Close Readings

Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/closereadingsmbtc For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc Read more in the LRB: Tom McCarthy: Ulysses and its Wake: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce01 Colm Tóibín on Joyce’s errors: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce02 Anne Enright: At Sandymount Strand: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce03 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition,’ Thea Riofrancos writes in Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, ‘global climate action comes into conflict with local environmental protection.’ Or as Meehan puts it at the start of the episode, there’s a fundamental contradiction between two desirable things. Meehan and Peter discuss Latin America’s long history of resource nationalism and compare the process of lithium extraction through brine evaporation with the far more destructive practices of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The paradoxes inherent in ‘green capitalism’ are brought into sharper focus by Riofrancos’s exploration of these extractive frontiers, but are her solutions – smaller batteries, more recycling, denser cities and fewer cars – a serious proposal or pie in the sky? Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Laleh Khalili: Who owns the arctic? https://lrb.me/nicep1101 Adam Tooze: What energy transition? https://lrb.me/nicep1102 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity (1994), a middle-aged teacher, Elias Rukla, is teaching Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for perhaps the hundredth time when he has a revelation about an apparently insignificant detail in the play relating to a minor character, Dr Relling. The detail is classically realist in that it appears to have no importance in the plot, yet it acquires a major significance in Rukla’s life, who shortly after the lesson has a breakdown in the school playground and is convinced his career is finished. In this episode, James Wood is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss a novel that avoids the expectations of realism to explore the psychological and cultural impact of the realist tradition. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Adam Mars-Jones on Solstad: https://lrb.me/realism1101 David Edgar on Ibsen: https://lrb.me/realism1103 Michael Hofmann on Thomas Bernhard: https://lrb.me/realism1102 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them, but for many of the large number who made their hopeful journey to the capital from all over the country in the 18th century, life was more likely to end up like a scene from a Hogarth print, ruined by gin and despair. London had become a ‘great and monstrous thing’ according to Daniel Defoe. However, if you were lucky enough to survive childhood, and gin, and have a bit of money, it was an increasingly pleasant monster, offering strolls through grand squares and pleasure gardens, and shops displaying a dizzying variety of goods from all over the world alongside cheap copies of a new literary form: the novel. To discuss London’s emergence as a brutal city of consumption and cultural innovation, Rosemary is joined again by Markman Ellis, a professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠⁠⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠⁠ Read more in the LRB: Clare Bucknell on Samuel Richardson: https://lrb.me/lrep1001 John Mullan on Pamela: https://lrb.me/lrep1002 Rosemary Hill on Hogarth: https://lrb.me/lrep1003 Tom Paulin on Daniel Defoe: https://lrb.me/lrep1004 Claude Rawson on Henry Fieldings: https://lrb.me/lrep1005 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilification inflation’, Moore and Roberts make the case for the continuing salience of the word fascism. They argue that a direct line can be traced between early fascist ideology in Italy and Germany and the ‘reharmonising’ green nationalism of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Mystical and dangerous ideas claiming to be environmentalist, once the preserve of fringe online groups, have entered the political mainstream through these successful disrupter parties, and understanding the connection between past and present is the only way to speculate meaningfully about the future of far-right ecological thought and action. Meehan and Peter consider the plausibility of the three future scenarios sketched in the book: ‘Fossilised Reaction’, ‘Batteries, Bombs and Borders’ and ‘Climate Collapse Cultists’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture⁠ Read more in the LRB: Daniel Trilling: Is this fascism? ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/nicep1001⁠⁠ Alan Ryan: Fascism in the Plural ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/nicep404⁠⁠ Edward Luttwak: Why fascism is the wave of the future: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/c6350c ⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some European travel and the following year found himself in Rome during the short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came Amours de Voyage, an epistolary verse novel written in hexameters, in which a young scholar visits Italy during the uprising and falls in love with a fellow English tourist. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at Clough’s poem as an expression of its author’s rootlessness and the crisis of faith that characterised the age, and the ways in which it undercuts the grand Byronic promise of its title and meter to unfold an Austenian story of subtle social snobbery and young romantic failure. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Fergus McGhee: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt https://lrb.me/npep1001 Christopher Clark: God Bless Italy https://lrb.me/npep1002 Stefan Collini: Matthew Arnold https://lrb.me/npep101003 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted’. The loss of an arm was hardly wonderful for Mr Lloyd, but for the girls at the centre of the novel it is a rich source of fascination, and Spark’s description exemplifies her use of one of the classic realist tools, free indirect style, to fill her short book with the life and character of adolescent girlhood at an Edinburgh school in the 1930s. In this episode, James Wood considers the ways in which Spark, like Nabokov, gave the grammar of realism a post-modernist treatment to interrogate what it means to tell the story of a life. He considers the influence of Miss Brodie’s tyrannical, charismatic personality on the structure of the book itself, with its use of flash-forwards to suggest a Calvinistic, omniscient narrator, and the effect of Spark’s Dickensian leitmotif that sets the novelistic desire for knowability against the relentless change of youth. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Frank Kermode on Spark's life: https://lrb.me/realismep1001 Colin Burrow on Spark's letters: https://lrb.me/realismep1002 Susan Eilenberg on Spark's poems: https://lrb.me/realismep1003 More Spark in Close Readings: Listen to Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow on Spark's novel A Far Cry from Kensington in their Close Readings series On Satire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular, not least for the energy and locations it provided for two great booms in London life: financial speculation and a genuinely public print culture. For this episode, Rosemary is joined by Markman Ellis, professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London, to look at the architecture, literature and culture of ‘politeness’ that emerged after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the stories spun out of it by Daniel Defoe and John Gay. They discuss the coffee houses where London’s stock exchange and marine insurance market were created, the front rooms where women enjoyed the new ‘visiting system’ and the increasingly hazardous streets where Moll Flanders and others sought their fortune. Reading by Fiona Sheehan Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠ Read more in the LRB: Steven Shapin on coffee: https://lrb.me/lrep901 Tom Paulin on Defoe: https://lrb.me/lrep902 Michael Ledger-Lomas on the South Sea Company: https://lrb.me/lrep903 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a kind of dream’, Browning recalled. ‘I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day.’ The result, inspired by a line spoken by Edgar (as Poor Tom) in Act III of King Lear, is a grim, hallucinatory quest poem that exemplifies Browning’s talent for what G.K. Chesterton called ‘the poetry of mean landscapes’. In this episode, Seamus and Mark read Browning’s mysterious poem as a rejection of the resources and consolations established by the Romantics. They then turn to an earlier narrative poem, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (1843), in which Browning uses a comical, Byronic tone to tell the story of another prophetic figure. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep901 Matthew Reynolds: https://lrb.me/npep902 Donald Davie: https://lrb.me/npep903 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the species depicted by the artist John James Audubon, who lived in the area. Emily Raboteau’s ‘Lessons for Survival’ (2024) takes these murals, along with Raboteau’s own photographs of local birds, as a way into exploring the challenges faced by a mother of two Black sons in New York City living through Hurricane Sandy, the first Trump presidency, Covid and mounting climate breakdown. In this episode, Meehan and Peter talk through the different aspects of Raboteau’s project of survival, from experiences of gentrification and medical racism to the models it offers for dealing with existential threat and ‘justifiable rage’, and Raboteau’s stylistic achievement of bringing together the urban and natural environment. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Further reading in the LRB: Meehan Crist: When the ice melts: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep901⁠ Liam Shaw: Great Auks: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep902⁠ Richard Fortey: Sea Slugs, Wombats, Microbes: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep903⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of postmodernism. Yet for all its playfulness, the book maintains, in its powers of noticing and subtle emotional intelligence, a strong commitment to the real. To examine the debts to realism in Nabokov’s story of a Russian-born academic in the United States, James Wood is joined by Patricia Lockwood, who wrote about Nabokov for the LRB in 2020. They discuss why, despite the cruelty of the narrator, Pnin offers one of Nabokov’s most affectionate portraits, and whether it’s possible to define the style of a writer often referred to as a ‘master stylist’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more on (and by) Nabokov in the LRB: Patricia Lockwood: https://lrb.me/realismep901 Vladimir Nabokov: ‘The University Poem’ (read by Ralph Fiennes): https://lrb.me/realismep902 Michael Wood: https://lrb.me/realismep903 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founded and the West End, with its squares, parks and fashionable ‘season’, was born. But the social whirl stopped abruptly in 1665 with the arrival of plague, which was followed in 1666 by the catastrophic Great Fire of London. To talk about these events and the new city that emerged from the ashes, Rosemary is again joined by Vanessa Harding, emerita professor of London history at Birkbeck. They look at the invaluable observations of Samuel Pepys, the continental ambitions of Christopher Wren and the emergence of political parties from the succession crisis of the 1680s. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Margaret Anne Doody on Aphra Behn: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep801⁠ Deborah Friedell on Samuel Pepys: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep802⁠ Simon Schaffer on Christopher Wren: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep803⁠ James Shapiro on plague writing: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep804⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he was inspired to write his own account. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss Keats’s talent for sublime banality, the competing readings of the lover, Porphyro, and the poem's repurposing of Spenserian allegory for a contemporary love story. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more on Keats in the LRB: John Bayley: https://lrb.me/npep801 Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep802 Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/npep803 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical masterpiece, which marks a revolution in English fiction as significant in its way as the political, scientific and industrial revolutions that it's set against. They look at the novel’s philosophical underpinnings, its treatment of knowledge and desire, money and debt, sex and marriage, and whether or not Casaubon was onto something with his ‘Key to All Mythologies’. 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/closereadingsmbtc For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc Read more on Eliot in the LRB: Rosemary Ashton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n14/rosemary-ashton/homage-to-mrs-brater Terry Eagleton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak Rachel Bowlby https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n07/rachel-bowlby/waiting-for-the-dawn-to-come Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped to push the settlement to collapse. ‘How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?’ Roy Scranton asks near the start of ‘Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress’ (2025). For Scranton, the fate of the civilisation at Chaco Canyon is a microcosm for the crisis now confronting humanity. The challenges we face, from climate change to political instability, are so intractable in part because of their complexity. In this episode, Meehan and Peter discuss Scranton’s analysis of our predicament and his proposal for ‘ethical pessimism’, based on resistance to our bias for optimism, as a way of coping with an uncertain future. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Further reading: Adam Tooze: Trouble Transitioning: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep8tooze⁠ Further listening: Meehan Crist's series on 'Climate, Politics and Procreation' on the LRB Podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/meehanpod⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wilhelm also bears the intervening influence of modernism, not least in its opening section in which, for twenty pages, our hero simply stands on the street thinking about his life. In this episode, James Wood discusses the Bellovian prose style with its Melvillian love of words and biblical undertones, and explores the book’s evocation of a postwar Manhattan imbued with masculinist conventionality. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Saul Bellow talks to Melvyn Bragg: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n08/melvyn-bragg/in-conversation-with-melvyn-bragg-saul-bellow-talks-about-his-new-novel-and-about-the-women-of-eastern-europe⁠ Andrew O’Hagan on Saul Bellow’s letters: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n01/andrew-o-hagan/they-don-t-say-that-about-idi-amin⁠ James Wolcott on Bellow’s later life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half of Westminster up in 1605. But the plot failed, and with James’s reign came a new, lavish court life, the emergence of the first newspapers amid the booming print industry around St Paul’s, and, with the guidance of Inigo Jones, the arrival of the renaissance in London’s architecture with the development of Covent Garden and the first of the city’s squares. To continue her story of London, Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to see why James’s Stuart settlement eventually failed under the personal rule of Charles I, leading to a civil war in which London became the financial and military headquarters for the victorious Parliamentarians and James’s grand new banqueting house at Whitehall was used as the backdrop for his son’s execution. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠ Read more in the LRB: Perry Anderson on the Civil War: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n21/perry-anderson/maurice-thomson-s-war⁠ Blair Worden on the Civil War: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n16/blair-worden/conrad-russell-s-civil-war⁠ Maggie Kilgour on Milton and London: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/maggie-kilgour/pens-and-heads⁠ John Gallagher on Early Modern news: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n03/john-gallagher/quickly-quickly-quickly⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s interest in rural poverty as much as the natural world. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the two poems as part of the literary revolution brought about by the Lyrical Ballads, in which everyday language is used to depict marginal lives without sentiment, guided by Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.’ Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Marilyn Butler on The Lyrical Ballads: https://lrb.me/npep702 Jonathan Wordsworth: Wordsworth in Love: https://lrb.me/npep701 Seamus Perry on 'The Prelude': https://lrb.me/npep703 Colin Burrow on Wordsworth: https://lrb.me/npep704 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. Braiding Sweetgrass was an enormous success for a small press publication, becoming a bestseller and a touchstone for readers searching for alternatives to extractivist realpolitik. In this episode, Meehan and Peter look at the most compelling features of Kimmerer’s technique – reminiscent of Darwin at his best – and where her book risks scientific overreach. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her contemporary Jean Rhys, but if she had read ‘A Voyage in the Dark’ (1934), she might well have marvelled at, and even envied, its radical realism. Rhys’ story of a young woman who moves from the Caribbean to England and enters a world of financial and sexual exploitation was drawn from experiences unavailable to Woolf. In this episode, James is joined by the biographer Miranda Seymour to discuss Rhys’s virtuosity of technique and detachment, her extraordinary ear for dialogue and the places where her mastery of realist method gave way to modernism. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Mary-Kay Wilmers on Jean Rhys: https://lrb.me/waorep701 Carole Angier on Rhys's letters: https://lrb.me/waorep702 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention but the ready availability of refreshments and the high quality of the players’ clothes. The revolution in playmaking that he witnessed on the south bank of the Thames reflected widespread innovations in London’s cultural life in the reign of Elizabeth I. For the first time, we can see the city clearly, in the panoramas and maps inspired by Dutch artists. New ideas about history are emerging in the works of Stow and Holinshed. And the growth of trade through piracy, with a new centre of commerce in Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, marks the beginning of England's imperial expansion. In this episode, Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to discuss this extraordinary moment in London’s history and some of the reasons behind it, from Elizabeth’s genius for survival to the city’s lack of a university. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠ Read more in the LRB: Charles Nicholl on Elizabethan true crime: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep601⁠ Michael Dobson on Shakespeare's life: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep603⁠ Colin Burrow on Walter Raleigh: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep02⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in the dark,’ she wrote, ‘William and Coleridge employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad.’ This was the origin of the opening poem of the ’Lyrical Ballads’, published the following year – the book often seen as marking the beginning of Romanticism. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the strange hallucinatory power of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Coleridge’s search for a meter that could capture the force of his imagination. They also consider some of the poem’s many interpretations, from the influence of abolitionist writing to William Empson’s reading of the shooting of the albatross, and consider whether it’s best understood as a terrible encounter at a wedding reception. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠ Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Barbara Everett on Coleridge the modernist: https://lrb.me/npep601 Susan Eilenberg on the life of Coleridge: https://lrb.me/npep602 Marilyn Butler on the Lyrical Ballads: https://lrb.me/npep603 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words, ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’. In ‘Is a River Alive?’ (2025), Robert Macfarlane travels with the lawyers, Indigenous people, scientists and others who are working to protect rivers in Ecuador, India and Quebec, and challenges himself to see rivers in a way that widens the category of life. In this episode, Meehan and Peter assess Macfarlane's quest and look at the different kinds of writing he deploys along the way, including adventure story, biography and philosophy. They also look back to the origins of the rights of nature movement at the University of Southern California in the 1970s and consider whether the choice between seeing a river as either a resource or a fellow being is a false one. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Read more in the LRB: Rebecca Solnit on water: https://lrb.me/nicep601 Kathleen Jamie of Robert Macfarlane: https://lrb.me/nicep602 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depiction a group of circulating consciousnesses in London over the course of one day. But underlying these innovations are the techniques of 19th-century realism, and in this episode James Wood explores what Woolf owes to Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down these certainties to arrive at the ultimate unknowability of character. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more the LRB: Jacqueline Rose on Woolf: https://lrb.me/realismep601 Gillian Beer on Woolf‘s essays: https://lrb.me/realismep602 David Trotter on ‘Mrs Dalloway’: https://lrb.me/realismep603 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to Catholic Europe. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, much of that world had vanished. The Reformation not only changed the religious practices of its inhabitants, it brought a widespread transfer of property that reshaped the character and activity of the city and turned it into a theatre of power, punishment and debate. Rosemary is joined by Vanessa Harding, emerita professor of London history at Birkbeck, University of London, to look at the events that transformed London into a commercially expanding and ideologically contested Protestant capital under the Tudors, from the arrival of Caxton’s printing press in Westminster and the beginnings of an aristocratic West End to Mary I’s brutal attempt to restore Catholic England. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr Read more in the LRB: Hilary Mantel on England under Mary I: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep504⁠ Lucy Wooding on Henry VIII and the merchants: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep502⁠ Patrick Collinson on Henry VIII's Reformation: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep503 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you got four minutes to share your feedback on Close Readings? It will help shape how we develop the podcast over the coming year. We’ve set up a short survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XCR7LQ7 Thanks for your time, and for listening to our podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and chastisement of Scottish masculinity ever since its publication, but the attitude of its narrator remains elusive throughout. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s moral and stylistic turns, its influence on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and what it owes to the Augustan perfectionism of Pope. They then turn to a much darker example of Romantic narrative poetry, George Crabbe’s ‘Peter Grimes’ (published in his collection The Borough in 1810), and explore the bracing realism and psychological insight in the story of a Suffolk fisherman who destroys the apprentices placed in his care. This episode also features a bonus conversation with Andrew O’Hagan, who reads extracts from 'Tam o’ Shanter' and explains why the poem’s reliably contradictory narrative voice is so useful for anyone learning to write stories. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Karl Miller: Peeping Tam: ⁠https://lrb.me/npep501⁠ Neal Ascherson on Burns's life: ⁠https://lrb.me/npep502 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’ (1979), James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is something like a single living organism, capable of manipulating its circumstances and the environment to suit its needs. While many scientists reject the fullest formulation of this idea, it has nonetheless had a profound influence on our understanding of the ways in which animal and plant life interact with the non-living parts of the environment, to the extent that observations in biological and earth systems science are often assessed for which version of Gaia they might support. In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith look at the origins of the Gaia hypothesis in the radical work of Lynn Margulis and the contributions of Lovelock’s academic collaborator Dian Hitchcock, and in the science of cybernetics. They then consider the degree to which any formulation of Gaia can explain certain processes, from the impact of the ecological competition between daisies on the reflection of solar radiation to the carbon-silicate cycle and its control of carbon dioxide levels, and consider some of Lovelock’s wilder theories, including his suggestion that humans should merge their minds with those of whales. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Read more in the LRB: Meehan Crist on ‘Novocene’: https://lrb.me/natureep501 Peter Godfrey-Smith on Lovelock: https://lrb.me/natureep502 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). To discuss The Death of Ivan Ilyich and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman. They consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening, and why the unique authority of his style has proved so resistant to the critiques of realism in the 20th century. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Michael Wood on War and Peace: https://lrb.me/realismep501 James Meek on the death of Tolstoy: https://lrb.me/realismep502 John Bayley on Tolstoy's diaries: https://lrb.me/realismep503 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life. As well as its origins and afterlives, they consider the many systems that the novel draws on, challenges, reproduces and mutates – the laws of nature, philosophy, science, the human body, the traditional family – and ask whether the real horror at the heart of Frankenstein is not the creature so much as incest. The Man Behind the Curtain is a bonus Close Readings series running this year. The next episode will be on ‘Middlemarch’, released in a couple of months. 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/closereadingsmbtc For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc Read more in the LRB: Anne Barton on Mary Shelley: ⁠https://lrb.me/frankensteincr01⁠ Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein: ⁠https://lrb.me/frankensteincr02 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If historians of medieval London had a patron saint, it might well be Edward I. While many English monarchs chose to leave London to its own devices, Edward decided from the start of his reign in 1272 to put pressure on the city to justify its liberties. The result was a profusion of bureaucracy, most notably in the Letter Books, that describe the life of London and its people in vivid detail, from disputes, petitions and regulations to the names of all the city’s apprentices. This record-keeping was good for the city too, reinforcing a powerful system of guilds supporting hundreds of trades and a flourishing merchant and consumer culture. But when the Black Death arrived in England in 1348, London’s population was devastated, and its social and economic life transformed. In this episode, Rosemary is joined again by Matthew Davies, professor of urban history at Birkbeck, to continue the story of England’s capital through its rapid rise in the first half of the 14th century and a long period turmoil thereafter, including the Hundred Years’ War, the revolts of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, and the Wars of the Roses. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr Read more in the LRB: Tom Johnson: No More Baubles: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep401⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty. The incident caused an irreconcilable rift between the two families, who were both Catholic. Shortly afterwards, the young poet Alexander Pope, also Catholic, was approached by a friend who suggested he turn the incident into a comic poem. The result was one of the bestselling poems of the age, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712), a mock-epic that fused the grand styles of Homer, Virgil and Milton with an acerbic social satire, in which the gods are reimagined as airy sylphs guarding the honour of the heroine, Belinda. William Hazlitt wrote of the poem that ‘you hardly know whether to laugh or weep’, and in this episode Seamus and Mark discuss why Pope's masterpiece is at once the funniest poem in the English language and an essay on the seriousness of trivial things. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Claude Rawson on 'The Rape of the Lock': https://lrb.me/nppope01 Colin Burrow on Pope: https://lrb.me/nppope02 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ‘great acceleration’ is a term used to describe the dramatic surge in the 1950s of both human and earth systems indicators that marked a shift from a relatively stable planetary state to one that's characterised by increasing environmental instability. Alongside measures of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane levels, this shift can be tracked in numerous other areas of human activity, such as GDP, financialisation, foreign direct investment and the spread of telecommunications. In ‘The Burning Earth’ (2024), Sunil Amrith uses history as a way of understanding why we got to this moment, drawing on multiple strands of human activity over more than 500 years to trace the origins of environmental crisis. In this episode, Meehan and Peter interrogate some of Amrith’s major themes and examples, from the damaging impact of 18th-century ideas of freedom on our relationship to the natural world, to his analysis of postwar environmentalism through the figures of Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson and Indira Gandhi. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture More from the LRB: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n24/alexander-bevilacqua/friend-or-food⁠ ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/pooja-bhatia/the-end-of-the-plantocracy⁠ ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n05/benjamin-kunkel/the-capitalocene⁠ Meehan Crist and Alison Bashford on Indira Gandhi and the anthropocene: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/climate-politics-and-procreation-alison-bashford⁠ Recommendations for the London Review Bookshop from Sunil Amrith: ⁠https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2025/october/british-academy-book-prize-2025-sunil-amrith-s-reading-recommendations⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central to Chekhov’s radical realism. Unlike Flaubert and Ibsen, Chekhov sought to avoid imposing authorial meaning or irony, instead handing over perception to his characters. In this episode, James looks at three of Chekhov’s stories, ‘Gusev’ (1890), ‘The Bishop’ (1902) and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and the ways in which each seeks to curb the judgment or expectations of the reader to foreground the experiences of his characters, even beyond death. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Further reading in the LRB: John Bayley on Chekhov's stories: https://lrb.me/realismep401 Donald Rayfield on Chekhov's love letters: https://lrb.me/realismep402 Joseph Frank on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep403 James Wood on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep404 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling across England in the wake of the Roman retreat in the early fifth century, the city they found on the north bank of the Thames was hardly a city at all. Within its walls were the great abandoned ruins of antiquity, ‘the works of giants’ as one Anglo-Saxon poet put it, and little else. For hundreds of years the site was patchily inhabited, but two features indicated its future importance. In 604, the first Bishop of London was appointed, leading to the continuous presence of Christianity and the founding of St Paul’s Cathedral; and down the river, the emergence of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic near where Covent Garden is today confirmed the area’s prime position as a trading centre. By the time Alfred repelled the Danes in the ninth century, London’s value had been realised, and the symbolic movement of the royal court from Winchester to Westminster under Edward the Confessor set London’s trajectory. In this episode, Rosemary is joined by Matthew Davies, professor of urban history at Birkbeck, to trace this story of London through the multiple invasions, grand projects and power struggles that took it from a field of ruins to a flourishing medieval capital. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr Further reading in the LRB: Eamon Duffy on Westminster: https://lrb.me/lrep301 Ferdinand Mount on Henry III: https://lrb.me/lrep304 Tom Shippey on Alfred: https://lrb.me/lrep302 Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the Strand: https://lrb.me/lrep303 Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multiple genres and perspectives to interrogate the moral and emotional significance of ‘man’s first disobedience’, self-consciously drawing on the resources of Renaissance tragedy, pastoral and love poetry to achieve his great innovation, the Christian epic. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Milton’s study of temptation and free will became an unparalleled expression of poetic brilliance, from its thrillingly ambiguous and seductive depiction of Satan to its vivid dramatisation of the reproachful lovers confronting the consequences of their misdeeds, and ultimately its claim to being the finest love poem in English. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Colin Burrow: Loving Milton https://lrb.me/npmilton01 Tom Paulin: Milton and the Regicides: https://lrb.me/mpmilton02 Tobias Gregory: Milton’s Theology: https://lrb.me/npmilton03 Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible. In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith reflect on the ways Czerski’s book has altered their thinking about the ocean, and whether new perspectives can ever be enough to change public policy. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Get the book: https://lrb.me/czerskicr More from the LRB: Richard Hamblyn on deep-sea exploration: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n21/richard-hamblyn/hurrah-for-the-dredge Katherine Rundell on the greenland shark: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/katherine-rundell/consider-the-greenland-shark Liam Shaw on coral: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n22/liam-shaw/in-the-photic-zone Amia Srinivasan reviews Peter’s book on octopus minds: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker Film: Forecasting D-Day https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/videos/lrb-films-interviews/forecasting-d-day Next episode: ‘The Burning Earth’ by Sunil Amrith https://lrb.me/amrithcr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present three humiliating episodes from his earlier life, offers no kind of conclusion. Instead, it is the unbearable moments of psychological truth that make ‘Notes from Underground’ a revolutionary development in the history of realism. In this episode, James Wood is joined by the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell to consider Dostoevsky’s mastery of the inner life and the experiences that shaped his hostility to rational egoism, from being subjected to a mock execution and four years in a Siberian prison camp to his reading of Hegel and a visit to London’s Crystal Palace. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB on Dostoevsky: John Bayley: https://lrb.me/realismep301 Daniel Soar: https://lrb.me/realismep302 Michael Wood: https://lrb.me/realismep303 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After Roman London was hit by a catastrophic fire in about 125 AD, perhaps the result of another local revolt, it entered a new period of sophistication which saw the emergence of elaborate townhouses for its mercantile and administrative elite, richly embellished with mosaics and wall paintings. But the city had stopped growing, and when a devastating plague arrived in about 165 AD, which may well have been Europe’s first encounter with smallpox, it was probably already on a long slow decline caused by its diminishing importance as a trading hub. To continue Roman London’s story to its eventual fate as an abandoned walled garden, Rosemary Hill is joined again by Dominic Perring, author of 'London in the Roman World', to consider what objects such as a Greek spell found on the Thames foreshore, and a small bronze archer found in Cheapside, can tell us about the fortunes of the city, and why the construction of the London Wall in the early third century marked a terminal transformation of its role in the Roman Empire. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. 'Venus and Adonis' appeared in quarto that year and become by far the most popular work Shakespeare published in his lifetime, running to ten editions before his death (compared to just four for Romeo and Juliet). In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider the many ways in which Shakespeare’s poem displays its author's remarkable originality, from its peculiar reshaping of the Ovidian myth into a tale of comic mismatch, to its surprising diversion into the psychology of grief. They then look at his disturbing follow-up, 'The Rape of Lucrece' (1594), in which a chilling depiction of self-conscious, premeditated evil anticipates characters such as Iago and Macbeth. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Further reading in the LRB: Stephen Orgel on Shakespeare's poems: https://lrb.me/npshakespeare01 Barbara Everett on the sonnets: https://lrb.me/npshakespeare02 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Light Eaters (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our ideas of plants as passive life forms. Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith explore Schlanger’s account of new research into plant behaviour. They examine the case for plant agency – and the far more speculative claims for plant consciousness – and attempt to make sense of some astonishing discoveries. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Get the book: https://lrb.me/schlangercr Further reading from the LRB: Francis Gooding on mushroom brains: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n10/francis-gooding/from-its-myriad-tips Andrew Sugden on the life of a leaf: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n03/andrew-sugden/hairy-spiny-or-naked Ian Hacking on human thinking about plants: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n04/ian-hacking/living-things Francis Gooding on the hidden life of trees: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n04/francis-gooding/thinking-about-how-they-think Next episode: ‘Blue Machine’ by Helen Czerski https://lrb.me/czerskicr Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been describing. In the second part of his analysis of 'Madame Bovary', James Wood considers the major episodes leading to Emma’s death and argues that what made Flaubert’s realism dangerous was not its depictions of infidelity, but its use of cliché to expose French bourgeois lives constructed entirely of received ideas and second-hand emotions. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Further reading in the LRB: Julian Barnes on translations of Madame Bovary: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep201⁠ Michael Wood on 'Sentimental Education': ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep202⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The year London was founded will always be disputed, but the most recent archaeological evidence suggests the Romans had created the first settlement on the north bank of the Thames by 48 AD, five years after their invasion. That early military encampment expanded to become a busy, cosmopolitan supply base until it was burned down in the Boudican revolt of 60 AD. In the first episode of her series tracing the history of London, Rosemary Hill is joined by Dominic Perring, archaeologist and author of London in the Roman World, to examine the development of Londinium over its tumultuous first century, during which it grew to a population of 30,000 and it acquired all the recognisable Roman landmarks – forum, basilica, baths, amphitheatre – before facing its second great destructive event around 125 AD. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr In their next episode, Rosemary and Dominic consider Roman London’s second revival and the emergence of new belief systems and monuments before its eventual abandonment by Rome at the start of the fifth century. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Read more in the LRB: Christopher Kelly on Roman London: ⁠https://lrb.me/londonep1roman2⁠ Tom Shippey on Roman Britain: ⁠https://lrb.me/londonep1roman1⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

'Hero and Leander' was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a sixth-century version by Musaeus. Seamus and Mark begin their new series by looking at the playful but often troubling treatment of desire in a poem that contains one of the most explicit depictions of sex in English poetry. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Further reading in the LRB: Michael Dobson on the life of Marlowe https://lrb.me/np1marlowe1 Hilary Mantel on the murder of Marlowe: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe2 Charles Nicholl on Faustus: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub Street’ (1891), which follows a handful of literary men and women in London in the early 1880s. All of them have different ideas about success, love and personal fulfilment, and all those ideas – even the most brutally pragmatic – are subverted by the pressures of sexuality and the marketplace. In the final episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell and Tom Crewe discuss Gissing’s great portrait of London at its shabbiest. They explore Gissing’s unrelenting realism, his gift for writing nuanced characters, and why, in Tom’s words, if the novel is gloomy, it’s ‘an invigorating gloom’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this 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 Further reading from the LRB: Frank Kermode on George Gissing: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/frank-kermode/squalor⁠ Rosemarie Bodenheimer on Gissing’s life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n13/rosemarie-bodenheimer/give-us-a-break⁠ Jane Miller on Gissing’s letters: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n05/jane-miller/gissing-may-damage-your-health⁠ Ian Hamilton on a new ‘New Grub Street’: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/ian-hamilton/diary⁠ Patricia Beer on Gissing’s women: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n14/patricia-beer/new-women⁠ AUDIO GIFTS Close Readings and audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiogifts 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 bonus episode 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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this 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

After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that proliferated after the Second World War, which were assiduously defended by overconfident policymakers, industrial chemists and agribusiness. The book quickly became a bestseller and kickstarted the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. In the first episode of Nature in Crisis, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith discuss one of the truly great success stories in science writing. Carson was a masterful stylist and gifted scientist who could make abstruse developments in organic chemistry compelling, accessible and alarmingly intimate. Meehan and Peter show how Carson wrote at the edge of science, anticipating the study of epigenetics and endocrine disruption. They illustrate why, though some of her proposed solutions fell short, Silent Spring remains ‘both an exhilarating and melancholy pleasure’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Get the book: https://lrb.me/carsoncr Further reading from the LRB: Meehan Crist on Silent Spring https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n11/meehan-crist/a-strange-blight Stephen Mills on Rachel Carson https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n08/stephen-mills/chaffinches-with-their-beaks-pushed-into-the-soil-woodpigeons-with-a-froth-of-spittle-at-their-open-mouths Edmund Gordon on the insect crisis: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n09/edmund-gordon/bye-bye-firefly Anthony Giddens on chemical contamination: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n17/anthony-giddens/why-sounding-the-alarm-on-chemical-contamination-is-not-necessarily-alarmist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition of Flaubert’s ‘realism’ to cut to the bone of its characters and society at large. Karl Marx, on the other hand, praised realist writers who ‘issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together’. In the first episode of his new series, James Wood considers the fears and criticisms that have dogged realism from its emergence in the 19th century through its long history of transformations up to the present day. He examines the ways in which Flaubert used detail (both significant and significantly insignificant), impersonal narration, lifelike dialogue and free indirect style to create realism’s essential grammar. This is part one of Wood’s analysis of 'Madame Bovary', going up to the moment that Emma meets Rodolphe Boulanger. He uses Geoffrey Wall's translation, published by Penguin Classics. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Julian Barnes: Flaubert at Two Hundred https://lrb.me/realismep101 Two Letters from Flaubert to Colet: https://lrb.me/realismep102 Tim Parks on Flaubert's life: https://lrb.me/realismep103 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

Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this eccentric man deserved a poetic tribute for demonstrating ‘the power of the art without show’, a phrase that could as much describe the poem itself. In this episode, Seamus and Mark close their series by looking at the ways in which Johnson’s elegy, 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levet', rejects the pastoral heroism of the poem they started with, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, and compare it to two poems that offer their own kinds of unsentimental, eccentric portrait: 'Felix Randal' by Gerard Manley Hopkins and 'Stephen Boyd, 1957-99' by Mick Imlah. Seamus and Mark will be back in January to start their new series, 'Narrative Poems'. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld⁠⁠⁠ Find tickets to Seamus's LRB Winter Lecture in London here: https://lrb.me/perrywlpod Further reading in the LRB: Freya Johnston on Samuel Johnson: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n09/freya-johnston/i-m-coming-my-tetsie! Patricia Beer on Hopkins: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n11/patricia-beer/what-he-meant-by-happiness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of fantastic literature. This episode, recorded live at Swedenborg House, is an attempt to fill the gaps, or fail heroically. Marina and Adam Thirlwell are joined by Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review Books and author of ‘Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel’. Together they assess existing canons and definitions, redefine and rediscover categories and exceptions, and consider the pleasures and uses of the fantastic. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠⁠ Read more in the LRB: Colin Burrow: Fiction and the Age of Lies ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/colin-burrow/fiction-and-the-age-of-lies⁠ Marina Warner on fairytale: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n21/marina-warner/that-which-is-spoken⁠ Jonathan Lethem on Stanisław Lem and Science Fiction: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n03/jonathan-lethem/my-year-of-reading-lemmishly⁠ A.D. Nuttall on the rhetoric of the fantastic: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/a.d.-nuttall/really-fantastic 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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Read more in the LRB: Jacqueline Rose: Where's Woolf? https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf1 Virgina Woolf: The Symbol https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf2 John Bayley: Superchild https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel. Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this 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 Further reading and listening from the LRB: Mary and Mark discuss Hardy’s medievalism on the LRB Podcast: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind⁠⁠ Mark discusses Poems of 1912-13 with Seamus Perry in Love and Death: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/love-and-death-poems-of-1912-13-by-thomas-hardy⁠⁠  James Wood on Hardy’s life:⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures⁠⁠ Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts⁠⁠ Next episode: New Grub Street by George Gissing. 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 a subscriber, 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’  Browning, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’ Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’ H.D., ‘Helen in Egypt’ Seth, ‘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' Joyce, 'Ulysses' Ellison, 'Invisible Man' Pynchon, 'Gravity’s Rainbow' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despite loosening his early formalism after absorbing the work of the New American Poets, Gunn’s vision of the poet was not as a confessional diarist but rather a careful stylist of well-wrought verse drawing on the traditions of Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at elegies including ‘Talbot Road’, ‘The Gas-poker’ and others from his celebrated collection The Man with Night Sweats, where Gunn combined this allusive, rhetorical style with a poignant realism to recreate his subjects. They then turn to the more self-reflexive, oblique elegies of Paul Muldoon, who has reinvented the form in richly-patterned, playful poems such as ‘The Soap Pig’ and ‘Incantata’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld⁠⁠⁠ More in the LRB: Thom Gunn's 'Lament': ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn1⁠ Colm Tóibín on Gunn: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn2⁠ Michael Nott: Thom Gunn in New York: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn3⁠ Markl Ford on Muldoon: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldep12muldoon1 Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When the polymorphous writer Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018, she left behind novels, short stories, poetry, essays, manifestos and French and Chinese translations. The huge and loyal readership among children and older readers that she built during her lifetime has only grown since her death, as has recognition of her work as ‘serious’ literature. Chafing against her confinement in genre fiction, she liberated sci-fi, fantasy and YA literature from the condescension to which they had long been subjected. In 2016, she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetime by the Library of America. For the final regular episode of Fiction and the Fantastic (though there will be one more special episode) Marina and Chloe read ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ and ‘The Dispossessed’: works of exceptional imaginative power and intellectual range, passionate idealism and keen-eyed observation. Is Le Guin’s status in both literary and ‘genre’ canons a testament to the force and clear-sightedness of her radical – even prophetic – political vision? And what does it mean for the fantastic if we accept her self-characterisation as a ‘realist of a larger reality’? Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠⁠ Further reading and listening from the LRB: Colin Burrow on Ursula K. Le Guin: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/colin-burrow/it-s-not-jung-s-it-s-mine A collection of writing on science fiction from the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/collections/in-hyperspace Amia Srinivasan on Le Guin’s experiments with pronouns: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/amia-srinivasan/he-she-one-they-ho-hus-hum-ita Colin Burrow discusses Le Guin with Thomas Jones on the LRB Podcast: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/magical-authority Next episode: A taxonomy of fantastic literature with Marina, Adam Thirlwell and Edwin Frank. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clearly and justly she comes to accept and even appreciate the younger woman. For Iris Murdoch this is an example of moral labour, the struggle to achieve virtue that is understood intuitively by all of us. In her 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good, a collection of three lectures, Murdoch rejects the unambitious, ‘milk and water’ ethics of her fellow English moralists at Oxford in favour of a Platonic system in which morality has the same objectivity as mathematics. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Murdoch’s lifelong philosophical project to establish what the rational unity of morality might be like without God. They consider her ideas of ‘unselfing’ and of goodness as a replacement for God, and what she got wrong about Sartre’s distinction between authenticity and sincerity. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Alexander Nehamas: John Bayley's 'Iris': https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch1 James Wood: Existentialists and Mystics: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch2 Rosemary Hill on Iris Murdoch: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch3 Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising, Kidnapped follows young lowlander David Balfour’s flight across the Highlands with the rebel Alan Breck Stewart. In Stevenson’s hands, a straightforward adventure story becomes a vivid exploration of friendship, the body, and social and political division. In this episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell is joined by Stevenson fans Andrew O’Hagan and Tom Crewe. They explore Stevenson’s startlingly modern handling of perspective and pacing, his approach to the art of fiction, and the value of being ‘betwixt and between’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this 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 Further reading in the LRB: Andrew O’Hagan on Stevenson’s life:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/andrew-o-hagan/in-his-hot-head⁠ ...his circle:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth⁠ ...and his home in Edinburgh:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/andrew-o-hagan/diary⁠ P.N. Furbank on R.L.S.’s letters:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n16/p.n.-furbank/what-sort-of-man⁠ Matthew Bevis on Treasure Island:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n20/matthew-bevis/kids-gone-rotten⁠ Next episode: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold commented on his elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1865), that ‘one has the feeling that not enough is said about Clough in it.’ In his elegy for W.B. Yeats (1939), Auden insists that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Both poems resist idealisation of their subject and use the elegy’s pastoral tradition as a way of distancing themselves from the poetic sensibility of their subject. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the ways in which Arnold and Auden’s visions of what a poet should be aren’t so far apart, and finish with a look at James Schuyler’s similarly unromantic elegy for Auden, in which he finds ‘so little to say’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld⁠⁠ Arnold's 'Thyrsis': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11thyrsis⁠⁠⁠⁠ Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11yeats⁠⁠⁠⁠ More in the LRB: Seamus Perry on Auden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11auden⁠⁠⁠⁠ Stefan Collini on Arnold: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11arnold⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that still dominated English readers’ appreciation and expectations. Pioneers in the liminal spaces between literary and ‘genre’ fiction, and science fiction in particular, both of them are haunted by the visions of Swift, Shelley, Kafka and Borges. Ballard’s ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ and ’The Passion of New Eve‘, considered together here along with Ballard’s short story ’The Drowned Giant‘, are vivid, fearless, still shocking novels of ideas – if ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ can be described as a novel at all. Marina and Chloe discuss that question as they consider Ballard’s catalogue of contemporary violence and pop culture transgression. Then they turn to Carter’s own gleeful transgressions, born out of the ferment of 1970s cultural theory, which she explores and interrogates with inimitable style. But do the excesses of these works still speak to the present, and does their lack of restraint risk collapsing the whole category of the fantastic? Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Susannah Clapp on Angela Carter: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n05/susannah-clapp/diary⁠ Edmund Gordon on J.G. Ballard: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/edmund-gordon/his-galactic-centrifuge⁠ Watch ‘If God is a snail...’, a film about Carter’s food writing for the LRB: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxqr5O2JFvE⁠ Listen to Edmund Gordon discuss Ballard on the LRB Podcast: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/on-j.g.-ballard⁠ Next episode: Ursula K. Le Guin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a profound personal crisis. The self-described ‘judge-penitent’ had once thought himself to be morally irreproachable, but an encounter with a woman on a bridge and a mysterious laugh left him tormented by a sense of hypocrisy. In this episode, Jonathan and James follow Camus’s slippery hero as he tries and fails to undergo a moral revolution, and look at the ways in which the novel’s lightness of style allows for twisted inversions of conventional morality. They also consider the similarities between Camus’s novels and those of Simone de Beauvoir, and his fractious relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Jeremy Harding: Algeria's Camus: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus1⁠⁠ Jacqueline Rose: 'The Plague': ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus3⁠⁠ Adam Shatz: Camus in the New World: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/cip11camus2⁠⁠ Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠ 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/travel26pod Further reading in the LRB: Colm Toíbín on Henry James: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n01/colm-toibin/a-man-with-my-trouble⁠ Ruth Bernard Yeazell on Henry James’s life and notebooks: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n01/ruth-bernard-yeazell/the-henry-james-show⁠ James Wood on The Portrait of a Lady: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n19/james-wood/perfuming-the-money-issue⁠ Next time on Novel Approaches: 'Kidnapped!' by Robert Louis Stevenson. LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981; in Miller’s poem, a series of rapes and murders in Jamaica. Both can be seen as collective elegies, interleaving newspaper and medical reports, and other archival documents, with more lyrical passages, and both can be read as comments on the state of the nation as well as personal expressions of desolation. While Bernard’s poem opens out into an investigation of radical Black history and the marginalisation of Black communities in London, Miller uses blanked-out newspaper items, among other techniques, to search for the ‘understory’, an experience beyond language, which is in turn connected to colonial, and pre-colonial, Jamaica. In this episode, Mark and Seamus consider the different ways these poets respond to the shocking events they depict, while also incorporating them into a broader poetic landscape. Watch Jay Bernard reading from 'Surge' at the London Review Bookshop: https://youtu.be/XTZKYEimq2Y Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her writing has helped cement her cult status, not least The Hearing Trumpet (1974). Before her family consign her to an old-age facility, nonagenarian Marian Leatherby is gifted a hearing trumpet with almost magical capabilities. Her institutionalisation leads to much eavesdropping, a Grail quest, descent into the underworld and an apocalyptic ice age. Joyous, disturbing and subversive, The Hearing Trumpet is full of themes and images that populate Carrington’s artwork and other writing. Both Marina and Chloe knew Leonora Carrington, and in this episode they reflect on the ways her personality inflected her work. Their reading of The Hearing Trumpet reveals her humour, her visionary imagination and her attention to the boundaries between inner and outer realities. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Chloe Aridjis: A Leonora Carrington A to Z https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/april/a-leonora-carrington-a-to-z Alice Spawls: On Leonora Carrington https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n08/alice-spawls/at-tate-liverpool Edmund Gordon: Save the feet for later https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n21/edmund-gordon/save-the-feet-for-later Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either state. In her 1947 book, Simone de Beauvoir addresses the ethical implications of this uncertainty and the ‘agonising evidence of freedom’ it presents, along with the opportunity it creates for continual self-definition. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss these arguments and Beauvoir’s warnings against trying to evade the responsibilities imposed upon us by this ambiguity. They also look at the ways in which Beauvoir developed these ideas in The Second Sex and her novels, and her remarkable readings of George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Read more in the LRB: Joanna Biggs: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir1⁠ Toril Moi: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir2⁠ Elaine Showalter: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipbeauvoir3⁠ Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last Chronicle of Barset: a model example of Anthony Trollope’s gift for comedy, pathos, social commentary and masterful dialogue. At the heart of Last Chronicle is a mystery: how did the impoverished Reverend Crawley get his hands on a cheque for £20 that no one can account for, and is he capable of theft? The scandal has dire repercussions not only for Reverend Crawley, but the whole county: his ostracision raises broader questions about inequity in the church; it sparks rifts between his daughter, her would-be husband and his parents; and it gives his young relative Johnny Eames an excuse to flee the entanglements of London high society for the continent, in search of the only man who may be able to solve the puzzle. Although it’s the final book in the Barchester series, Last Chronicle can be read as a standalone novel, and Tom and Dinah join Thomas Jones to explore its sensitivities, ambivalences and sheer readability. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this 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 Further reading in the LRB: John Sutherland: Trollopiad ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n01/john-sutherland/trollopiad⁠⁠ Richard Altick: Trollope’s Delight ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/richard-altick/trollope-s-delight⁠⁠ Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Portrait of a Lady' by Henry James. LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death, it had deteriorated into hostility and bitterness. Out of grief, regret and ambivalence, Hardy produced the work Mark Ford considers to be among ‘the greatest poems in any language’: Poems of 1912-13. Mark and Seamus discuss the collection in the light of what Hardy called ‘strange necromancy’: the reconfiguring of Emma as ghost, critic, corpse and mythic lover. They pay close attention to the tight structure and novelistic detail in these poems, which exemplify Hardy’s gift for mixing the lyrical with realism. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read the poems: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2863/2863-h/2863-h.htm Further reading and listening from the LRB: On Mark’s book, Woman Much Missed: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/matthew-bevis/i-prefer-my-mare⁠ Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts and Emma’s diary: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts⁠ Dinah Birch on the letters of the two Mrs Hardies: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n22/dinah-birch/defence-of-the-housefly⁠ Mark and Seamus on Hardy for Modern-ish Poets: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/modern-ish-poets-thomas-hardy⁠ Mark and Mary Wellesley discuss A Pair of Blue Eyes: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursion, labyrinths, language and creation. Marina and Chloe explore Borges’s fiction with particular focus on two stories: ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Aleph’. They discuss the many contradictions and puzzles in his life and work, and the ways in which he transformed the writing of his contemporaries, successors and distant ancestors. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Michael Wood on Borges’s collected fiction: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n03/michael-wood/productive-mischief⁠⁠⁠ Colm Toíbìn on Borges’s life: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n09/colm-toibin/don-t-abandon-me⁠⁠⁠ Marina Warner on enigmas and riddles: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damned⁠⁠⁠ Daniel Wassbeim on Sur and Borges’s circle: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n05/daniel-waissbein/dying-for-madame-ocampo⁠⁠⁠ Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on human emotion and its relation to consciousness. For Sartre, the emotions are not external forces acting upon consciousness but an action of consciousness as it tries to rearrange the world to suit itself, or as he puts it at the end of his book: a sudden fall of consciousness into magic. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss why Sartre’s rejection of the idea of the subconscious is not as much a departure from Freud’s theories as he thought they were, and the ways in which his attempt to establish a ‘phenomenological psychology’ manifested in other works, including Nausea, Being and Nothingness and The Words. Note: Readers should use the translation by Philip Mairet. The earlier one by Bernard Frechtman, as Jonathan explains in the episode, contains numerous (often amusing) errors. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Further reading in the LRB: Jonathan Rée on 'Being and Nothingness': ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre1⁠ Sissela Bok on Sartre's life: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre2⁠ Edwards Said's encounter with Sartre: ⁠https://lrb.me/cipsartre3⁠ Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip 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. For this episode, 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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Next time on Novel Approaches: 'The Last Chronicle of Barset' by Anthony Trollope Further reading in the LRB: John Sutherland on Peter Ackroyd's Dickens: https://lrb.me/nadickens1 David Trotter on Dickens's tricks: https://lrb.me/nadickens2 Brigid Brophy on Edwin Drood: https://lrb.me/nadickens3 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley’s elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song’ as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell’s elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson’s ‘Nox’ (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone’s life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Poems discussed in this episode: William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont Robert Lowell, selections from ’Life Studies’ https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song Anne Carson, Nox https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson Next episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913’ by Thomas Hardy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the first episode of their miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries. In the stories of Mary’s life she leads a wild and licentious youth before exiling herself to serve penitence in the desert. There she meets Zosimas, an ascetic monk, and teaches him the value of an imperfect life. Several accounts of her life were written in the Middle Ages, including one in Old English that appears in a manuscript with Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints. Sign up to our Close Readings subscription: Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq In other podcast apps here: https://lrb.me/closereadings 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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠ Read more in the LRB: Claire Tomalin on Mary Shelley’s letters: ⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley1⁠ Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein: ⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley2⁠ Marilyn Butler on Frankenstein as myth: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley3⁠ Anne Barton on Mary Shelley’s life: ⁠https://lrb.me/ffshelley4⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting of objects that can be represented objectively, and into the kind of thinking that ‘responds and recalls’. For Heidegger, the world we experience is one of dynamic movement between revelation and concealment, where the essential nature of a thing lies in its ‘thinging’, and the ‘jug’s jug character consists in the poured gift of the jug’s pouring out’. In this episode Jonathan and James work through Heidegger’s ideas about both ‘things’ and time, and consider the purpose of his poetic style. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Further reading in the LRB: Richard Rorty: Heidegger's Worlds ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n03/richard-rorty/diary⁠ J.P. Stern: Heil Heidegger ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n08/j.p.-stern/heil-heidegger⁠ James Miller: Arendt and Heidegger ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/james-miller/thinking-without-a-banister LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life. Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggie Tullliver, for whom duty – societal, familial, self-imposed – continually conflicts with her personal desires. They explore the book’s submerged sexuality, its questioning of conventional gender roles, and the way Eliot’s satirical impulse is counterbalanced by the complexity of her characters. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Further reading in the LRB: Rachel Bowlby on reading George Eliot: https://lrb.me/naeliot1 Dinah Birch on Eliot’s journals: https://lrb.me/naeliot2 Rosemary Ashton on Eliot and sex: https://lrb.me/naeliot3 Gordon Haight’s speech on Eliot at Westminster Abbey: https://lrb.me/naeliot4 Audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Poems discussed in this episode: Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night’ ⁠https://⁠⁠w⁠⁠ww.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night⁠ Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’ ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57⁠ Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ ⁠https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/⁠ W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’ ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death⁠ Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’ ⁠https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/⁠ Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War’ ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas’s letters: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldwar1⁠ Jonathan Bate on war poetry: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldwar2⁠ Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldwar3⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld 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 episode, Marina and Adam 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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff Further reading in the LRB: Liam McIlvanney on James Hogg: ⁠https://lrb.me/ffbulgakov1⁠ Michael Wood on Bulgakov: ⁠https://lrb.me/ffbulgakov2⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally delivered as a lecture and intended not so much as a defence of religion as an attack on anti-religion. James’s target was the ‘rugged and manly school of science’ and the kind of atheism ‘that goes around thumping its chest offering its biceps to be felt’. In this episode Jonathan Rée and James Wood look at the intellectual environment William James was working in, and against, in the second half of the 19th century, and its parallels in the ‘new atheism’ of today. They also discuss the extraordinary upbringing William (and his novelist brother Henry) received and the advice he offered to anyone contemplating suicide in his essay ‘Is life worth living?’ Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Read more in the LRB: Helen Thaventhiran: William James's Prescriptions https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/helen-thaventhiran/no-dose-for-it-at-the-chemist Michael Wood: William James and modernism https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n18/michael-wood/understanding-forwards Richard Poirier: Williams James's pragmatism https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n19/richard-poirier/copying-the-coyote LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.’ The poem she had in mind turned out to be her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, published in 1854, and described by Ruskin as the greatest long poem of the 19th century. It tells the story of an aspiring poet, Aurora, born in Florence to an Italian mother and an English father, who loses both her parents as a child and moves to England and the care of her aunt. From there she pursues her poetic ambitions to London, Paris, Italy and back to England while negotiating a traumatic love triangle between the vicious Lady Waldemar, the impoverished seamstress Marian, and the austere social-reformer Romney. In this episode, Clare is joined by Stefanie Markovits and Seamus Perry to discuss the wide range of innovations Barrett Browning deploys to fulfil her commitment to immediacy and narrative drive in the poem, and the ways in which she uses her characters to explore the extent of her own emancipatory politics. Read the poem: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/56621/pg56621-images.html Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: John Bayley: https://lrb.me/nabrowning1 Ruth Yeazell: https://lrb.me/nabrowning2 Audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince Albert. Its subject is the death in 1833 of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22, and in its 131 sections it explores the possibilities of elegy more extensively than any English poem before it, not least in its innovative, incantatory rhyme scheme, intended to numb the pain of grief. From its repeated dramatisations of the experience of private loss, 'In Memoriam' opens out to reflect on the intellectual turmoil running through Victorian society amid monumental advances in scientific thought. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the unique emotional power of Tennyson’s style, and why his great elegy came to represent what mourning, and poetry, should be in the public imagination of his time. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read more in the LRB: Frank Kermode: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldtenn1⁠ Seamus Perry: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldtenn2⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a central seam of the fantastic, and in this episode Marina and Adam turn to two writers in that mode who lived over a hundred years apart but drew on the period of the Napoleonic wars: Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen (the pseudonym of Karen Blixen). Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805) is a complex sequence of tales within tales, written from the point of view of the early 19th century but describing events in Spain in the 18th century. It’s a powerful commentary on the preoccupations of the Enlightenment and the repression of historical guilt. In Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Dinesen confronts some of the most unsettling aspect of sexual guilt and desire with psychological astuteness. Adam and Marina discuss the ways in which, in both works, the gothic was able to explore areas of human experience that other genres struggled to accommodate. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/crscfflrbpod Read more in the LRB: On Potocki: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ffpotocki1⁠ On 'Out of Africa': ⁠https://lrb.me/ffpotocki2⁠ On Dinesen's letters: ⁠https://lrb.me/ffpotocki3⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. In this episode 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, perhaps above all, the deification of success. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Read more in the LRB: David Hoy on Nietzsche's life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n01/david-hoy/different-stories⁠ J.P. Stern on 'Unmodern Observations' (or 'Untimely Meditations'): ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n16/j.p.-stern/impatience⁠ Jenny Diski on Elisabeth Nietzsche: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n18/jenny-diski/it-wasn-t-him-it-was-her⁠ LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thornton, she is forced to reassess her assumptions about justice and propriety. At the heart of the novel are a series of righteous rebels: striking workers, mutinous naval officers and religious dissenters. Dinah Birch joins Clare Bucknell to discuss Gaskell’s rich study of obedience and authority. They explore the Unitarian undercurrent in her work, her eye for domestic and industrial detail, and how her subtle handling of perspective serves her great theme: mutual understanding. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: Dinah Birch: The Unwritten Fiction of Dead Brothers https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n19/dinah-birch/the-unwritten-fiction-of-dead-brothers Rosemarie Bodenheimer: Secret-keeping https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n16/rosemarie-bodenheimer/secret-keeping John Bayley: Mrs G https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n05/john-bayley/mrs-g Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which poets have reflected on their own passing, is a small but eloquent one in the history of English poetry. In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider some of its most striking examples, including Chidiock Tichborne’s laconic lament on the night of his execution in 1586, Jonathan Swift’s breezy anticipation of his posthumous reception, and the more comfortless efforts of 20th-century poets confronting godless extinction. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read more in the LRB: Jacqueline Rose on Plath: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldself1⁠ David Runciman on Larkin and his father: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldself2⁠ John Bayley on Larkin ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldself3⁠ Matthew Bevis on Hardy: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldself4⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it confronts the nightmares of modernity. In this episode, Marina Warner is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss the ways in which Kafka extended the realist tradition of the European novel by drawing on ‘simple forms’ – proverbs, wisdom literature and animal fables – to push the boundaries of what literature could explore, with reference to stories including ‘The Judgment’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Report to the Academy’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff Further reading in the LRB: Franz Kafka (trans. Michael Hofmann): Unknown Laws ⁠https://lrb.me/ffkafka1⁠ Rivka Galchen: What Kind of Funny is He? ⁠https://lrb.me/ffkafka2⁠ Judith Butler: Who Owns Kafka? ⁠https://lrb.me/ffkafka3⁠ J.P. Stern: Bad Faith ⁠https://lrb.me/ffkafka4⁠ LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where his only obligation was not to get married. Yet in over fifty years of slow, meticulous writing he articulated a series of unusual and arresting ideas that attacked Kantian and utilitarian notions of duty and morality. In this episode, Jonathan and James look at Bradley’s polemic against John Stuart Mill, ‘My Station and Its Duties’, and other essays in Ethical Studies, which challenge the idea of morality as a product of calm reasoning arrived at by mature, rational minds. For Bradley, morality is a characteristic of communities, determined by people’s differing needs at various stages in their lives, and the universal need for self-realisation can only be achieved through those communities. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Read more in the LRB: Frank Kermode on Eliot and Bradley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n17/frank-kermode/feast-of-st-thomas LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: John Sutherland on Thackeray: https://lrb.me/nathackeray1 Rosemary Hill on 'Frock Consciousness': https://lrb.me/nathackeray2 Audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mark and Seamus turn to elegies for poets by poets, tracing the intricate connections between them. Lowell, Berryman and Bishop’s work was offset by a deep commitment to the literary tradition, and Mark and Seamus identify their shared influences and anxieties. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Further reading in the LRB: Mark Ford: No One Else Can Take a Bath for You ⁠https://lrb.me/ldpoets1⁠ Karl Miller: Some Names for Robert Lowell ⁠https://lrb.me/ldpoets2⁠ Nicholas Everett: Two Americas and a Scotland ⁠https://lrb.me/ldpoets3 Helen Vendler: The Numinous Moose ⁠https://lrb.me/ldpoets4⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular. Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of consciousness, the transformative power of language and the arbitrariness of authority. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff Further reading in the LRB: Marina Warner: You Must Not Ask ⁠https://lrb.me/ffcarroll1⁠ Dinah Birch: Never Seen A Violet ⁠https://lrb.me/ffcarroll2⁠ Marina Warner: Doubly Damned ⁠https://lrb.me/ffcarroll3⁠ Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB. Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014. LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s deeply repressed, coming to terms with the uncompromising educational experiment his father subjected him to as a child – described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘an appalling success’. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Mill’s startlingly honest account of this experience and the breakdown that ensued in his 20s, and the boldness of his life and thought from his views on socialism and the rights of women to his unwavering devotion to his wife, Harriet Taylor, the co-author of 'On Liberty' and other works. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Further reading in the LRB: Sissela Bok on Mill's 'Autobiography': https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n06/sissela-bok/his-father-s-children Alasdair MacIntyre: Mill's Forgotten Victory https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n20/alasdair-macintyre/john-stuart-mill-s-forgotten-victory Panbkaj Mishra: Bland Fanatics https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n23/pankaj-mishra/bland-fanatics Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: David Trotter: Heathcliff Redounding https://lrb.me/nabronte1 John Bayley: Kitchen Devil https://lrb.me/nabronte2 Alice Spawls: If It Weren’t for Charlotte https://lrb.me/nabronte3 Patricia Lockwood: What a Bear Wants https://lrb.me/nabronte4 Buy this book from the London Review Bookshop: ⁠https://lrb.me/crbooklist⁠ Audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksna⁠⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their peculiar emotional power. They discuss Gray’s ambiguous sexuality, his procrastination and class anxieties, and where his humour shines through – as in his elegy for Horace Walpole’s cat. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Further reading in the LRB: John Mullan: Unpranked Lyre ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldgray1⁠ Tony Harrison: ‘V.’ ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldgray2⁠ Read the texts online: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/sorw⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/elcc⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/odfc⁠⁠⁠ LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld⁠ 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. Marina and Anna Della 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. Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' at checkout when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/travel26pod Further reading in the LRB: Salman Rushdie: Calvino ⁠https://lrb.me/ffcalvino1⁠ James Butler: Infinite Artichoke⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://lrb.me/ffcalvino2⁠ Jonathan Coe: Calvinoism ⁠https://lrb.me/ffcalvino3⁠ Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB. Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014. Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which individuals are bounded by self-created horizons, and the extent to which this fits with Transcendentalist notions of progress and independence. They also discuss what his other essays, including ‘Self-Reliance’, ‘Art’ and ‘Nature’, have to say about the importance of thinking one’s own thoughts, and why Emerson had such a powerful influence on writers as varied as Nietzsche, Saul Bellow and Louisa May Alcott. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Read 'Circles' here: https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-first-series/circles/ Read more in the LRB: Tony Tanner on the life of Emerson: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n10/tony-tanner/arctic-habits Colin Burrow on the American canon: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n22/colin-burrow/the-magic-bloomschtick LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values. In this episode Clare is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument’ to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Read more in the LRB: Thomas Keymer on Peacock https://lrb.me/napeacock1 Paul Foot: The not-so-great Reform Act https://lrb.me/napeacock2 Audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksna Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the way each poem deals with the traditional demand of the elegy for consolation, and what happens when the form and language of love poetry subverts elegiac conventions. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Read the poems here: Ben Jonson: On My First Son https://lrb.me/jonsoncrld Anne Bradstreet:In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet https://lrb.me/bradstreetcrld Geoffrey Hill: September Song https://lrb.me/hillcrld Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia https://lrb.me/bishopcrld Read more in the LRB: Blair Worden on Ben Jonson ⁠https://lrb.me/ldch1⁠ Blair Worden on puritanism ⁠https://lrb.me/ldch2⁠ Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldch3⁠ Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop ⁠https://lrb.me/ldch4 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Travels as a text in which empiricism and imagination are tightly woven, where fantastical realms are created to give different perspectives on reality and both writer and reader are liberated from having to decide what to think. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff Further reading in the LRB: Terry Eagleton: A Spot of Firm Government ⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift1⁠ Clare Bucknell: Oven-Ready Children ⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift2⁠ Thomas Keymer: Carry Up your Coffee Boldly ⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift3 Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB. Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014. LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity. In this episode, Jonathan and James discuss the ways in which the book applies this thought to various aspects of Christian doctrine, from sexual relations to the Trinity, and consider why Feuerbach would never have described himself as an atheist. They also look at George Eliot’s remarkable translation of the work, published only thirteen years after the original, which not only ensured Feuerbach’s influence in the Anglophone world but invented a new philosophical vocabulary in English for German thought. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip Further reading in the LRB: James Wood: What next? https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n08/james-wood/what-s-next Terry Eagleton: George Eliot https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠ Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money. In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Further reading in the LRB: John Mullan: Noticing and Not Noticing ⁠https://lrb.me/naausten1⁠ Colm Toíbìn: The Importance of Aunts ⁠https://lrb.me/naausten2⁠ W.J.T. Mitchell: In the Wilderness ⁠https://lrb.me/naausten3⁠ Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023. Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients. Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices