pieces for the LRB here: https://lrb.me/stevensonpod
Listen to this podcast ad free on our website: https://lrb.me/weaponsofwar
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In the 1740s the Scots were invading England and the wearing of tartan was banned. By the 1850s, Queen Victoria had built her Gothic fantasy in Aberdeenshire and tartan was everywhere. What happened in between?
In the second episode of her series on Romantic history, Rosemary Hill talks to Colin Kidd about the myths and traditions of Scottish history created in the 19th century, and the central role of Walter Scott in forging his country’s identity.
Buy Rosemary Hill's book, Time's Witness, from the London Review Bookshop here: https://lrb.me/hill
Subscribe to the LRB and get 79% off the cover price plus a free tote bag: https://lrb.me/history
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In the first episode of a new four-part series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill is joined by Tom Stammers to consider how an argument over the ‘improvement’ of Salisbury Cathedral in 1789 launched a new attitude to the past and its artefacts. Those sentiments were echoed in revolutionary France, where antiquarians risked the guillotine to preserve the monuments of the Ancien Régime.
Buy Rosemary Hill's book, Time's Witness, from the London Review Bookshop here: https://lrb.me/hill
Subscribe to the LRB and get 79% off the cover price plus a free tote bag: https://lrb.me/history
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Charlotte Mew, who brought the Victorian art of dramatic monologue into the 20th century, and whose difficult experiences are often refracted through her damaged and marginalised characters.
Find related reading in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/mewpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt
James Meek talks to Tom about the events leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the fall of Yanukovych to the wars in the Donbas and Nagorno-Karabakh, and considers what may happen next.
Read more by James Meek here: https://lrb.me/jamesmeekpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
Laleh Khalili talks to Tom about the mythology of covert military operatives, through romance novels, self-help books and, more recently, the business guru, in the form of retired US army general Stanley McChrystal, who earns millions writing books and advising boards on how to inject warlike thinking into their business plans.
Find pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/khalili
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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This week's discussion, with Laleh Khalili, will be out on Thursday. In the meantime, here's Jorie Graham reading her latest poem for the LRB, 'One the Last Day'.
Find more readings of poems and pieces here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/lrb-readings
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Geoff Mann talks to James Butler about the economic models developed by William Nordhaus and others, widely used by governments around the world as a tool to tackle climate change. They discuss the moral and practical limitations of Nordhaus’s methods, the danger of relying on their predictions, and whether the use of such models is even an appropriate way of confronting environmental crisis.
Read Geoff Mann's piece here: https://lrb.me/mannpod
Read two pieces from the next issue early:
Laleh Khalili on Stanley McChrystal's business guide: https://lrb.me/khalilipod
Paul Theroux on V.S. Naipaul: https://lrb.me/therouxpod
Jeremy Harding talks to Tom about the long and repressive reign of King Hassan II of Morocco, as described in a new book by Aziz BineBine, who suffered 18 years of brutal detention in Tazmamart, a secret prison. They discuss Hassan’s accession to the throne in 1961, his efforts to suppress Morocco’s radical anti-colonialist elements, the occupation of Western Sahara, and the survival of his dynasty beyond the Cold War era.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/hardingpod
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Title music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Colm Tóibín talks to Tom about the life and work of the novelist John McGahern through his recently published correspondence, which includes letters to Tóibín. They discuss his family, his banned work, his style, and his unusually honest opinions of other writers.
Read more on McGahern in the LRB: lrb.me/mcgahernpod
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Rivka Galchen talks to Tom about two recent books on the history of vaccine opposition and reluctance, from smallpox to covid, including the role of 'Big Supplement' and the effectiveness of mandates.
Find further reading here: https://lrb.me/antivaxpod
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Les Mommsen and Anthony Wilks
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In the third and final guest episode from a new podcast series, Myself with Others, food writer Claudia Roden talks to Adam Shatz about her early life in Cairo and Paris, her obsession with collecting recipes, how politics informs her understanding of food, and the secret Jewish origins of fish and chips.
Subscribe to Myself with Others wherever you're listening to this podcast.
Find out more about the series here: https://www.myselfwithothers.com/
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In this second guest episode from a new podcast series, Myself with Others, novelist, memoirist and poet James Lasdun talks to Adam Shatz about his taste for the Middle Ages, the power of Patricia Highsmith, and his memoir about being stalked.
Subscribe to Myself With Others wherever you're listening to this podcast.
Find out more about the series here: https://www.myselfwithothers.com/
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In the first of three guest episodes from a new podcast, Myself with Others, hosted by Adam Shatz, writer and critic Margo Jefferson talks about her childhood in Chicago, her early experiences in radical theatre at Brandeis University, her relationship to the feminist and Black Power movements, her emergence as a writer, and her battles with melancholia. Produced by Richard Sears.
Subscribe to Myself with Others wherever you're listening to this podcast.
Find out more about the series here: https://www.myselfwithothers.com/
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Alan Bennett reads his diary for 2021, in which he falls over Philip Roth, changes the course of English history, and considers selling his har on eBay.
Bennett read the first part of this diary earlier this year, for his Diary from the Pandemic Year.
Read it here: https://lrb.me/bennett2021pod
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford continue their Close Readings series with a look at the life and work of W.B. Yeats, from his early quest for a mythological Irish culture, to his shift towards the Modernist experiment, and preoccupation with the ‘murderousness of the world’.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/yeatspod
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Sam Kinchin-Smith and Anthony Wilks
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John Lanchester and Rupert Beale talk to Tom about the spread of the latest variant, where we might stand in the story of Covid, and the failures of the state in coping with the pandemic.
Find their pieces on the episode page: https://lrb.me/omicronpod
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In this sample episode from their forthcoming Close Readings series, starting next year, Emily Wilson talks to Thomas Jones about the comedies of Aristophanes, in particular Clouds and Lysistrata.
Close Readings Plus: Among the Ancients is a new subscription podcast series looking at some of the greatest works of Ancient Greek and Roman literature over the course of a year, starting in January 2022 with the Iliad.
In addition to the podcast episodes, subscribers to the series will receive a book every month (an English translation of the work under discussion) and access to four live events with Emily and Tom, featuring guest poets and translators including Anne Carson and A.E. Stallings.
Find out more and subscribe: lrb.me/ancients
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Rachel Nolan talks to Tom about the overthrow of President Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954, its importance as a model for CIA-backed regime change across Latin America, and a new novel about it by Mario Vargas Llosa.
Find Rachel Nolan's piece and others here: https://lrb.me/guatemalapod
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Enzo Traverso talks to Adam Shatz about his new book on the history of revolutionary passions, images and ideas, from Haiti’s emancipatory slave rebellion in 1791 to Stalin’s top-down authoritarianism. Are revolutions, as Marx suggested, the ‘locomotives of history’, or, as Walter Benjamin saw it, the emergency brake? And what can modern political movements learn from their revolutionary forebears?
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/revolutionpod
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Clair Wills talks to Tom about Netherne psychiatric hospital, where her mother and grandparents worked, and which became a national centre for art therapy. Wills asks how asylums such as Netherne – ‘total institutions’ as Erving Goffman described them – became normalised, and considers the role of art in revealing people’s experiences of them. They also discuss Wills’s related piece about the scandal of the Irish Mother and Baby Homes, published in the LRB in May.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/willspod
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In the fourth and final episode in their miniseries, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the life and work of pilgrim, entrepreneur and visionary mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated what is thought to be the first autobiography in English.
Find a transcript and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/firebrandpod
Book tickets for Irina and Mary's live online event on 7 December: https://lrb.me/medievalwomenevent
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Produced by Anthony Wilks
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Tom talks to Charles Nicholl about the craze in the 1590s for plays representing real-life murder on the London stage, from the first known example, Arden of Faversham, to the genre's influence on Hamlet, Macbeth and, perhaps, the death of Christopher Marlowe.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/truecrimepod
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In the third episode in their series, Irina and Mary discuss Chaucer’s sexually voracious professional widow, stealth preacher, vivid storyteller and teacher of love, the Wife of Bath.
Buy all the books from the series: https://londonreviewbookbox.co.uk/collections/gift-boxes/products/medieval-women
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Series Producer: Anthony Wilks
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Rosemary Hill talks to Tom about the painter John Craxton: why he wasn’t a romantic, why he wasn’t interested in being famous, and his relationship with Lucian Freud, who very much was.
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In the second episode in their series, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the work of mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the first book in English that we can be sure was authored by a woman.
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Find a transcript of this episode and more information on the series here: lrb.me/anchoresspod
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Tom talks to Colin Burrow about a new book by Christopher Ricks, regarded by some as the greatest living literary critic. They also look back at his previous studies of, among others, Milton, T.S. Eliot and Bob Dylan, and consider the rewards and limitations of the Ricks critical method, characterised by close verbal analysis.
Find related articles on episode page: https://lrb.me/rickspod
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Episode produced by Eliane Glaser / Series Producer: Anthony Wilks
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In the first episode of their new podcast miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries. In the stories of Mary’s life she leads a wild and licentious youth before exiling herself to serve penitence in the desert. There she meets Zosimas, an ascetic monk, and teaches him the value of an imperfect life.
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David Runciman talks to Thomas Jones about Silicon Valley’s best known investor-provocateur, his prescience, his mistakes, and why, despite his ultra-libertarian ideology, he owes so much to the state.
Listen without ads, and find further reading, on our website: https://lrb.me/thielpod
Find details of our forthcoming podcast series, Close Readings: Encounters with Medieval Women, here: lrb.me/medieval
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Music by Kieran Brunt / Episode produced by Eliane Glaser / Series Producer: Anthony Wilks
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Dominic West reads Patrick Leigh Fermor's piece about the olive harvest on the Mani peninsula, written in the 1950s but first published in 2021 in the LRB.
Read it here: https://lrb.me/leighfermorpod
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Daniel Soar talks to Thomas Jones about the sixth taste, variously translated as ‘mouthfulness’, ‘thickness’ and ‘lingeringness’, apparently discovered by the Japanese company Ajinomoto, and its origins in the twisty and opaque story of MSG in North America.
Read Daniel Soar's piece here: https://lrb.me/kokumipod
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Lydia Davis reads her essay on Arles, recorded for the Trilling Lecture at Columbia University in 2019.
Read the piece here: https://lrb.me/lydiadavisarlespod
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Colm Tóibín reads his diary from November 2020, about visiting Venice during the pandemic.
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In the first of four summer readings visiting different places in Europe, Rosemary Hill explores the history of London's West End.
Read the piece here: https://lrb.me/hillwestendpod
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David Trotter talks to Joanne O’Leary about the novels and stories of Elizabeth Bowen, from her weird families and idiosyncrasies of style, to her mastery of atmospherics and prescient use of technology to shape her characters.
Find David's piece and more on Elizabeth Bowen in the LRB: https://lrb.me/bowenpod
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Stephen Frears talks to Andrew O’Hagan about making movies in America, to mark the publication of a new collection of LRB essays on Hollywood. He describes being protected by Scorsese, learning from Billy Wilder, and why films often had budgets of $39 million.
Buy the collection here: lrb.me/hollywood
Find more on the episode page: https://lrb.me/frearspod
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John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about ‘visible’ cheating in sport, that is, the kind which is against the rules but within the ethos of the game, from diving in football to bodyline bowling in cricket.
Read John's piece in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/lanchestersportpod
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Pooja Bhatia talks to Thomas Jones about the assassination of President Moïse in Haiti, the recent history of US involvement in the country, and the difference between elections and democracy.
Find Pooja Bhatia's writing on Haiti in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/seizeduppod
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James Meek talks to Thomas Jones about the connected fates of two wind tower factories, one in Scotland, the other in Vietnam, and asks why the determination to achieve a green future isn’t matched by a determination to ensure fair wages and good conditions for the workers who will make it possible.
Meek also describes the challenges of reporting on the story remotely during the pandemic. You can find his piece and watch some of the video shot by his researcher, Chi Mai, of the CS Wind factory in Phu My, on the episode page: https://lrb.me/twoutopiaspod
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Toril Moi talks to Joanna Biggs about the French philosopher Simone Weil, whose short and uncompromising life became a workshop for her revolutionary ideas about labour, human suffering and the power of paying attention.
Read Toril Moi on Simone Weil in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/weilpod
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Deborah Friedell talks to Thomas Jones about the Rosenbergs, from their early years on the Lower East Side of New York to their executions for conspiracy to commit espionage in 1953, and the significance of their trial in American public life, not least as a platform for Donald Trump’s future lawyer, Roy Cohn.
Read Deborah's piece on the Rosenbergs and more here: https://lrb.me/rosenbergspod
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Niamh Gallagher talks to Thomas Jones about the history of the Irish border, from its origins in the 1920s to today, the way it has shaped Irish politics in both the south and north, and why the Troubles can’t be repeated.
Find Niamh Gallagher's piece in the LRB and more here: https://lrb.me/irishborderpod
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Tariq Ali talks to Thomas Jones about a newly reissued biography of the Prophet by Maxime Rodinson, and the historic prevalence of Arabic culture in the West, from Don Quixote to Trafalgar Square.
Find Tariq Ali's review and other related pieces in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/muhammadcervantespod
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The legendary cartoonist talks to Thomas Jones about his latest book, Street Cop, a collaboration with Robert Coover, and looks back on previous work including Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers, which was originally published in the LRB.
Find related pieces in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/spiegelmanpod
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Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O'Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson — her dashes, death instinct and obliquity.
Find Joanne's piece and more on Emily Dickinson in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/emilydickinsonpod
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Alan Bennett reads selections from his diary from March 2020 to March 2021.
Read more Alan Bennett in the LRB here: lrb.me/alanbennettpod
Alan Bennett’s pandemic diary will be published as a signed, numbered London Review Bookshop limited edition at the end of June. Pre-order a copy at lrb.me/housearrest
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Adam Shatz talks to Tareq Baconi and Henriette Chacar about the crisis in Israel-Palestine, the significance of the ceasefire, the context of the war, the politics inside Israel and the Gaza Strip, and the response in Washington.
Read Tareq Baconi on the LRB blog: https://lrb.me/afterceasefirepod
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Claire Hall talks to Thomas Jones about Ancient Greek horoscopy, the Ptolemaic model, the mysteries of the Antikythera mechanism, and why astrology was the first data science.
Find Claire's LRB pieces and more here: https://lrb.me/perfectcirclespod
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Rosa Lyster talks to Thomas Jones about the global water crisis, from the severe droughts in her home city of Cape Town, to the sinking of Mexico City and the damming of the Nile, and the need for all countries to prepare for future shortages.
Find Rosa Lyster's pieces (and listen ad free to this podcast) on our website here: https://lrb.me/waterpod
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Peter Geoghegan talks to Thomas Jones about the Greensill lobbying scandal, the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s flat, the unhealthy relationship between successive British governments and the private sector, and what it might all mean for the future of the Union.
Find Peter's pieces others in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/onebigpaydaypod
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Jesse McCarthy talks to Adam Shatz about his studies of Black diasporic culture, from Juan de Pareja to Audre Lorde, and his critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations.
Find related pieces in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/blindspotspod
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Irina Dumitrescu talks to Thomas Jones about female authorship in early medieval England, and how the power and freedom that (some) women had in the eighth century challenges the idea of linear social progress.
Find more by Irina Dumitrescu in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/dumitrescupod
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John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about his experience of being on a cargo ship blocked from entering the Suez Canal in 1967, his subsequent journey round the Cape of Good Hope, and the modern-day business of containers.
Read John's piece and more in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/longwayroundpod
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Diane Williams talks to Thomas Jones about her short stories, and reads her latest two published in the LRB.
Find more stories by Diane Williams in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/williamspod
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Gill Partington and Thomas Jones explore Kenneth Goldsmith’s online avant-garde archive, UbuWeb, listen to some of the things you can find on it, and consider what might not be found there.
Find Gill's piece and more relevant LRB pieces here: https://lrb.me/ubuwebpod
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Mouin Rabbani and Nathan Thrall talk to Adam Shatz about Israel’s vaccination programme, the system of apartheid that now effectively exists between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, the legacy of Trump’s policies, and how the Biden administration may or may not exert its influence.
Read Mouin Rabbani in the LRB: https://lrb.me/rabbanipod
Read Nathan Thrall in the LRB: https://lrb.me/thrallpod
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In this extra episode, Jorie Graham reads her poem ‘To 2040’, published in the latest issue of the LRB.
You can listen to Jorie Graham reading twelve more of her poems from the LRB on our website here: https://lrb.me/graham
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian poet, playwright and Nobel laureate Derek Walcott.
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Terry Castle talks to Thomas Jones about Patricia Highsmith.
Find Castle's piece on Highsmith, and pieces by Highsmith, in the LRB here: lrb.me/highsmithpod
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Catherine Moore, a consultant clinical virologist at Public Health Wales, and Rupert Beale, a clinician scientist group leader at the Francis Crick Institute, talk to Thomas Jones about the vaccine rollout for Sars-CoV-2, the new variant originally found in Brazil, and whether the virus might ever be eliminated.
Find Rupert Beale's latest piece and others here: lrb.me/bealemoorepod
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Mary-Kay Wilmers, who retired as editor of the LRB last month, talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her career, first at Faber and Faber, then the Listener, then for 42 years at the London Review of Books. She talks about working with T.S. Eliot, the importance of being teased, and how a joke by Alan Bennett changed her life.
The episode also contains extracts from Wilmers’s 1988 diary for the LRB, ‘Putting in the Commas’, and O’Hagan’s piece about Wilmers in the latest issue of the paper. Read and listen to them in full here:
Mary-Kay Wilmers: Putting in the Commas
Andrew O'Hagan: Miss Skippit
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Raphaëlle Branche talks to Adam Shatz about her new book, Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie? (Daddy, What Did You Do in Algeria?). In it, Branche investigates the experiences of French conscripts in the Algerian war, what they saw and did, and, more important, how they did and didn’t talk about it afterwards.
Shatz reviews Branche's book in the latest issue of the LRB. Find it and other related pieces here: https://lrb.me/branchepodcast
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Forrest Hylton talks to Thomas Jones about what’s happening in Brazil: the oxygen shortage in Manaus, Bolsonaro’s disastrous response to the pandemic, why Trump’s departure won’t hurt him, and the prospects for the left in next year’s general election.
Find pieces by Forrest Hylton and others on Brazil in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/viewfromsalvadorpod
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Erin Maglaque talks to Thomas Jones about abortion in 16th-century Italy, the stories of women who experienced it, how it was investigated, and why attitudes to pregnancy 400 years ago were in some ways preferable to those now.
Find more LRB pieces by Erin Maglaque here: lrb.me/erinmaglaquepod
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Andrew O‘Hagan reads his review of Sea State by Tabitha Lasley, a portrait of the oil rig industry, those who work in it, and a journalist‘s intensely close relationship with her subject.
Read the review here: https://lrb.me/seastatepod
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Colin Burrow talks to Thomas Jones about the work of Ursula Le Guin. They discuss the way she brought anthropology into speculative fiction, her explorations of power and moral responsibility in the Earthsea books, and what it was like for Burrow growing up with another writer of fantasy and speculative fiction: his mother, Diana Wynne Jones.
Find Burrow's piece on Le Guin and more here: https://lrb.me/ursulaleguinpod
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Hazel Carby talks to Adam Shatz about the increasing nationalisation of racial histories, and the way African-American studies in the United States have been influenced by ideas of American exceptionalism. She argues instead for a broader, global view of race and African culture.
Carby explores these ideas in her review of Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents: https://lrb.me/hazelcarbypod
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James Wood talks to Thomas Jones about Beethoven, drawing on his review of three recent books on the composer. They discuss some of the apparently immovable Beethoven mythologies – the keyboard pedagogy, the heroic glower, the many appropriations of the 9th Symphony – and the blend of Viennese tradition and radical invention which characterises his music, particularly the piano sonatas, from the ethereal melodic sweetness of The Tempest to the terrifying, thumping trills of the Hammerklavier.
Read James Wood's piece here: https://lrb.me/beethovenpod
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Pieces and recordings featured in this episode:
5th Symphony: Berlin Philharmonic / Furtwängler (1954)
3rd Symphony: Berlin Philharmonic / Furtwängler (1952)
Piano Sonata No. 29 (‘Hammerklavier’): Barenboim (1984)
Piano Sonata No. 29 (‘Hammerklavier’): Solomon (1952)
Piano Sonata No. 17 (‘The Tempest’): Gould (1960)
9th Symphony: Beyreuth Festival Orchestra / Furtwängler (1951)
Piano Sonata No. 7: Horowitz (1959)
Piano Sonata No. 26 (‘Les Adieux’): Kempff (1951)
Piano Sonata No. 31: Hess (1953)
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John Lanchester reads his review of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Artby Rebecca Wragg Sykes.
Read the piece here: lrb.me/neanderthalspod
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Diane Williams reads nine of her (very) short stories published in the LRB, the most recent, ‘Tassel Rue’, from our Christmas issue.
Find these stories and more, as well as a conversation between Williams and Lara Pawson from the London Review Bookshop, on our website: https://lrb.me/dianewilliamspod
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Thomas Jones reads his homage to Maradona, with help from some 1980s commentators.
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Rupert Beale talks to Thomas Jones about the new Sars-CoV-2 vaccines, how the mRNA technology works, why social distancing still matters, and why he’s worried about Christmas. (The conversation was recorded before the publication of the AstraZeneca/Oxford trial data.)
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Ange Mlinko talks to Joanne O’Leary about the work of Denise Riley, following the publication last year of Riley’s Selected Poems: 1976-2016 and her essay Time Lived, without Its Flow. They look in particular at Riley’s celebrated poem ‘A Part Song’, a long elegy for her adult son, Jacob, who died from undiagnosed cardiomyopathy in 2008. ‘A Part Song’ was published first in the LRB in 2012 and won the Forward Prize for best poem in that year, and this discussion features extracts of Riley reading from the poem.
Click here for more by Ange Mlinko and Denise Riley
This episode of the LRB Podcast is supported by The Week magazine. To try your first 6 issues of The Week for free, visit theweek.co.uk/offer and enter offer code LONDON
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness.
Find LRB pieces about Louis MacNeice here: https://lrb.me/louismacneicepod
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Pooja Bhatia talks to Thomas Jones about the Haitian revolution of 1791, the world-historical debut of the movement for Black liberation. They discuss the early insurrections, the leadership of Toussaint Louverture and his complicated legacy, the post-revolutionary land reforms and their traces in modern Haiti’s mango industry, and how Bhatia managed to get an interview with former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide after his return from exile.
Find more by Pooja Bhatia on Haiti in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/haitirevolutionpod
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Randall Kennedy and Mike Davis talk to Adam Shatz about the results of the US elections. They consider the achievement of Stacey Abrams in Georgia, why the pandemic didn’t make much difference, how Democrats failed to understand changing Latino demographics, the role of progressives in Biden’s victory, and the intransigent, exurban core of the Republican base.
Find more on the US elections in the LRB on the episode page for this podcast: https://lrb.me/kennedydavispod
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Patricia Lockwood talks to Joanne O’Leary about being possessed by Vladimir Nabokov, reading Lolita as a teenage girl, the diagnostic value of Bend Sinister, and her anxiety about writing after having Covid-19.
Read Patricia Lockwood on Nabokov and more in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lockwoodnabokovpod
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Adam Shatz talks to Mike Davis about some of the underlying and long-term political shifts at play in next week’s US elections. They discuss both traditional and emerging swing voters, the obstacles to majority rule, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett as the latest move in an ongoing civil war within the Catholic Church in the United States, the critical failure of the left to challenge the philosophy of the Reagan revolution, the death cult at the core of today’s Republican base, the importance of Bernie Sanders’s presidential run and the Black Lives Matter movement, and why, fifteen years ago, Davis predicted an age of pandemics.
Find LRB pieces related to this episode here: https://lrb.me/mikedavispod
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Alex Abramovich talks to Thomas Jones about the history of country from Jimmie Rodgers to Lil Nas X, by way of Dolly Parton (and Eddie Van Halen), and the problems with the labels that get applied to American vernacular music.
Find Alex Abramovich's piece on Ken Burns' series here: https://lrb.me/countrymusicpod
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To mark the publication of the latest LRB Collection of essays, about sport, David Runciman, on loan from Talking Politics, talks to Ben Markovits about Michael Jordan, home advantage, how basketball has tackled racial inequality, the difference between writing about sport in fiction and non-fiction, and why it turns out that players really are sometimes hot and sometimes not.
Pre-order the LRB's collection of sports writing here: https://lrb.me/sport
Find the pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/sportpod
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Emily Wilson talks to Thomas Jones about three new translations of the Oresteia. They discuss what the texts of the tragedies may tell us about the state of democracy in fifth-century Athens, the difficulties of Aeschylus’ language, why Hamilton may be the best modern analogue to Ancient Greek drama, and how Wilson came to do her own translation of theOdyssey.
Find Emily Wilson's piece on Aeschylus and more here: https://lrb.me/emilywilsonpod
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In the latest episode of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of Adrienne Rich, in whose poems the personal becomes not only political, but epic.
Read more on Adrienne Rich in the LRB: https://lrb.me/adriennerichpod
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Jenny Turner talks to Joanna Biggs about the history of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the loneliness of feminist work, and the seemingly unavoidable question: How do you think your life compares to your mother’s?
Find Jenny Turner’s piece and other related pieces on the episode page for this podcast: https://lrb.me/jennyturnerpod
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Deborah Friedell talks to Thomas Jones about the origins, and origin myths, of the National Rifle Association, how it spends its money, and why it's wary of winning.
Read Deborah Friedell on the NRA here: https://lrb.me/friedellnrapod
And you can find her other pieces for the LRB here: https://lrb.me/friedellpod
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Katherine Rundell reads her study of the Greenland shark, which can live for 500 years.
You can find all the pieces in Katherine Rundell's series of animal studies on her author page on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/rundellpod
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Rupert Beale talks to Thomas Jones about Covid-19 vaccine candidates, and reasons not to rush them; how worried we should be about reported cases of re-infection; possible reasons for the apparent drop in the infection fatality rate; and the prospects for reopening schools.
Read more by Rupert Beale in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/lrb-conversations/covidology
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Patricia Lockwood reads her diary about catching and recovering from Covid-19.
Read more by Patricia Lockwood in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/lockwoodpod
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Adam Shatz talks to Paul Gilroy about his intellectual background and the recent anti-racist protests in the UK and US. They discuss Gilroy’s experience growing up in North London in the 1950s and 1960s, the influence of African-American culture on his understanding of racial ordering, the role of Turner’s painting The Slave Ship in the history of the ‘Black Atlantic’, the shifting use of terms such as ‘racism’ and ‘anti-blackness’, and how the imminent threats of climate change might affect racial identity.
Find material related to this podcast on our website: https://lrb.me/paulgilroypod
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Stefan Collini talks to Thomas Jones about the life and work of Frank Kermode, and Mary-Kay Wilmers remembers him as a contributor to the LRB.
Find LRB pieces related to this episode here: lrb.me/frankkermodepod
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Buy the LRB’s selection of Frank Kermode’s essays from the LRB Store: lrb.me/kermodeselectionpod
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In the latest episode in their series of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods. They discuss Frost’s difficult early life as an occasional poultry farmer and teacher, his arrival in England in 1912 amid the flowering of Georgian poetry, and his emergence as the first 20th-century professional poet, whose version of the American wilderness myth, full of mischief and foreboding, took him to packed concert halls and a presidential inauguration.
Find the LRB pieces mentioned in this episode on the LRB website here: https://lrb.me/robertfrostpod
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Following his piece in the latest issue of the LRB, William Davies talks to Thomas Jones about the new political polarisation, and what it owes to the online culture of instant feedback. What does politics look like, Davies asks, once the provocation of reaction, positive or negative, precedes the slow work of excavation, research, reporting and administration?
They discuss the anticipation of this modern politics in the ideas of the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, the seductive appeal of referendums as relief from the quagmire of parliamentary liberalism, and the way that demanding people take sides in the ‘culture wars’ inhibits meaningful discussion where it’s most needed.
Read William Davies' piece here: https://lrb.me/daviesredbuttonpod
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Pankaj Mishra talks to Adam Shatz about his latest piece for the LRB, which looks at the ways the US and UK have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, and what those botched responses reveal about the broader failures of Anglo-America.
Their discussion also touches on the recent ‘open debate’ letter to Harper’s, the lingering prevalence of Cold War thinking among Western intellectuals, and the extent to which a Biden administration may or may not bring change.
Read Pankaj Mishra's piece here: https://lrb.me/pnakajmishrapod
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Katherine Rundell reads her study of the lemur.
You can find all the pieces in Katherine Rundell's series of animal studies on her author page on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/rundellpod
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Amia Srinivasan talks to Thomas Jones about the long search for a third person singular, gender-neutral pronoun, and the resurgence of the pronoun debate in recent years.
Read more by Amia Srinivasan in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/amiasrinivasanpod
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Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor talks to Adam Shatz about the intellectual and historical background to the Black Lives Matter movement, and why she’s optimistic that the current protests might bring change.
Find further reading and a full transcript of this episode on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/howdoyouchangethings
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Katherine Rundell reads her study of the common swift, which flies about two million kilometres in its lifetime.
You can find all Katherine Rundell's pieces on animals for the LRB here: https://lrb.me/rundellpod
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Gaby Wood reads her diary from the latest issue of the LRB, in which she tries to draw an albatross using a camera lucida.
Read the diary and much more in a latest issue: https://lrb.me/latestlrb
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Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her landmark 1958 play, A Taste of Honey.
Read Susan Pedersen on Shelagh Delaney in the LRB: https://lrb.me/delaneypod
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The first two clips in this episode are from the 1961 film, the third clip is from The White Bus (1967) directed by Lindsay Anderson, and the fourth clip is from a 1959 interview with Delaney for ITN.
John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about Georges Simenon, whose output was so prodigious that even he didn’t know how many books he wrote.
Find links to related articles and a full transcript on the podcast episode page: https://lrb.me/maigretreturnspod
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Sonia Gandhi and Rupert Beale, scientists at the Francis Crick Institute, talk to Thomas Jones about the ways Covid-19 can affect the nervous system, the steps required to reopen the NHS after lockdown, the state of testing, and reasons for optimism about a vaccine.
Read Rupert Beale’s latest piece on the coronavirus here: How to Block Spike
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Andrew O’Hagan talks to Thomas Jones about the friendship between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, and the time they spent together in Bournemouth.
Find a full transcript of this episode and links to related articles here: http://lrb.me/ohaganrlspod
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Michael Wood talks to Adam Shatz about critical theory, its origins, developments and various diversions, and where it stands today. The conversation marks the publication of the eighth volume in the LRB Collections series, The Meaninglessness of Meaning: Writing about the theory wars from the ‘London Review of Books’ by contributors including Pierre Bourdieau, Judith Butler, Richard Rorty, Lorna Sage, John Sturrock and Michael Wood.
You can buy the book on the LRB Store here: lrb.me/theory
Find a full transcript and list of related articles for this episode here: https://lrb.me/theorytrucepod
Use the code ‘collect8’ at checkout to buy all eight LRB collections for just £40.
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Colm Tóibín talks to Thomas Jones about the breakdown of Elizabeth Hardwick’s marriage to Robert Lowell, and its literary consequences.
Find the pieces mentioned in this episode here: lrb.me/toibinhardwickpod
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Mary Wellesley talks to Joanna Biggs about islands, blessed and not so blessed, from Homerto the Fyre Festival.
Read more by Mary Wellesley in the LRB:
On Blessed Isles
On anchorites
On Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
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Joanna Biggs talks to Thomas Jones about the life of Simone de Beauvoir.
Further reading on Beauvoir in the LRB:
Joanna Biggs: https://lrb.me/biggsdebeauvoirpod
Michael Rogin: https://lrb.me/rogindebeauvoirpod
Toril Moi: https://lrb.me/torilmoipod
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Lana Spawls talks to Thomas Jones about working on a paediatric ward during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the ways hospitals have changed in response to the virus.
Read Lana's latest piece in the LRB: Lana Spawls: How to set up an ICU
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Rupert Beale talks again to Thomas Jones about his work at the Francis Crick Institute, where he’s helping to set up a testing lab for Covid-19. He talks about the challenges of creating a scalable process, explains why a successful antibody test could be hard to achieve, and finds some reasons to be hopeful.
You can find a full transcript of this episode HERE.
Read more in the LRB:
Rupert Beale: Wash Your Hands
Lana Spawls: How to set up an ICU
Thomas Jones: Quaresima
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Erin Maglaque talks to Thomas Jones about the lockdown imposed by the city of Florence in January 1631 in response to a plague outbreak, the similarities with our current situation, and the differences.
Maglaque wrote about the plague in Florence in a recent issue of the LRB, reviewing Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City by John Henderson.
Read her piece here: https://lrb.me/maglaquepod
Read Tom's piece on Italy and the coronavirus pandemic: https://lrb.me/jonesitalypod
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In the first episode in a new series of Close Readings, our ‘revolutionary . . . ★★★★★’ (The Times) podcast that considers the life and work of Anglophone poets from the (increasingly) long 20th century, through pieces written about them in the LRBarchive, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest.
Find a full transcript and list of pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/closereadinghopkins
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Following his piece for the LRB about Covid-19, Rupert Beale talks to Thomas Jones about what the novel coronavirus is, how well countries are dealing with it, and what hopes there are for stopping the contagion.
Read Rupert's piece here: https://lrb.me/bealecoronaviruspod
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Akihito, who abdicated in April, was a paradoxical figure: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against the historical revisionism of the nationalist right. Richard Lloyd Parry considers the former emperor’s part in the intellectual and political debate over Japan’s wartime record, and its history of apology – or non-apology – for its conduct in East Asia.
Find more from Richard Lloyd Parry in the LRB here: lrb.me/richardlloydparrypod
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Given what we know about the future of the planet, is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us? Meehan Crist explores the debate about the ethics of childbearing in the age of climate crisis. She addresses the relationship between BP and the British Museum, the implications of culture-washing, and the logic of cultural divestment initiatives.
Read more from Meehan Crist in the LRB here: lrb.me/meehancristarticlespod
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The line between making a fiction and telling a lie has been blurry at least since Homer, and liars – from Odysseus and Iago to Austen’s Wickham and beyond – have often played central parts within fictions. This lecture will aim to tell some (though not all) of the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction from Homer to Ian McEwan, and will ask if fiction has responded adequately to the maggoty abundance of lies in public life at the present time.
Read more by Colin Burrow in the LRB: lrb.me/colinburrowpod
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Alan Bennett reads his Diary for 2019, with a few little extra bits.
Read more by Alan Bennett in the LRB: lrb.me/bennettpod
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In the last of a series of events marking the LRB's 40th anniversary, Jeremy Harding and Adam Shatz talk to Nikita Lalwani about their work for the paper, with a focus on North Africa and the Middle East.
Due to some problems with the audio recording, this is a slightly abridged version of the event.
Read more Jeremy Harding in the LRB: lrb.me/jhardingpod
Read more Adam Shatz in the LRB: lrb.me/shatzpod
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As part of a series of events marking the LRB's 40th anniversary, Nell Dunn and Tessa Hadley talk to Joanna Biggs, one of the LRB's editors, about fictional representations of women’s everyday lives.
Read more in the LRB from:
Tessa Hadley
Nell Dunn
Joanna Biggs
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As part of our series of events marking the 40th anniversary of the LRB, longtime contributors Rosemary Hill and Iain Sinclair talked to the LRB’s digital editor, Sam Kinchin-Smith, about London, through the lens of pieces they've written for the paper.
Read more by Rosemary Hill in the LRB: lrb.me/hillpod
Read more by Iain Sincliar in the LRB: lrb.me/sinclairpod
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As part of our series of events marking the LRB's 40th anniversary, Katrina Forrester and William Davies discuss political crisis, and in particular the crisis of liberalism, through the lens of pieces they've written for the paper.
Read more by Katrina Forrester in the LRB: https://lrb.me/forresterpod
Read more by William Davies in the LRB: https://lrb.me/daviespod
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the London Review of Books, and mark the publication of The London Review of Books: An Incomplete History, the LRB’s editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, along with Alan Bennett, Andrew O’Hagan, John Lanchester and Sheng Yun, talk to LRB publisher Nicholas Spice about the history and character of the paper.
The London Review of Books: An Incomplete History is available to buy on the LRB store:https://lrb.me/storepod
Read more Alan Bennett in the LRB here: https;//lrb.me/bennettpod
Bee Wilson on eating out in late Victorian London.
Read more by Bee Wilson in the LRB: https://lrb.me/beewilsonpod
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James Wood recalls his time at the college, with David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others.
Read more by James Wood in the LRB: https://lrb.me/jameswoodpod
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In the concluding episode of their acclaimed series, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford confront Robert Lowell: the Boston Brahmin for whom poetry trumped every other consideration, and whose Cold War ‘confessionalism’ came to exemplify a generation of Americans’ collective trauma; the poet who changed everything, but whose star has somehow fallen. But, Perry and Ford conclude, it will – like this podcast, we hope – rise again.
You can find the pieces mentioned in this episode on the LRB website: lrb.me/robertlowellpod
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Andrew O'Hagan goes to the fashion designer's memorial at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Read more by Andrew O'Hagan in the LRB: https://lrb.me/ohaganpod
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Mary Wellesley looks inside the cell of a medieval anchorite, and considers why so many women shut themselves away to devote themselves to prayer and contemplation, and what their lives were like.
Read Mary Wellesley in the LRB: lrb.me/wellesleypod
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Seamus Heaney, through the lens of pieces written about him in the London Review of Books.
You can find the pieces mentioned in this episode on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/heaneypod
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‘Instead of shaking all over, I read the newspapers. I listened to the radio. I had my lunch.’ Colm Tóibín reads his account of being treated for cancer.
Read more by Colm Tóibín in the LRB archive: lrb.me/colmtoibinpod
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Mark Ford, Seamus Perry and Joanna Biggs consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War.
You can find the pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/sylviaplathpod
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Alan Bennett puts on a new play and finds himself on someone’s arm, in his 2018 diary.
Read more by Alan Bennett in the LRB: https://lrb.me/bennettpod
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, and the pieces about him in the LRB archive: his anecdote-proof life, the capitalist economy of his imagination, and his all-American poetry of precise abstraction.
You can find a reading list of pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/wallacestevenspod
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Worcestershire lad and old-type natural fouled-up guy, A.E. Housman, through a lens of the pieces written about him in the LRB archive.
You can find a reading list of pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/aehousmanpod
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford consider the life and work of Stevie Smith, ‘an eccentric poet with a tenacious reputation,’ through a lens of the pieces written about her in the LRB archive.
You can find the pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/steviesmithpod
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the poetry of Thomas Hardy in the latest in their series of discussions on 20th century poets.
You can find the pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/hardypod
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Rosemary Hill explores frock consciousness in life and literature in her LRB Winter Lecture, delivered at the British Museum.
Read more by Rosemary Hill in the LRB: https://lrb.me/hillpod
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Linda Colley argues that the prospect of Brexit makes history more important than ever in her LRB Winter Lecture, delivered at the British Museum.
Read more by Linda Colley in the LRB: https://lrb.me/colleypod
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Anne Enright delivers her Winter Lecture on the corruptions of the Adam and Eve story in her LRB Winter Lecture, delivered at the British Museum.
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Toby Jones reads John Lanchester’s ghost story.
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Alan Bennett finds his métier at last in 2017.
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In the latest instalment of the LRB podcast, recorded in Seoul, Richard Lloyd Parry talks to the Korean-American novelist Krys Lee about Christianity, plastic surgery and mutual incomprehension in the Korean borderlands.
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Jane Campbell reads a story about dispossession in paradise.
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, through the lens of the pieces written about her in the LRB archive.
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Lucy Prebble describes meeting Harvey Weinstein.
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In the second part of their conversation, Olivier Roy and Adam Shatz discuss the deculturation of Islam, and why it has led to the radicalisation of so many second-generation immigrants and converts.
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In the first of two podcasts, Olivier Roy tells Adam Shatz about his experiences with the Gauche prolétarienne in the 1960s and his early travels in Afghanistan.
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Carmen Callil, writer, editor and founder of Virago, tells Rosemary Hill how she made her way in 1960s London.
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Ferdinand Mount on how India was governed strictly for the benefit of Britain.
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of W. H. Auden with reference to pieces from the LRB.
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Writer and actor Wallace Shawn talks to Adam Shatz about ‘the thin line between entertainment and cruelty’ in the age of Trump.
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William Davies talks to Tom Crewe about politics in the new media age.
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Elaine Mokhtefi tells Jeremy Harding about her time working in Algeria in the 1960s when she met Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.
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‘Bohemia was never a safe country for women. If they didn’t all die of consumption in a garret, many of them might as well have done’ – Rosemary Hill on the letters of Ida John.
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‘It’s like the drunken lout at a party who can’t get anyone to like him.’ Andrew O’Hagan reads the Daily Mail.
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Tom Crewe talks to Lorna Finlayson about Jeremy Corbyn and Labour’s prospects in the general election and beyond.
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‘Once you start seeing everyday behaviour as having the potential to draw people into terrorism, you’re inside the problem’ – Karma Nabulsi on the British government’s Prevent programme.
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the work of Philip Larkin, drawing on articles from our archive by contributors including Alan Bennett, Barbara Everett and John Bayley.
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Julian Barnes on Georges Simenon and Brexit.
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Adam Shatz talks to Joshua Landis about the war in Syria.
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David Runciman talks to John Lanchester about banks, Europe and technology in this latest collaboration with Talking Politics.
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Iain Sinclair delivers his lecture on ‘The Last London’ at the British Museum, as part of the LRB’s Winter Lecture series.
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Mary Beard delivers her lecture ‘Women in Power’ at the British Museum.
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In the first of our ongoing and occasional collaboration with the Talking Politics podcast, David Runciman talks to Mary Beard about women in power.
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Emily Witt goes to the Burning Man gathering in Nevada, from our 17 July 2014 issue.
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Alan Bennett reads his diary for 2016.
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To mark John Berger’s 90th birthday, the London Review Bookshop and Verso Books organised a discussion of his work with Mike Dibb, Yasmin Gunaratnam and Tom Overton, hosted by Gareth Evans.
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Frederick Seidel reads his poem ‘In Late December’.
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Hal Foster reviews the Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at Tate Modern.
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Susan Pedersen on the birth of ‘International Relations’.
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Mary-Kay Wilmers, Andrew O’Hagan and Ben Eastham talk to Sarah Howe about ‘Long-Form Essays in the Digital Age’.
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John Lanchester on the implications of the UK’s EU referendum.
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Gavin Francis observes the autopsy of a man pulled from a river.
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Andrew O'Hagan watches Craig Wright show Gavin Andresen, one of the most respected bitcoin core developers, that he holds the Satoshi key.
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Frederick Seidel reads his poem ‘Trump for President!’.
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Peter Pomerantsev remembers his time in the 'English section' at the European School in Munich.
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Naomi Klein examines how Edward Said’s ideas of racial hierarchy, including Orientalism, have long been the silent partners to climate change.
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Charles Hope on Giorgione, 'a sort of Venetian counterpart to Leonardo'.
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Colm Tóibín on the story of Easter 1916.
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Julian Bell discusses Delacroix and his heirs.
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Frances Stonor Saunders examines the crossing of borders, in her LRB Winter Lecture delivered at the British Museum.
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James Meek asks how, in a time of austerity economics, we define the robber and the robbed, in his LRB Winter Lecture delivered at the British Museum.
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Alan Bennett works the line, in his LRB Diary for 2015.
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David Runciman on Margaret Thatcher.
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Chaohua Wang on justice in China.
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Andrew O'Hagan crosses the road.
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Robert Hanks on the pleasures and pains of putting things off.
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Julian Barnes on Van Gogh.
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Seymour Hersh talks to Christian Lorentzen about his pieces for the LRB, collected in a new book, The Killing of Osama bin Laden.
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Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on the rise of the Houthis in Yemen.
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Hilary Mantel reads her short story, ‘The School of English’.
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In his 2015 Winter Lecture, Tariq Ali argues that we are living in the twilight period of democracy.
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In her 2015 Winter Lecture, Marina Warner shows how higher education in the UK has been betrayed.
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In his 2015 Winter Lecture, Adam Phillips reflects on the ways we hate ourselves.
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Peter Pomerantsev on images and myths of Maidan.
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Rosemary Hill on the life and disappearance of Lord Lucan.
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Owen Bennett-Jones on the messengers that paved the way for the Northern Ireland peace process.
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Alan Bennett on what he did in 2014.
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James Meek on the British army’s eight years in Afghanistan.
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T.J. Clark comes face to face with Rembrandt.
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Alan Bennett read this sermon on private educations before the University, King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, 1 June 2014.
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Mary Beard reflects on the way women are heard – and have been heard – in public, from Homer’s Odyssey through Margaret Thatcher to internet trolls.
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Andrew O’Hagan spent six months with Julian Assange helping him write his autobiography, though in the event Assange didn’t want the book published. O’Hagan speaks about those six months for the first time.
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James Wood explores the estrangement of voluntary emigration: the puzzling sense of losing the country you leave and failing to find another. Homelessness, in a word.
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Alan Bennett reluctantly pays some overdue bills.
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Jenny Turner on Penelope Fitzgerald
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Adam Shatz on the life and death of Juliano Mer-Khamis.
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Andrew O’Hagan remembers Norman Mailer.
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Jacqueline Rose on what links Frank Kermode and Nigel Farage.
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In August, as Australian politicians hung tough on asylum seekers, the Melbourne Writers Festival asked Jeremy Harding how far governments can patrol migration. With grateful acknowledgments to the Alan Missen Foundation and Liberty Victoria.
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Recognised for her writing on subjects including Sylvia Plath, feminism, Proust, psychoanalysis, Zionism, the Middle East conflict and Jewish identity, Rose discusses her work with Justin Clemens, co-editor (wtih Ben Naparstek) of the Jacqueline Rose Reader.
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Jacqueline Rose draws parallels between revolutionary 19th-century socialist Rosa Luxemburg and Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. She explains how each of these remarkable women straddled the divide between their political and inner lives. Chaired by Hilary Harper.
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Author, essayist and poet Colm Tóibín is one of Ireland’s greatest living writers. He discusses his life and work, including his recent book The Testament of Mary, in which he re-imagines the life of Christ through the eyes of the holiest of saints. With Michael McGirr.
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Michael Wood reconsiders ‘Cleopatra’ – its expense, its quarrelling stars, its length, its success – on the release of a restored print for the film’s fiftieth anniversary.
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Lavinia Greenlaw tells the story of singer Tracey Thorn’s rise from bedroom rehearsals and an ad in the NME to indie label Cherry Red (who also signed Greenlaw’s band), the top ten and a platinum record.
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Marina Warner explores Emily Davison’s legacy as the suffragettes’ first martyr in a talk given at the inaugural Wilding Festival at St George’s Bloomsbury, where Davison’s memorial service was held.
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Andrew O’Hagan tells the story of Alexis Neiers and the rest of the ‘Bling Ring’ who stole from Paris Hilton in order to be more like Paris Hilton.
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Patrick Cockburn explains why the Syrian war feels close to ending when it isn’t and how YouTube is changing war reporting.
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Diane Williams reads ‘Perform Small Tasks’ and ‘Removal Men’.
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Robin Robertson reads his versions of Nonnus and a selection of other poems.
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Mark Ford reads a selection of poems he’s published in the LRB.
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On the centenary of Wagner’s birth, Nicholas Spice asks in his Winter Lecture at the British Museum how his music works on us and what this tells us about music in general.
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David Runciman on the impossibility and persistence of the US political system.
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In his 2013 Edward W. Said lecture Noam Chomsky reflects on 65 years of violence in the Middle East.
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Adam Phillips considers the sadomasochism of childhood and the pleasures and pains of tantrums.
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Introduced by Neil MacGregor, Hilary Mantel considers the royal body from Anne Boleyn’s ‘bosom not much raised’ to Kate Middleton’s equally modest endowment.
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Colin Burrow, Michael Dobson, James Shapiro, Emma Smith and Marina Warner discuss the ways we continue to make (and occasionally unmake) Shakespeare in our own image.
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August Kleinzahler reads and talks about some of the poems he’s published in the LRB.
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Alan Bennett rides in Mr Murdoch’s car and gets a review from T.S. Eliot.
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Colin Burrow on the reasons Jane Eyre is called Jane Eyre and Tom Jones is called Tom Jones.
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Anne Carson reads ‘A Fragment of Ibykos Translated Six Ways’.
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Adam Mars-Jones imagines J.K. Rowling bringing the manuscript ‘The Casual Vacancy’ to him for advice.
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Tom Carver on the night Kim Philby disappeared from the rue Kantari.
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Michael Friedman gets arrested and spends the night at Central Booking.
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James Meek wonders how Britain happened to sell off its electricity.
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Andrew O’Hagan on the art of terrible writing about sex.
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Marina Warner watches Damien Hirst’s butterflies hatch.
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In the 2012 Edward Said Lecture at the British Museum, Ahdaf Soueif explains ‘Mina’s Banner’
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Ralph Fiennes reads ‘The University Poem’, which Nabokov wrote in 1926, four years after he left Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Iain Sinclair meets the last of the Beats, the poet Gary Snyder.
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Daljit Nagra reads ‘This Be the Pukka Verse’ and ‘A Ballad for Bopoluchi’.
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Jacqueline Rose celebrates Marilyn Monroe.
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John Lanchester writes about Marx at 193.
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Neal Ascherson writes about Europe, its pasts and its possible future
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Gillian Anderson reads ‘Ingratitude’, a lost fable by Charlotte Brontë.
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Denise Riley reads ‘A Part Song’, her first poem in the LRB for many years.
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Jeremy Harding discusses the politics of migration and the battle at Europe's borders.
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Tariq Ali visited North Korea twice in the 1960s and met the ‘Great and Beloved Leader’ himself.
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Alan Bennett considers the banana skin and is mistaken for ‘another Alan’ in his Diary for 2011.
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Andrew O’Hagan chaired this discussion between Linda Colley, R.W. Johnson and Tom Devine about national histories and the ways they should, and should not, be taught.
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Jacqueline Rose speaks about her first readings of Freud and Jung and her encounters with feminism, Sylvia Plath and Israel/Palestine.
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Judith Butler asks ‘Who Owns Kafka?’ in one of the LRB’s 2011 Winter Lectures.
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In his 2011 Winter Lecture at the British Museum, T.J. Clark shows how the painting of Guernica in May and June 1937 changed the way Picasso imagined space.
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