The LRB Podcast

For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived in Britain – perhaps invited at first, later as invaders – bringing their new customs, religion and language with them, and displacing, killing or subjugating the people who were already here. On this episode, Pablo joins Tom to explore the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss why none of the changes that took place was inevitable and why so few British words survive in modern English, even if the man said to be the first English poet was a cowherd with a British name. Read Pablo's piece: https://lrb.me/pschefferlrbpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that emerged in the middle of the last century. She joins James to talk about the ways in which the public sphere has changed since Sartre’s book and how Big Tech has assumed an authority like the medieval church, demanding a new form of enlightened resistance.  Lea Ypi is the author of 'Free' (2021) and 'Indignity: A Life Reimagined' (2025) Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘every age has its own fascism’, and in their recent book Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have identified ‘end-times fascism’ as a feature of our time, offering a portrait of arsonists and accelerationists who are knowingly pushing the world towards new and greater catastrophes. On this episode Klein and Taylor join Adam Shatz to discuss what fascism looks like in the age of AI, drone warfare and influencers, and why we have reached a point where tech billionaires declare they are ‘unapologetically on Team Humanity’. Further listening: Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith on ecofascism: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/nicapplelrbpod Spotify: https://lrb.me/nicspotifylrbpod LRB wesbite: https://lrb.me/niclrbpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first microphones were invented in the 1870s as components for telephones. By the 1930s, politicians as unalike as FDR and Hitler were using microphones as both audio devices and visual props for projecting power. The history of the microphone often focuses on its function as a technology of transmission, but as David Trotter wrote recently in the LRB, microphones ‘both receive and transmit’, and there is another tradition more concerned with listening than transmitting. In this episode, David joins Tom at the mic to discuss these alternative histories, as well as the role of microphones in the history of eavesdropping, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie The Conversation and the strange cry that Ted Hughes picked up on his RAF radio while doing his National Service. Read David's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/trotterpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber's and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the ways in which Hayek’s anti-intellectualism has shaped discourse up to the present day. Where do politicians look for ideas and does the modern marketplace of algorithmic video platforms pose a challenge to independent thought? From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several answers, and in this episode he joins Tom to discuss them, along with the work of the late Helen Vendler, one of the great critics of the second half of the 20th century, who dedicated a lifetime to the close reading of lyric poetry and ‘believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others’. Read Colin's piece: https://lrb.me/burrowvendlerpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest share for any far-right party in post-1945 Germany. Among the many surprising aspects of the result was the broad, multigenerational support the AfD attracted, on an unusually high turnout of 77 per cent. In this episode, Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, talks to James Butler about the reasons behind the AfD’s success, from the background of economic malaise in the region to Ulrich Siegmund’s successful mix of TikTok and in-person campaigning. They also discuss the legacy of Angela Merkel’s migration policies and whether the ‘firewall’ against far-right coalitions can survive when mainstream parties keep copying the AfD’s rhetoric. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story of why, and how, an arrow ended up in Harold's eye in the Bayeux Tapestry is tied to the politics of the early 19th century, to Napoleon's ambitions and Britain's national pride, and the work of two antiquaries, Anne and Charles Stothard, who travelled to northern France several times to make drawings of the great embroidery. In this episode from our series on Romantic History, originally released in 2022, Rosemary Hill talks to Roey Sweet about the emergence of the Bayeux Tapestry as an artefact of political importance in the early 1800s and 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. Listen to other episodes in this series: From Waterloo to the British Museum, with Neil MacGregor: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep4 Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep4s LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep4lrb Salisbury Cathedral, with Tom Stammers: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep1 Spotify: ⁠https://lrb.me/rhep1s LRB website: ⁠https://lrb.me/rhep1lrb Balmoral, with Colin Kidd: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep2 Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep2s⁠ LRB website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/rhep2lrb Or find them in all in this Spotify playlist: https://lrb.me/rhspotify From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now Denmark. After Marcus’ death in 180, his German campaigns were abandoned and the Romans withdrew to the Danube. Some of the demobilised troops returned north and ‘revolutionised their cultural world’, as Michael Kulikowski wrote recently in the LRB, ‘by adapting the lessons they had learned in Roman service’. On this episode, Michael joins Tom to discuss his review of an ‘extraordinary book’ by Dagfinn Skre, ‘which gives Scandinavia an ancient history for the very first time’. There is no written record of the period, ‘no text to impose its tyranny of words’, but the proxy evidence – coins, arms, stones, seeds – ‘converges on the existence of a late second-century watershed that produced a complete transformation in Scandinavian society in response to interaction with Rome’. Whether or not a pair of polar bears made it to the Colosseum, however, remains an open question. Read Michael's piece: https://lrb.me/kulikowskipod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. In this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling. Listen to the full series of ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, and all our other Close Readings series, with a Close Readings subscription. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/crtravelff Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/crtravelffweb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? Seamus Perry considers the ways in which modern poets have responded to the demands of pluralism, and whether Auden was right in thinking that a poem that exemplified the pluralist values of liberal democracy would be ‘formless, windy, banal and utterly boring’. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (and American) way. Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss the novel that established Henry James as ‘the Master’. They dissect James’s and his characters’ complicated motivations, the significance of his 1905-6 revisions, and the ways in which a ‘primitive plot’ irrupts in a painstakingly subtle and stylish novel. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/crtravelna Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/crtravelwebna Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Donald Trump’s vision of Fortress America, at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists and itself, is a violent attempt to resolve what Baldwin called the ‘rich confusion’ of American identity. But there are other possible Americas, some, like Baldwin's, described from voluntary exile. What can they offer at the present moment? From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is, in this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘On Satire'. They see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness. Introduced by Clare and Colin with Thomas Jones. Listen to the full series of On Satire, and all our other Close Readings series, with a Close Readings subscription. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/crtravelsatire Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/crtravelsatireweb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us of politics, and to what practical purpose can this knowledge be put? Does psychoanalysis merely describe the world, or could it also change it? This lecture was delivered as part of the LRB's Winter Lecture series in December 2025. Read more by Amia in the LRB: https://lrb.me/srinivasanwlpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism. Mark and Seamus discuss why, despite Wordsworth’s claim of being innately republican, discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution is strangely absent from the poem, which is more often preoccupied with romance and the imagination, particularly in their power to soften zealotry. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/crtravelpp Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/travelwebpp Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel machismo. An alignment between the three major petrostates – the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia – no longer looks implausible. The outlines of a new Cold War are becoming visible, one which will be determined by a novel mixture of ideology, critical technologies, supply chains and control of energy flows. How will these geopolitical dynamics play out – and what will it mean for global warming? Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. A columnist at Foreign Policy and a regular contributor to the LRB, he also writes Chartbook, a newsletter on economics, geopolitics and history. His books include ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’ and ‘Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy’. Adam Tooze's LRB Autumn Lecture was delivered at the New School, NYC on 27 October 2025 From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To continue our summer of travel with Close Readings, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the medieval bestseller The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fictional traveller’s fantastical descriptions of different places, peoples and animals across the Holy Land and Asia are almost certainly drawn mainly from other textual sources, rather than direct experience by the unknown author, and yet the work was often used as a source of reference as well as entertainment or prurient interest. Many of the writer’s observations of different political and religious practices could be taken as radical critiques of his homeland. Yet while it often urges appreciation of other cultures, the book is undoubtedly xenophobic and racist in places, foreshadowing the European quest for colonisation: indeed, Christopher Columbus had a copy with him when the Santa Cruz sighted land on 12th October 1492. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' here: https://lrb.me/crtravelmb Find our full Travel with Close Readings playlist here: https://lrb.me/travelwebmb Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In April this year, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's voting map on the grounds that state lawmakers had violated the constitution by creating a second district with a majority of Black voters. This was followed by a similar decision by the court in June, giving Alabama the green light to eliminate a Black majority district. At the same time, President Trump has called for more restrictive voting laws and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming midterms. To discuss what the decision in Louisiana v. Callais means for future US elections and the long erosion of voting rights protections, from the limitations of the 15th amendment to the evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Adam Shatz is joined by Mara Gay, a staff writer at the New York Times, and Randall Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andy Burnham’s early promises to end rough sleeping and sort out social care won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his political career, but his apparent interest in the structures of Whitehall was less expected. To discuss what we know so far about the direction of Britain’s new government, James is joined by Stephen Bush of the Financial Times and Sienna Rodgers of the House magazine. They talk through what the exclusions from Burnham’s cabinet reveal about his political intentions, and why the tax and spending plans inherited from the last government might push him to call a general election next year. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the themes of his earlier movies, as once again a male protagonist embarks on a desperate quest to recover a female love object. But, as Emily Wilson argues, while Homer’s Odyssey might seem the perfect source material for Nolan, the ancient Greek poem also excels at many things the director isn't so good at, not least dialogue and characterisation. Wilson, who has translated both the Odyssey and the Iliad, joins Thomas Jones to talk through the new adaptation, discussing its echoes of Nolan’s earlier films and his use of the Trojan Horse as a parable about wars built on lies. They also look at the compositional history of Homer’s poem and consider why this archetypal journey narrative is also a story about stasis and the desire to resist time. Listen to Emily and Tom's Close Readings episode on the Odyssey here: Apple: https://lrb.me/odysseyapple Spotify: https://lrb.me/odysseyspotify LRB website: https://lrb.me/odysseyweb GET 50% OFF a 12-month Close Readings subscription with the code 'SUMMER50' when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/atasummer50 Read Emily Wilson on Nolan's ‘Odyssey’ in the LRB: https://lrb.me/wilsonodysseypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government’, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin wrote recently in the LRB. The newsletter where they work, Democracy for Sale, ‘has been looking into Palantir’s business in the UK, and particularly its contracts with the NHS’. On this episode, Peter joins Thomas Jones to discuss the company's origins, rapid rise and expansion – with the help of Peter Mandelson – into the British state. They talk about the risks of handing our most personal data over to a company whose billionaire founders have poured millions into right-wing political campaigns in the US, and ask whether the software’s actually any good at doing what it promises. Read Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin on Palantir: https://lrb.me/palantirpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Would the Founding Fathers recognise the modern United States as the republic they declared in 1776? The nation formed from Britain’s North American colonies has become the most powerful and prosperous in the world, but the muted celebrations on 4 July reflected a divided country in which, for many of its citizens, the principles of the Declaration of Independence are hard to square with what’s happened to its democratic institutions. James is joined by Gary Gerstle, a professor of history at Cambridge, to reflect on some of the major changes in the political evolution of the United States, including the expansion of federal power in the 20th century, the perpetual state of war since 1941 and the voluntary ceding of influence by Congress to the executive under Trump. They also look at the past and future of the US ‘special relationship’ with the UK and what could come next for American democracy following this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the sixth episode of their series, Sarah and Sandeep look at poems that explore the complexities of money and its metaphorical power: Frederick Seidel’s ‘In Late December’ starts with an image of degradation in the symbolic heart of global capitalism but ends with an ambiguous vision of the undead in an apparent appeal to common humanity; in Ella Frears’s Goodlord, an email from an estate agent triggers a stream-of-consciousness tour through a series of barely-habitable rental properties and a reflection on a financial system that traps people in dehumanising accommodation; and Danez Smith’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ provides a satirical exploration of the relationship between race, poverty and systemic exploitation, describing a compressed history of the evolution of oppression from slavery to sharecropping to the modern exploitations of capitalism. Read Frederick Seidel's 'In Late December' in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n24/frederick-seidel/in-late-december Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: ⁠https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Trump-Russia dossier, leaked to the press in 2017, contained multiple allegations of collusion between the US president and Putin, including reports of meetings between Kremlin officials and members of Trump’s campaign team, and the existence of kompromat in the form of the infamous ‘pee tape’. Shortly after the dossier was leaked, Christopher Steele, the head of a private business intelligence firm called Orbis, was named as its author. Steele claimed that his company had access to sources which allowed them to ‘illuminate Vladimir Putin’s autocratic and closed regime’. In a review of Steele’s memoir in the LRB, Vadim Nikitin called the dossier ‘shoddy’ and ‘full of uncorroborated and implausible’ material. None of its claims have been proven. In this episode, Vadim joins Thomas Jones to discuss the legacy of the dossier, Steele’s career before and after its release and how the internal workings of the business intelligence industry are influencing politics in both the US and the UK. Archive: ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’/MSNBC ‘Russian oligarch met with Cohen at Trump tower’/CNN ‘This House Prefers Style Over Substance’/Cambridge Union ‘Special Report: Mueller report release’/CBS News ‘Your World’/Fox News ‘Times Radio Breakfast’/Times News More from the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The most popular modern food poem is probably William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’, in which the speaker confesses to eating the plums his wife was saving for breakfast. Food has often been a means for poetry to represent intimate relationships, but, as Sarah and Sandeep explore in this episode, it has also provided ways of thinking about alienation, societal change, survival and displacement. In Tony Harrison’s 'V.', supermarkets and food providers become central motifs in a discussion of Britain’s changing landscapes; Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart uses the memory of a grandfather planting yogurt under a tree as a means of understanding the aftermath of Partition; and in Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s ‘Communion’, set in the Beddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, lentils become part of a living archive through which experiences are transmitted across generations. Read Tony Harrison's 'V.' in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak economy. To dissect the collapse of the Starmer project and the prospects for a Burnham administration, James is joined by Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for the Times, and William Davies, a political economist at Goldsmiths. Patrick Maguire is the author of 'Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer',. William Davies is a regular contributor to the LRB and the author of 'This is Not Normal: The collapse of liberal Britain' among other books. Read William Davies on Burnham: https://lrb.me/opburnham01 From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between internal and external experiences. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep look at the ways in which weather has functioned as a poetic tool, and consider three recent poems which describe the intimate and communal effects of atmospheric events: Maureen McLane's ‘Rocks’, with its ‘rain/when I’d just told her it would hold off’; ‘Surface Mapping’ by Jake Skeets, describing the death of 191 horses on Navajo land during a drought; and Ishion Hutchinson's ‘After the Hurricane’, in which the silence after a violent storm becomes a space to assess different forms of aftermath. Read Maureen McLane's 'Rocks' in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/maureen-n.-mclane/rocks Book tickets to a live recording of this series: https://lrb.me/ptwtickets Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is that a nostalgic illusion? The second competition, held in Italy in 1934, was a podium for Mussolini and, as Skinner puts it, ‘an early advertisement of the tournament’s potential service to politically repressive hosts’ that has continued through the years to Russia 2018, Qatar 2022 and the ‘Fifa-MAGA pageant’ of 2026. In this episode Simon Skinner and Natasha Chahal join Tom to talk about the long relationship between football and politics and why Roberto Baggio can offer us no consolation. Read more: Simon Skinner: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod1 Natasha Chahal: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod4 John Lanchester on Qatar: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod2 Thomas Jones on Maradonna: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod3 More from the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material for poetry, starting with a look at Milton’s prose arguments in favour of divorce and the ways in which ‘confessional’ poets such as Lowell and Sexton took on divorce as a subject alongside other taboo subjects and subverted the traditional poetry of romantic failure. They then turn to three more recent examples. In Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’, a picture of a marriage is constructed through defamiliarised domestic objects and the political metaphors of postwar Germany. Anne Carson’s ‘fictional essay’ The Beauty of a Husband draws on different genres and the writings of Keats to make sense of a chaotic, lonely experience with an untruthful husband. And in ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi chooses the palindromic form of the ‘specular’ as a metaphor for the non-linear collapse of a marriage. Read Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’ in the LRB: https://lrb.me/divorcepoem Further listening: Seamus Perry and Mark Ford on Lowell and Carson: https://lrb.me/ldptwpod Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projected cost of more than £100 billion, and perhaps won’t even be ‘high speed’. To discuss what this failure tells us about Britain’s capacity to build things and the consequences for our everyday lives, James is joined by Gill Plimmer, the FT's infrastructure correspondent, and Matthew Lawrence, director of Common Wealth. They discuss the unique features of the UK’s ‘outsourcing state’, beset by bloated projects weighed down by the increasing costs of private capital, and the long, corrosive impact of the failure of David Cameron’s government to invest in infrastructure when borrowing was cheap. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider what happens when poetry, and poets, meet technology, and why a poem itself can, in Paul Valéry’s description, be such a powerful ‘kind of machine’. They explore ambivalent attitudes to technology in three poems: Mina Loy’s ‘Time Bomb’ is a reflection on the extreme destruction of the atomic bomb and the power of scientific discovery; Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘A World Where News Travelled Slowly’ charts a history of technology that involves the gradual removal of the human body from methods of communication; and in Jorie Graham’s ‘Honeycomb’, fragments of technology reveal a divided self sitting at a desk in front of a computer, seen but not known by multiple tools of surveillance. Read Jorie Graham's poem in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/ptwgraham Mina Loy's 'Time Bomb' is published in 'The Lost Lunar Baedeker' (Carcanet, 1997, edited by Roger L Conover) For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day. Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering the concepts of both work and play in the writing process. They then look at three poems that address workplace experiences. Valzhyna Mort’s ‘Factory of Tears’ and Robert Crawford’s ‘Jesus Christ endorses the new Hillman Imp’ both deploy technocratic, management speak to expose the emotional labour of manual work, in one case for someone trapped in a relentless system, in the other for someone cast out by redundancy. In 'During the Pandemic', Romalyn Ante describes the experience of being an NHS nurse at the start of the Covid pandemic and the role of language in carework. For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day. Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Read Robert Crawford's poem in the LRB: https://lrb.me/crawfordtwep1 Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets Watch this episode our YouTube channel: https://lrb.me/twep1yt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The transformations of European politics over the past twenty years, including Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the rise of post-Soviet strongmen, are often explained as part of a ‘wave’ of populism. But as Jan-Werner Müller argues, populism is best understood as a form of politics that claims to represent the ‘real’ people and delegitimise its opponents, rather than a catch-all way to describe far-right and left-wing movements. In this episode, Müller talks to James Butler about why misleading interpretations of populism have proved so dangerous for traditional parties, and the role of technocracy and digital platforms in the rise of anti-democratic politics. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of ‘Tristram Shandy’ in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on ‘Emma’ as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider the ways in which the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels. Listen to the full episode on the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code EMMA25 when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza six months ago, 904 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded by the Israeli army. Last week, Trump’s Board of Peace released a report complaining of a ‘funding gap’ after reports emerged that it had received only a ‘tiny fraction’ of the $17 billion its members had pledged to rebuild the region.In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Muhammad Shehada and Jehad Abusalim to discuss the ongoing crisis on the ground in Gaza, the economic and political vision of the Board of Peace and the role of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, a transitional body of Palestinian technocrats, in the so-called reconstruction. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every individual; in the US it’s more than $7000, and the majority of this exists in the highest-denomination banknotes, such as the $100 and €500 bills. So where is it all? Remarkably, nobody really knows, but the assumption is that it’s underpinning much of the world’s criminal activity. John Lanchester joins Tom to talk through the many ways this money is hidden and processed, from the three classic stages of money laundering (placement, layering and integration) to the methods used to bypass banks entirely, through the purchase of agricultural equipment or the use of store cards and cash-only businesses such as vape shops and nail bars. Read John Lanchester on money laundering: https://lrb.me/lanchester052026pod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the time when computer games didn't even have screens, and in this episode he talks to Tom about the enormous changes generative AI has brought to programming and the world of work in the past couple of years, from the threat of Claude’s secretive Mythos to one-person companies, and they consider what jobs might be like in the future, if they exist at all. Read Paul Taylor on Claude: https://lrb.me/taylorclaude From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second in Scotland (tied with Reform UK), and lost nearly 1500 councillors in England. But while Plaid Cymru and the SNP were victorious in Wales and Scotland, in many ways the results in England were a disappointment for everybody, with no party making the breakthroughs they hoped for and the Conservatives pushed to the fringes. James is joined by Richard King, Rory Scothorne and Andy Beckett to makes sense of this new political map and consider what the collapse of old party loyalties and the rise of nationalist politics means across all three countries. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For more than a decade, Viktor Orbán has stood alongside Trump and Modi as a global figurehead for authoritarian nationalism, and an inspiration to popular strongmen everywhere with his model for the ‘illiberal’ democratic state. But on April 12 his sixteen-year tenure as Hungary’s prime minister came to an end with a surprisingly gracious concession speech to his opponent, Péter Magyar, who won the country’s general election by a landslide. But if Orbán has fallen, will Orbánism collapse with him? James is joined by journalist Dan Nolan and poet and translator George Szirtes to discuss why Orbán was finally voted out and the challenges Magyar faces in meeting his main election promises of tackling corruption and improving the economy. Read Jan-Werner Müller on the Hungarian elections: https://lrb.me/ophungary01 Watch 'Magda's Boy: How George Szirtes invented his mother': https://lrb.me/ophungary02 From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB. Last October, he set out on a road trip across America, with the aim of attending as many different kinds of criminal and civil trials as possible in one month. His journey took him from immigration hearings in Chicago to jury trials in Deadwood to felony proceedings in Louisiana. On this episode of the LRB podcast, James joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ‘swerving tales’ he witnessed on his trip, and whether the ‘brazenly bad-faith goings-on at the Justice Department’ are showing up in local courts. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump has yet to question how many F35s Leo XIV has, but he may as well have done in his angry response to the American pope’s criticism of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran. With the US president’s supporters invoking the Catholic theory of ‘just war’ to defend the bombing of Iran, and the claims of Silicon Valley to offer their own paths to salvation, the Church of Rome faces multiple challenges to its role as a moral and diplomatic force. To consider why the conflict between the pope and the American right has escalated so quickly in the past few weeks, James is joined by Massimo Faggioli, a professor in ecclesiology at the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin, and Jack Hanson, an associate editor at the Yale Review. They also discuss the nature of papal authority and its evolution since the loss of the papal states in 1870, and whether we’re seeing the return of faith to the public sphere or simply the shattering of a consensus about what constitutes religion. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River a ‘Hizbullah kill zone’. In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Joëlle Abi-Rached and Mohamad Bazzi to discuss life on the ground in Lebanon, Israel’s strategic objectives in the region and Hizbullah’s relationship to the the Lebanese state. This episode was recorded shortly before Trump’s statement announcing the agreement of a ten-day ceasefire. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a recent issue of the LRB, Tom Crewe asked if the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte’s fixation with male figures and the male gaze is evidence not just of a homosocial milieu, but of homosexual desire. Meanwhile, in the same issue of the paper, James Butler reviewed Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations 1400-1750 by the historian Noel Malcolm, who excavates archival evidence of sexual relationships and interactions between men in northern and southern Europe while cautioning against applying modern ideas of queerness to historical figures. Tom and James join Malin to discuss the interplay between their pieces, and to reflect on the ways that modern interpreters attempt to read the history of homosexuality in sometimes patchy archives, as well as on gay art in the past and the present. Read more in the LRB: Tom Crewe: Men Watching Men https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142601 James Butler: Cultures of Homosexuality https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142602 Alice Hunt: Out of Rehab https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142603 Also from the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’. In the final episode of their series, Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings when you use the code 'woolf' at checkout: https://lrb.me/woolfcrpod (Note: this offer is only available on the link above, through our partner Supporting Cast, and not if you subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts, but you can still listen in Apple Podcasts if you subscribe in Supporting Cast.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trump’s war on Iran has highlighted recent dramatic changes in the politics of oil. While the United States still guarantees maritime security in the Middle East, it is no longer the primary beneficiary, with most oil and gas exports from the Persian Gulf going to Asia. In Britain, meanwhile, debates over drilling in the North Sea point to the urgent need for electrification, both to achieve greater energy security and to reach net zero by 2050. In this episode, James is joined by Helen Thompson, a professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge, who argues that the war, though far from inevitable, stems in part from regional and international tensions caused by the shifting of energy flows. They discuss the central role that finance, and insurance in particular, plays in deciding whether tankers can sail, and how energy requirements helped Trump to secure the backing of major US corporations in the 2024 presidential election. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that its cause began to be understood, as scientists conducted experiments on dogs. It was a pair of researchers at the University of Toronto in the early 1920s who – through a gruelling series of experiments that would not pass an ethics review today – eventually isolated the hormone that patients with diabetes are lacking. On this episode, Liam Shaw, who reviewed the latest edition of Michael Bliss’s classic book The Discovery of Insulin in a recent issue of the LRB, joins Thomas Jones to discuss the history of diabetes treatments from insulin to Ozempic, the all-too-human scientists who discovered them and the companies that profit from them. Read Liam’s piece: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n06/liam-shaw/bring-me-bimagrumab From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does debate do for us today, aside from making us angrier and filling billionaire-owned social media sites with monetisable content? Sarah Stein Lubrano has argued that the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is a myth and the best ideas often don’t win out. In this episode she joins James Butler to talk about the things that do and don’t change people’s minds and why meaningful change is better achieved through means other than argument, such as social ties and collective action. They also consider what technology has done to shape the political landscape and individual behaviour, and the ways in which it has been exploited most effectively by those on the right.Sarah Stein Lubrano is the author of Don’t Talk About Politics. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in the LRB, Andrew O’Hagan writes: ‘All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and “loyalty” in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Ghislaine Maxwell took this young girl to Jeffrey Epstein, who abused her a number of times, then they flew her around the world to be abused by their powerful friends.’ In the same issue, Susan Pedersen observes that ‘the scandal lays bare the entitlement felt and impunity enjoyed by the powerful and crass,’ while pointing out that ‘a girl doesn’t have to fall into Epstein’s clutches to see sexual abuse up close.’ On this episode of the podcast, Susan and Andrew join Thomas Jones to discuss whether the Epstein scandal has anything new to tell us about sexual abuse. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/ordinaryabuse From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election last month, the prime minister has managed to cling on, for now. His critics point to a lack of vision in government, the alienation of Labour members and a failure to accept the need for radical reform. Those less critical argue it’s simply a problem with communicating his achievements, and that Britain is pretty much ungovernable anyway.James Butler is joined by Sienna Rodgers, deputy editor at the House magazine, and Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural and political theory at the University of East London, to consider the reasons for Starmer’s mess, from the selection of his MPs to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. And if he’s not prime minister at the end of the year, who will be? Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Later that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC that the ongoing strikes were ‘just the beginning’. In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Robert Malley and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj to discuss the chaos of Trump’s Iran strategy, whether the United States and Israel are aligned in their objectives for the region, and what Iran’s future might look like if Trump decides to bring the conflict to an end in the near term. They also examine how the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new leader of the Islamic Republic could shape the course of the war, and whether Iran will be able to sustain its current military strategy. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this violent, chaotic world’. On this episode, Erin joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ways that Caravaggio represented his models' bodies on canvas – their muscles, skin, hair, clothing and dirty toenails – and what makes his paintings so unnerving that even the people who commissioned them sometimes got rid of them as soon as they could. Find the article and further reading and listening on the episode page: https://lrb.me/caravaggiopod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘We must build our hard power because that is the currency of the age,’ Keir Starmer declared to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. It’s a sentiment shared across Europe, where leaders have cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rise of Chinese power and US instability to justify substantially increased defence spending. But the rearmament consensus has so far not been accompanied by much detail on where the money needs to go or what accountability there will be for the use of this ‘hard power’. To discuss the origins and implications of Europe's militarisation, James is joined by Sam Jones, European security correspondent at the Financial Times, and Anna Stavrianakis, professor of international relations at the University of Sussex.  Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under fifteen kilometres per hour. Yet postal systems, as pioneered by the enterprising Tassis family, were becoming ever more reliable and efficient, at first in northern Italy and then across much of Europe – despite plague, war and the efforts of bandits and spies to intercept the mail. If the post was highly organised, news spread more organically, whether in the form of manuscript newsletters, printed pamphlets or word of mouth, at the local barbershop, from a ballad singer on a street corner, on the Rialto bridge in Venice or in the nave of St Paul's Cathedral in London. On this episode of the LRB podcast, John joins Thomas Jones to discuss how information (and disinformation) circulated in early modern Europe, and whether our predecessors were any better than we are at sifting fake news from fact. Read John Gallagher’s piece: https://lrb.me/earlymodernnewspod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This is among the many extraordinary details of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein revealed by the release of more than three million pages of documents by the US Justice Department last month. In this episode, James is joined by investigative journalists Peter Geoghegan and Ethan Shone to discuss what Mandelson’s actions reveal about the vast influence network maintained by Epstein and the ways in which the increasing power of the lobbying and advisory industries are undermining democratic legitimacy. Peter Geoghegan is the author of 'Democracy for Sale' and Ethan Shone is an investigations reporter for openDemocracy. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long after that moved to the US where she became a naturalised citizen and joined the Communist Party. The Mitford sisters wrote many books and even more have been written about them, but Carla Kaplan's scholarly new biography of Jessica is a welcome addition to the ‘Mitford industry’, according to Rosemary Hill, because she approaches her subject as an ‘American communist with an unusual background in the English aristocracy’. In this episode, Rosemary joins Thomas Jones to talk about Decca’s eventful life, her work as a civil rights activist and writer, and her complicated relationships with the other Mitfords. When asked whether the bond with her sisters had ‘stood between her and life’s cruel circumstances’, Decca replied: ‘Sisters were life’s cruel circumstances.’ Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/mitfordpod Listen and subscribe to Rosemary Hill’s Close Readings series: In Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The protests that began in Iran last month have been suppressed with a level of state violence not seen since the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic executed thousands of leftists and other dissidents. In this episode, Adam Shatz talks to Chowra Makaremi and Amir Ahmadi Arian about the evolution of public dissent in Iran since 1979 and why the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement of 2022 opened the way to more overtly revolutionary protest. They also discuss the economic collapse underpinning the most recent uprising and the ways in which the Iranian regime has refined the use of opacity and rumour to consolidate its power. Chowra Makaremi is an anthropologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris and Amir Ahmadi Arian is a novelist and assistant professor at Binghamton University, New York. Read Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi on Iran's crises in the latest issue: https://lrb.me/iranscrisespod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Anti-communist​ dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right?’, Thomas Meaney asked in the LRB, reviewing Sam Tanenhaus’s recent biography of the founder of National Review and host of 34 seasons of Firing Line.On this episode of the podcast, Meaney joins Thomas Jones to discuss Buckley’s life and legacy: his proselytising for segregation at home and imperialism abroad, and how he laid the groundwork for Trump’s path to the White House. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions in Latin America. Yet in this case, Trump’s justifications for the action made no mention of democracy, but cited, among other things, migration, narco-terrorism and oil. In this episode, James is joined by historian Greg Grandin to discuss what the intervention reveals about Trump’s intentions in the region and his wider foreign policy, and why, as in the past, such adventures will ultimately expose the limits of US power. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.’ On this episode of the podcast, John joins Thomas Jones to discuss some possible answers to those questions. They talk about the history of companies such as Nvidia and OpenAI, the reasons ‘artificial intelligence’ is a misnomer, the harms that large language models can cause and why you shouldn’t rely on them for advice in the kitchen. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha, is thought to be mad by everyone he meets because he believes he’s living in a book. But from a certain point of view that makes the hero of Cervantes’ novel the only character who has any idea what’s really going on. Tom and Tom discuss the machinery – narrative, theoretical, economic, psychological and literal (those windmills) – which underpins Cervantes’ masterpiece. This is a bonus episode from the Close Readings series. To listen to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Karl Miller on ‘Don Quixote’: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n03/karl-miller/andante-capriccioso⁠ Michael Wood: Crazy Don ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n15/michael-wood/crazy-don⁠ Gabriel Josipovici on Cervantes’ life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v01/n05/gabriel-josipovici/the-hard-life-and-poor-best-of-cervantes⁠ Robin Chapman: Cervantics ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n16/robin-chapman/cervantics⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers unnervingly from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control. In this long extract from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ AUDIO GIFTS Close Readings and audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiogifts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848. As Patricia Lockwood said in an episode of Close Readings, there is evidence that Brontë was writing a second novel to follow ‘Wuthering Heights’, but if she was, it has been lost, and it has been suggested, though never proved, that her sister Charlotte might have destroyed it. But what could possibly be in that lost novel, Lockwood wondered, that was worse, more unacceptable, than what we find in ‘Wuthering Heights’? To mark the anniversary, we’re releasing the full version of this episode from the Close Readings series ‘Novel Approaches’. David Trotter and Patricia Lockwood join Thomas Jones to discuss Brontë’s only surviving novel, one Trotter describes as ‘completely amoral’. Readings by Alex Colley Give a gift subscription to Close Readings for Christmas: https://lrb.me/audiogifts From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a century, Judy Garland’s joyous and vulnerable singing voice has captivated audiences at the theatre, over the airwaves and in the cinema. Camille Paglia wrote of her that she ‘became an emblematic personality of her time, into whom the mass audience projected its hopes and disappointments’. Bee Wilson joins Malin Hay to discuss Garland’s years at MGM Studios, where she was mistreated and overworked by her employers but also made some of her best pictures, growing from a contract player into a star. They discuss whether Garland’s work at MGM was worth the pain it caused her, who her greatest collaborators were, and who now owns her story. Listen to Bee read her pieces in the audiobook Complicated Women, which includes an introductory conversation between Bee and Malin: https://lrb.me/audiobookspod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general election. Since the end of Rishi Sunak’s government, the crossings of ‘small boats’ over the English Channel and the use of ‘asylum hotels’ have become a focal point for protest, violence and escalating rhetoric, leading most recently to significant changes in the migration system proposed by the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood. To assess these changes and explain how Britain’s asylum system works, James is joined by Colin Yeo, a barrister and author of Welcome to Britain: Fixing Our Broken Immigration System, and Nicola Kelly, a former Home Office civil servant and author of Anywhere But Here: How Britain’s Broken Asylum System Fails Us All. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fatma Hassona was a Palestinian photographer from Gaza City who was killed with her family by an Israeli airstrike in April 2025. A year earlier, the Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi began recording video conversations with Hassona about her life and work under Israeli bombardment, which became the film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. In this episode, Adam Shatz talks to Farsi about the process of making the film, the connection she formed with Hassona, and the practical and ethical challenges of documenting Israel’s devastation of Gaza and its people. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests ‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith ‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford ‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill and guests Bonus Series: 'The Man Behind the Curtain’ with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones Episodes will appear on Monday every week, with a new episode from each series appearing every four weeks. Episodes from our bonus series, ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’, will come out every couple of months, either as extra episodes or live events: look out for announcements! If you're not already subscribed to Close Readings, sign up for just £4.99/month or £49.99/year to listen to these series plus all our past series in full: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/crintro2026apple⁠ Spotify and other podcast apps:  ⁠https://lrb.me/crintro2026sc⁠ Here are the works covered in each series: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests Flaubert, ‘Madame Bovary’ Dostoevsky, ‘Notes from Underground’ Stories by Anton Chekhov Tolstoy, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’ Woolf, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ Rhys, ‘Voyage in the Dark’ Bellow, ‘Seize The Day’ Nabokov, ‘Pnin’ Spark, ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ Sharma, ‘Family Life’ Stories by Lydia Davis Riley, ‘My Phantoms’ ‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith Carson, ‘Silent Spring’ Schlanger, ‘The Light Eaters’ Czerski, ‘The Blue Machine’ Lovelock, ‘Gaia’ MacFarlane, ‘Is a River Alive?’ Kimmerer, ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ Raboteau, ‘Lessons for Survival’ Moore and Roberts, ‘The Rise of Ecofascism’ Riofrancos, ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ And more TBD ‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford Marlowe, ‘Hero and Leander’ Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ Milton, Book 9 of ‘Paradise Lost’ Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ Coleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’  Byron, ‘Childe Roland’ Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’ Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’ H.D., ‘Helen in Egypt’ Set, ‘The Golden Gate’ Carson, ‘Autobiography of Red and ‘Red Doc>’  ‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill Each episode will cover a period of London’s history and begin with a piece of writing. The first episode, on Roman London, will start with an extract from Dio Cassius’s account of the Roman conquest from his Roman History. ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’ with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones Cervantes, ‘Don Quixote’ Shelley, ‘Frankenstein’ Eliot, ‘Middlemarch’ Wells, ‘The Invisible Man’ Joyce, ‘Ulysses’ Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The BBC is in crisis, again. A leaked dossier alleging a lack of impartiality in its reporting on Trump, Israel, race and gender has felled its director general and drawn threats of a defamation lawsuit from the White House. Yet many at the corporation point to the dossier’s culture war slant as evidence of a right-wing plot against the BBC. Defensive and stolid, Britain’s main news and media organisation now flinches from any real conflict. Is the BBC capable of surviving in the digital era? Joining James is the former BBC journalist Lewis Goodall, now a prominent face of digital political journalism as part of the News Agents, and Dan Hind, publisher and author of The Return of the Public: Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ More from the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush declared a state of emergency and initiated what would become an unprecedented expansion of US power. Public debate narrowed: there were new limits on what was acceptable, and not acceptable, to say. The London Review of Books published a number of pieces that challenged this consensus, forcing its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, to defend the paper on national radio. This is the first episode in a six-part series. To listen to the rest of the series follow Aftershock: The War on Terror in: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/wotapple Spotify: https://lrb.me/wotspotify Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/wotlinktree Archive:Rutgers Law Review, ‘CNN Live’/CNN, ‘Good Morning America’/ABC, ‘Good Day New York’/FOX5 New York/FOX, ‘SmackDown’/USA Network/WWE, ‘Meet the Press’/NBC/NBC News Productions and ‘Broadcasting House’/BBC Radio 4/BBC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since the 1980s, Brett Christophers wrote recently in the LRB, ‘firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South’ – hazardous waste at first, joined more recently by discarded electronics, clothes and plastics. Literal mountains of our rubbish are accumulating on the peripheries of cities such as Accra and Delhi. Waste, like wealth, is unevenly distributed. On this episode, Brett joins Tom to discuss what happens to our rubbish after we throw it away. They talk about where it goes and why it’s so difficult actually to get rid of it, let alone reduce the amount we discard, when the creation of waste is so much more profitable. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/wastepod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB and get a free tote! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After 9/11, George W. Bush launched a global War on Terror. What followed was an unprecedented expansion of American power, from Guantánamo Bay to drone strikes, mass surveillance to the weaponisation of the financial system. Asked when it would end, Vice-President Dick Cheney replied: ‘Not in our lifetime.’ Two decades later, we’re still living in its shadow. Aftershock: The War on Terror is a new six-part podcast from the London Review of Books. Daniel Soar, a senior editor at the paper, revisits the magazine’s coverage and reflects on the ways 9/11 has changed the world we live in. First episode coming 20 November. Find the series in: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/f16f79 Spotify: https://lrb.me/eb54a6 Or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the end of the 20th century and across the first decade of the 21st, a swathe of countries across Latin America elected left-wing governments in what became known internationally as the Pink Tide. In more recent years, what many have seen as a second wave of progressive governments have collapsed, giving way to right-wing leaders such as Milei, Bukele and Bolsonaro, with support from international libertarian movements. In this episode, James is joined by Tony Wood, who wrote about this shift in the latest issue of the LRB, and Camila Vergara, a critical legal theorist at the University of Essex, to discuss why the Pink Tide governments failed, where the new brand of right-wing politics comes from, and whether the revolutionary energy found across the continent could lead to further change. Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, an astonishingly large number of serial killers grew up or operated in America’s Pacific Northwest. Caroline Fraser’s book Murderland, reviewed in the LRB by James Lasdun, argues that a significant contributing factor may have been the spew of lead fumes and other toxic emissions that billowed unchecked across the region during those decades. On this episode, James joins Tom to discuss the evidence, and what the juxtaposition of industrial lead poisoning and serial murder may tell us about different kinds of violence in modern America, even if a direct causal link remains unproved. Find the piece and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/leadpollutionpod Read more from James Lasdun for the LRB in the archive: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/james-lasdun From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB and get a free tote! ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andy Burnham recently said that the government is ‘in hock to the bond markets’, and the political turbulence of the past few years, not least the downfall of Liz Truss following her ‘mini-budget’, would seem to back this up. But the bond markets are only part of the picture: the actions of the Bank of England and the fiscal rules a government sets for itself also play significant roles in the decisions a chancellor can make. In this episode James is joined by former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane and Daniela Gabor, professor of economics at SOAS, to consider why governments are so afraid of ‘bond vigilantes’ and the increasing influence of central banks on policy since the financial crisis of 2008. Should the Bank of England remain independent? And what room for manoeuvre does Rachel Reeves have in her budget next month? Read more on politics in the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons’. Lorraine joins Tom to explore the ways that ideas about extinction are warped by our timescales and politics. They discuss how the language of natural selection was used to excuse violence and ecocide, and the continued influence of ‘empirical’ myths on approaches to conservation and human culture today. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/evolutionpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the best part of a decade, a new type of anti-systemic, nationalist politics has been emerging from different corners of the online world. In Britain, this has united with older forms of cultural conservatism to propel Nigel Farage and Reform UK to within touching distance of power (at least for now). In this episode, James is joined by political theorist Alan Finlayson to understand what’s driving these changes and the ways in which different styles of online rhetoric, on both the left and right, are shaping our political discourse. They also consider whether the distinction between left and the right is still meaningful and why the way we understand equality has become the fundamental political dividing line. Alan Finlayson is professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia. Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adam is joined by Robert Malley to discuss the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and the long history of the peace process, in which Malley has been involved on behalf of several US administrations. They also talk about his recent book about the conflict, Tomorrow Is Yesterday, co-authored with Hussein Agha, why attempts to broker a lasting peace have failed and what the future might hold for the Palestinian movement. Find further reading on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/peaceprocesspod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's nearly eighteen years since Amanda Knox was arrested on suspicion of murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, and more than ten since she was finally exonerated of the crime. She has just written her second book, Free, which, as Jessica Olin wrote recently in the LRB, ‘chronicles her attempt to adjust to life after prison’. On this episode of the LRB podcast, Jessica joins Tom to talk about the murder case, the media frenzy surrounding it – which portrayed Knox as either a sex-crazed psychopath or an angelic innocent abroad – and the efforts Knox has since made to speak for herself and on behalf of others who have been wrongly convicted. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In its nearly two hundred years of existence the Conservative Party has survived through a combination of protean adaptability and ruthlessness, not least in its willingness to change leaders. Yet under its present leader, Kemi Badenoch, the party often described (by itself, at least) as the natural party of government appears to be facing a unique moment of peril. Polling now places Reform UK as the leading party of the right while Badenoch has presided over a steady stream of high-profile defections to Nigel Farage’s party, including one of her own MPs, and enormous losses in local elections. For this episode James Butler is joined by Anthony Seldon, a prolific historian of recent Tory administrations, and Henry Hill, deputy editor of Conservative Home, to consider what or who is to blame for the party’s dire situation and whether it will still be around to celebrate its bicentennial in 2034. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elmore Leonard ‘did more with less than any crime writer I can think of’ J. Robert Lennon wrote in the latest issue of the LRB. Leonard was born in New Orleans in 1925 and by the time he died in 2013 had published over forty novels selling tens of millions of copies, many of which were made into films such as Jackie Brown and Get Shorty. (A few have recently been reissued as Penguin Modern Classics.) He also wrote ten rules for writers that serve as a manifesto for the minimalist, dialogue-heavy style he mastered. In this episode Lennon joins Tom to discuss the usefulness of Leonard’s rules and the ways in which great crime writing will always defy the prescriptions of its genre. Read J. Robert Lennon on Leonard: https://lrb.me/leonardpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Keir Starmer brought Labour back to government last year with a majority of 174, many talked about two or even three terms in power. But over fourteen months the prime minister has run into numerous problems, losing both Angela Rayner as deputy PM and Peter Mandelson as US ambassador (to different scandals), and facing formidable opposition from Nigel Farage’s Reform party riding high on the issue of immigration control. In this first episode of a new strand in the LRB Podcast, host James Butler talks to former Labour MP and minister Chris Mullin, columnist Andy Beckett and journalist Morgan Jones about whether Labour can recover from critical mistakes over tax, why they’re failing to communicate their achievements, and who they should really be trying to represent. This was our first episode. Tell us what you think! https://lrb.me/opfeedback From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The manosphere, Emily Witt writes in a recent piece for the LRB, is the ‘online network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels’ whose popularity has exploded in the last fifteen years. Perceiving themselves as an underclass disenfranchised by feminism, men are increasingly turning to misogynistic content to gain a sense of control over their lives. Beyond the internet, the rhetoric of the manosphere has reached the highest levels of the US government, as well as sparking a series of violent misogynistic crimes. Emily Witt joins Malin Hay to discuss what makes the manosphere appealing to young men, and what can be done about it. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/manospherepod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile books including Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, but also a legacy as an influential political activist and leading figure in the Occupy movement, credited with contributing the slogan ‘We are the 99 per cent’. Following the publication of a new collection of Graeber’s essays, Richard Seymour joins Tom to survey his thought, ranging from the theories of power Graeber developed from his early field research in Madagascar to the daring arguments of his posthumous work, Dawn of Everything (co-written with David Wengrow) challenging the orthodox view of how egalitarian and hierarchical societies developed over the past thirty thousand years.  Richard Seymour is a writer and theorist whose books include Disaster Nationalism and The Twittering Machine. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the LRB, has been following Formula One since she was a child. Thomas Jones wrote recently in the LRB about the life and times of Enzo Ferrari. In this episode, they discuss the ways F1 has changed over the years (not least how it’s become safer), what it’s like to drive a ‘regular’ Ferrari, the extreme demands of handling an F1 vehicle, and why the personalities of the people behind the cars —the people who drive them, manufacture them, live for them and, in some cases, die in them — matter so much. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. In this extended extract from Novel Approaches, a Close Readings series from the LRB, Tom is joined by Rosemary Hill and Tom Crewe to make sense of a complex work that was not only the last great social novel of the period but also gestured forwards to the crisp, late-century cynicism of Oscar Wilde. They consider the ways in which the book was responding to the darkening mood of mid-Victorian Britain and the fading of the post-Waterloo generation, as well as the remarkable flexibility of its prose, with its shifting modes, tenses and perspectives, that combine to make Our Mutual Friend one of the most rewarding of Dickens’s novels. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Sponsored link: Find out more about the Royal Literary Fund: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.rlf.org.uk/⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As well as raw talent and incredible athleticism, professional tennis ‘requires extraordinary psychological capacities’, Edmund Gordon wrote recently in the LRB: ‘obsessive focus, epic self-belief’. Edmund – whose son is a rising star on the London under-nine circuit – joins Tom to discuss four recent books about the so-called golden generation of Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray, what it took for them to get to the summit of the game, and what happens to players who never manage to break into the top hundred. They also talk about the more recent rivalry between Sinner and Alcaraz, and why Djokovic thinks a slice of bread is like kryptonite. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/tennispod Sponsored link: Find out more about the Royal Literary Fund: ⁠⁠https://www.rlf.org.uk/⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the world's most famous amateur golfer now in charge of the 'free world', the sport has never been more important in the lives of non-golfers. When Donald Trump was spotted cheating recently on a course in Scotland, it was recognised by enthusiasts and sportswriters as a major violation in a game traditionally based on self-policing and high principles. David Trotter joins Tom, a non-golfer, to explain why golf is the favoured sport of US presidents, the role that fantasy plays on the fairway, and why Wodehouse believed that ‘to find a man’s character, play golf with him’. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/golfpod Sponsored link: Find out more about the Royal Literary Fund: https://www.rlf.org.uk/ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horror and trauma narrative, and continues to spark reinvention and reinterpretation. In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina Warner explore Shelley’s treatment of birth, death, monstrosity and the limits of science. They discuss Frankenstein’s philosophical and personal undercurrents, and how the creature and his creator have broken free from the book. To listen to the rest of this episode and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠ From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun placed large numbers of these rats in a controlled environment for more than a year, and found evidence for the same anxieties sparked by their urban cousins: overpopulation and an ensuing ‘behavioural sink’. Jon Day joins Tom to discuss lab rats, street rats and the ‘rat in the head’. They explore the reasons many found Calhoun’s rat utopias compelling, and why his conclusions do both rats and humans a grave disservice. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠ Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in the 1970s and avoiding extradition to West Germany. When General Pinochet was himself arrested in London in 1998 under an international warrant issued by a Spanish judge, the British government returned him to Chile on medical grounds. In this episode, Andy Beckett, the author of Pinochet in Piccadilly, joins Tom to talk about these two cases of impunity, the subjects of a recent book by Philippe Sands. They also consider why the democratic government of Salvador Allende that Pinochet overthrew in 1973 has been a touchstone for the international left in the decades since, and whether something similar to Pinochet's coup could have happened in the UK. Find Andy’s article and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/pinochetpod More from the Bookshop: Discover our author of the month, book of the week and more: ⁠https://lrb.me/bkshppod⁠ From the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict apparently over, Adam Shatz talks to Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Robert Malley, a former lead negotiator for the US in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, about why the war came about and what it means for the region. With Bajoghli, Adam looks at the way the war has been seen by the regime’s supporters and detractors, and the effects on the Iranian population of Israel’s widespread infiltration of the country. With Malley, he considers the events that paved the way for Israel’s attack and why America’s bombing of the nuclear facility at Fordow will probably not spur Iran to accelerate its nuclear programme. Further reading in the LRB: Tom Stevenson: Trump's Midnight Hammer https://lrb.me/stevensoniran Tareq Baconi: Gaza under Siege https://lrb.me/baconigaza Sponsored link Oculi Mundi: https://oculi-mundi.com/ LRB Audio Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 1940, also hinges around a pact with Satan (Woland), who arrives in Moscow to create mayhem among its literary community and helps reunite an outcast writer, the Master, with his lover, Margarita. In this extended extra from ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, Marina Warner and Adam Thirlwell look at the ways in which these two ferocious works of comic horror tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or Bolshevism, and consider why both writers used the fantastical to test reality. ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’ is part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Sign up to Close Readings: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/crapplefflrbpod In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff Sponsored link: Deaf Republic at the Royal Court: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/deaf-republic/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, entrusted with building his collection, Belle da Costa Greene could ‘spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of 26’, as the New York Times put it in 1912. In the latest LRB, Francesca Wade reviews a new biography of Greene and a recent exhibition dedicated to her at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, of which Greene was the first director. Francesca joins Tom on the podcast to talk about Greene's life and work. They discuss her long-term, long-distance relationship with the art historian Bernard Berenson and her reasons for concealing her African American heritage. Find further reading in the LRB: https://lrb.me/wadepod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald Trump recently announced a defence budget of more than one trillion dollars, much of which will be funnelled to private companies – and increasingly to tech firms such as Space X and Palantir. Laleh Khalili joins Thomas Jones to discuss the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon. She explains the limitations of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, the strengthening grip of private corporations on US defence agencies and why the trickle-down benefits of tech innovation can’t justify military spending. This conversation was recorded on 12 June 2025. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/pentagonpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earlier, is ‘often considered the best French novel of the 20th century’, as Joanna Biggs wrote in a recent issue of the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, Joanna joins Tom to discuss Yourcenar’s life and work, and what makes Memoirs of Hadrian – a reimagining of the life of the Roman emperor – such a good book. Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/yourcenarpod Find Memoirs of Hadrian at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/hadrianpod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. You can find a reading list of pieces mentioned in this episode here: https://lrb.me/philiplarkinpod Subscribe to the LRB from just £1 per issue: mylrb.co.uk/podcast20b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘How useful is it,’ Daniel Trilling asked recently in the LRB, ‘to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism?’ In this episode of the podcast Daniel joins TJ to explore the question in light of his review of Richard Seymour’s book Disaster Nationalism. They discuss the continuities between earlier forms of far-right politics and its more recent manifestations, as well as what’s new about the current moment, and why fascism may be a useful frame for thinking not only about where right-wing nationalism comes from, but also about what might be done to forestall it. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this extended extract from their series 'Conversations in Philosophy', part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast, Jonathan Rée and James Wood look at one of Friedrich Nietzsche's early essays, 'Schopenhauer as Educator'. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to forget what we already know. ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ was written in 1874, when Nietzsche was 30, and was published in a collection with three other essays – on Wagner, David Strauss and the use of history – that has come to be titled Untimely Meditations. Jonathan and James consider the essays together and their powerful attack on the ethos of the age, railing against the greed and power of the state, fake art, overweening science, the triviality of universities and the deification of success. James Wood is a contributor to the LRB and staff writer at The New Yorker, whose books include The Broken Estate, How Fiction Works and a novel, Upstate. Jonathan Rée is a writer, philosopher and regular contributor to the LRB whose books include Witcraft and A Schoolmaster's War. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘The Church​ needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,’ Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Tom to discuss how the new pope will have to navigate this paradox. He also looks back at the Francis papacy, and the way that Francis behind his smile ran the Vatican with an iron first; at relations between the Vatican and the Trump administration; and at Francis’s motives for bringing the future Pope Leo XIV to Rome in 2023: ‘the reason, in my view, is the same reason that Francis began to smile.’ Read Colm Tóibín on Pope Leo: https://lrb.me/toibinpopepod From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/pod⁠⁠ Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠ LRB Audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod⁠ Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: ⁠https://lrb.me/storelrbpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices