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228 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Fear and Trembling' by Søren Kierkegaard
6 januari 2025 · 13 min
The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling appeared under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, and its playful relationship to the reader doesn’t stop there. Described as a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the title page, the book works through a variety of formats in its attempt to understand the nature of faith and the apparently unsolvable paradox that the father of the Abrahamic religions was prepared to murder his own son. James and Jonathan consider whether Kierkegaard thinks we can understand anything, and what Fear and Trembling has in common with the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka. Lees meer
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: Dancing in the Service of Thought https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard1
James Butler: Reading Genesis https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard2
Roger Poole: A Walk with Kierkegaard https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard3
Terry Eagleton: A Long Way from Galilee https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard4
James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a contributor to the London Review of Books. His books include How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self.
Jonathan Rée is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and a freelance writer and philosopher. His most recent book on philosophy is Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English.
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
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Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’
5 januari 2025 · 9 min
Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property. Lees meer
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.
The full list of texts for the series:
Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen
Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray
North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell
Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Anthony Trollope (TBD)
Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot
Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens
Washington Square (1880)/Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James
Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy
New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Introducing ‘Love and Death’
4 januari 2025 · 6 min
Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why the elegy can be a particularly energising form for poets engaging with their craft and the poetic tradition, and how elegy serves an important role in public grieving, remembering and healing. Lees meer
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Introducing ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’
3 januari 2025 · 9 min
Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes the scope of the series, in which she will also be joined by Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis. Together, Anna Della and Marina discuss the ways the fiction of wonder and astonishment can challenge social conventions and open up new ways of living. Lees meer
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.
Texts for the first four episodes:
The Thousand and One Nights (Yasmine Seale’s translation)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
The Travels of Marco Polo (no particular translation) and Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (William Weaver translation)
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Introducing 'Conversations in Philosophy'
2 januari 2025 · 9 min
James Wood and Jonathan Rée introduce their new Close Readings series, Conversations in Philosophy, running throughout 2025. They explain the title of the series and why they'll be challenging a hundred years of academic convention by reuniting the worlds of literature and philosophy. Lees meer
James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a contributor to the London Review of Books. His books include How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self.
Jonathan Rée is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and a freelance writer and philosopher. His most recent book on philosophy is Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English.
The full list of texts for the series:
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, translated by George Eliot
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Circles’ and other essays
John Stuart Mill, An Autobiography
F.H. Bradley, ‘My station and its duties’
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’
William James ‘The Will to Believe’
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’
Jean-Paul Sartre, Theory of the Emotions
Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity
Albert Camus, The Fall
Iris Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: ‘Little Gidding’ by T.S. Eliot
28 december 2024 · 12 min
In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ presents us with an apocalyptic vision of purifying fire. Suggesting that humanity can survive warfare only through renewed spiritual unity, Eliot finds a model in Little Gidding, a small village that for a time in the 17th century served as an Anglican commune before its closure under Puritan scrutiny. Mark and Seamus explore how Eliot’s poetics heighten our sense of the liminal and mystical, and how, by ‘scrambling our brains’, Eliot’s brilliant rhetoric subsumes his bizarre politics. Lees meer
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Frank Kermode: Disintegration
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n02/frank-kermode/disintegration
Helen Thaventhiran: Things Ill Done and Undone
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/helen-thaventhiran/things-ill-done-and-undone
Tobias Gregory: By All Possible Art
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n24/tobias-gregory/by-all-possible-art
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Among the Ancients II: Marcus Aurelius
24 december 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the contradictions of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Said by Machiavelli to be the last of the ‘five good emperors’ who ruled Rome for most of the second century CE, Marcus oversaw devastating wars on the frontiers, a deadly plague and economic turmoil. The writings known in English as The Meditations, and in Latin as ‘to himself’, were composed in Greek in the last decade of Marcus’ life. They reveal the emperor’s preoccupations with illness, growing old, death and posthumous reputation, as he urges himself not to be troubled by such transient things. Lees meer
Non-subscribers can hear the full version of this episode with ads. To listen ad-free and in full to other episodes of Among the Ancients II, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Mary Beard: Was he quite ordinary?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n14/mary-beard/was-he-quite-ordinary
Emily Wilson: I have gorgeous hair
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n11/emily-wilson/i-have-gorgeous-hair
Shadi Bartsch: Dying to Make a Point
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n22/shadi-bartsch/dying-to-make-a-point
M.F. Burnyeat: Excuses for Madness
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n20/m.f.-burnyeat/excuses-for-madness
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: Gwerful Mechain’s ‘Ode to the Vagina’
18 december 2024 · 12 min
For the final episode of their series in search of the medieval sense of humour Irina and Mary look at one of the most remarkable women authors of the Middle Ages, Gwerful Mechain, who lived in Powys in the 15th century. Mechain was part of a lively literary coterie in northeast Wales and in her poem Cywydd y Cedor (‘Ode to the Vagina’) she challenged the conventional approach of her fellow male poets to praise every part of a woman’s body apart from her genitalia. Her witty, combative verses, intended for public performance, deployed a brilliant mastery of the complex metrical tradition of medieval Welsh poetry to discuss the most intimate physical experiences. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Human Conditions: ‘Sister Outsider’ by Audre Lorde
10 december 2024 · 14 min
In the final episode of Human Conditions, Brent and Adam turn to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of prose with exceptional relevance to contemporary grassroots politics. Like Du Bois, Césaire and Baraka, Lorde’s work defies genre: as she argues in this collection, ‘poetry is not a luxury’ but an essential tool for liberation. Throughout her work, Lorde sought to find and articulate new ways of living that encompassed her whole self – as a Black woman, poet, essayist, novelist, mother and lesbian. Brent and Adam discuss Lorde’s radical poetics and politics, and the case for poetry, anger, vulnerability, love and desire as the arsenal of revolution. Lees meer
This podcast was recorded on 21 August 2024.
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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Further reading and listening in the LRB:
Reni Eddo-Lodge & Sarah Shin: On Audre Lorde
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/at-the-bookshop/reni-eddo-lodge-and-sarah-shin-on-audre-lorde-your-silence-will-not-protect-you
Jesse McCarthy & Adam Shatz: Blind Spots
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/blind-spots
Sean Jacobs: Chop-Chop Spirit
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n09/sean-jacobs/chop-chop-spirit
Ange Mlinko: Waiting for the Poetry
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/ange-mlinko/waiting-for-the-poetry
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: 'A Far Cry from Kensington' by Muriel Spark
4 december 2024 · 17 min
In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing was as bitingly satirical as any 20th-century novelist's. A Far Cry from Kensington has a deceptively simple plot: Agnes Hawkins, working for a publisher in London in the 1950s, insults Hector Bartlett, a would-be author, by calling him a ‘pisseur de copie’. Bartlett seeks revenge with the help of Hawkins’s fellow lodger, Wanda, with tragic results. Yet the true plot of any Spark novel is difficult to pin down, not least when the word ‘plot’ is deployed so frequently by her characters to imply conspiracy and misinformation. Colin and Clare discuss Spark’s kaleidoscopic view of reality and the ways in which both Catholicism and Calvinism play through her work. Lees meer
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Jenny Turner:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n15/jenny-turner/she-who-can-do-no-wrong
Frank Kermode:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n17/frank-kermode/mistress-of-disappearances
Susan Eilenberg:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n24/susan-eilenberg/complacent-bounty
James Wood:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n17/james-wood/can-this-be-what-happened-to-lord-lucan-after-the-night-of-7-november-1974
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney
28 november 2024 · 13 min
As an undergraduate, Seamus Heaney visited Station Island several times, an ancient pilgrimage site traditionally associated with St Patrick and purgatory. Decades later, Heaney worked through competing calls for political engagement and his long-lapsed Catholicism in ‘Station Island’, a poem he described as an ‘exorcism’. Lees meer
A dreamlike reworking of Dante’s Purgatorio, ‘Station Island’ describes Heaney’s encounters with the ghosts of childhood acquaintances, literary heroes and victims of the Troubles. Seamus and Mark explore Heaney’s unusually autobiographical poem, which wrestles with the inescapability of politics.
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Paul Muldoon: Sweaney Peregraine
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n20/paul-muldoon/sweaney-peregraine
Seamus Perry: We Did and We Didn’t
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/seamus-perry/we-did-and-we-didn-t
John Kerrigan: Hand and Foot
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n11/john-kerrigan/hand-and-foot
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Among the Ancients II: Apuleius
24 november 2024 · 12 min
Apuleius’ ‘Metamorphoses’, better known as ‘The Golden Ass’, is the only ancient Roman novel to have survived in its entirety. Following the story of Lucius, forced to suffer as a donkey until the goddess Isis intervenes, the novel includes frenetic wordplay, filthy humour and the earliest known version of the Psyche and Cupid myth. In this episode, Tom and Emily discuss Apuleius’ anarchic mix of the high and low brow, and his incisive depiction of the lives of impoverished and enslaved people. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Peter Parsons: Ancient Greek Romances
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n15/peter-parsons/ancient-greek-romances
Leofranc Holford-Strevens: God’s Will
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n10/leofranc-holford-strevens/god-s-will
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: 'Tales of Count Lucanor' by Juan Manuel
18 november 2024 · 15 min
If you’re looking for advice on sustaining a marriage, or robbing a grave, or performing liver surgery, then a series of self-help stories by a 14th-century Spanish prince is a good place to start. Tales of Count Lucanor, written between 1328 and 1335 by Prince Juan Manuel of Villena, is one of the earliest works of Castilian prose. The tales follow the familiar shape of many medieval stories, presented as a kind of medicine to improve the lives of its readers by example. Yet in his preface Manuel makes an unusual assertion about the individuality of all people, a philosophy that, as Mary and Irina discuss in this episode, leads to bizarre and opaque moral messages intended more to make the reader think for themselves than reach a universal conclusion. Lees meer
Find a translation of the Tales here: https://elfinspell.com/CountLucanor1.html
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
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Human Conditions: ‘Black Music’ by Amiri Baraka
10 november 2024 · 18 min
In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of the avant-garde jazz scene. Published while he still went by LeRoi Jones, it provides a composite picture of Baraka’s evolving thought, aesthetic values and literary experimentation. In this episode, Brent and Adam discuss the ways in which Baraka tackled the challenge of writing about music and his intimate connections to the major players in jazz. Whether you’re familiar with the music or totally new to the New Thing, 'Black Music' is an essential guide to a period of political and artistic upheaval. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Further reading in the LRB:
Adam Shatz: The Freedom Principle
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/may/the-freedom-principle
Adam Shatz: On Ornette Coleman
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n14/adam-shatz/diary
Philip Clark: On Cecil Taylor
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/april/cecil-taylor-1929-2018
Ian Penman: Birditis
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n02/ian-penman/birditis
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: 'A Handful of Dust' by Evelyn Waugh
4 november 2024 · 17 min
In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit. In this episode, Colin and Clare look at A Handful of Dust (1934), a disturbingly modernist satire divorced from modernist ideas. They discuss the ways in which Waugh was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, with his belief in the artist as an agent of cultural change, and why he’s at his best when describing the fevered dream of a dying civilisation. Lees meer
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Perry:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n16/seamus-perry/isn-t-london-hell
John Bayley:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n20/john-bayley/mr-toad
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: 'The Prelude' (books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth
28 oktober 2024 · 38 min
Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism. Mark and Seamus discuss why, despite Wordsworth’s claim of being innately republican, discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution is strangely absent from the poem, which is more often preoccupied with romance and the imagination, particularly in their power to soften zealotry. Lees meer
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Perry:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/seamus-perry/regrets-vexations-lassitudes
E.P. Thompson
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n22/e.p.-thompson/wordsworth-s-crisis
Colin Burrow:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/colin-burrow/a-solemn-and-unsexual-man
Marilyn Butler
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n12/marilyn-butler/three-feet-on-the-ground
Thomas Keymer
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/thomas-keymer/after-meditation
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Among the Ancients II: Juvenal
24 oktober 2024 · 15 min
In this episode, we tackle Juvenal, whose sixteen satires influenced libertines, neoclassicists and early Christian moralists alike. Conservative to a fault, Juvenal’s Satires rails against the rapid expansion and transformation of Roman society in the early principate. But where his contemporary Tacitus handled the same material with restraint, Juvenal’s work explodes with vivid and vicious depictions of urban life, including immigration, sexual mores and eating habits. Emily and Tom explore the idiosyncrasies of Juvenal’s verse and its handling in Peter Green’s translation, and how best to parse his over-the-top hostility to everyone and everything. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Remembering Peter Green
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/september/peter-green-1924-2024
Claude Rawson: Blistering Attacks
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n21/claude-rawson/blistering-attacks
Clare Bucknell & Colin Burrow: What is satire?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/on-satire-what-is-satire
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, Part Two
18 oktober 2024 · 15 min
Mary and Irina resume their discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on three stories of female agency, deception and desire. Alibech, an aspiring hermitess, is tricked into indulging her powerful sexual urges; Petronella combines business and pleasure at the expense of her husband and lover; while Lydia demonstrates her devotion by killing hawks and pulling teeth. As Mary and Irina discuss, these stories exemplify the ambiguous depiction of women in the Decameron, where the world is powered by rapacious female lusts, sex has no consequences and conventional morality is suspended. Lees meer
Read more on the Decameron in the LRB: https://lrb.me/decameronpod
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Human Conditions: ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire
10 oktober 2024 · 14 min
Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thought and a precursor to the writings of Césaire's protégé, Frantz Fanon. Césaire was Martinique’s most influential poet and one of its most prominent politicians as a deputy in the French National Assembly, and his Discourse is addressed directly at his country’s colonisers. Adam and Brent consider Césaire’s poetry alongside his political arguments and the particular characteristics of his version of négritude, the far-reaching movement of black consciousness he founded with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: 'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde
4 oktober 2024 · 15 min
By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future. The ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ Wilde observed in the letters of his lover, Alfred Douglas, could equally be applied to Earnest, and the satire of Jane Austen before it, but is it right to think of Wilde’s play as satirical? His characters are presented in an ethical vacuum, stripped of any good or bad qualities, but ultimately seem to demonstrate the impossibility of living a purely aesthetic life free from conventional morality. Lees meer
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Colm Tóibín on Wilde's letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n08/colm-toibin/love-in-a-dark-time
Colm Tóibín the Wilde family: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading-gaol
Frank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n19/frank-kermode/a-little-of-this-honey
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: 'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice
28 september 2024 · 14 min
In his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a way that has few equivalents in English poetry. This diary-style work, written from August to December 1938, reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton has described, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months. Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s lively depiction of the anecdotal abundance of London life and the ways in which its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter. Lees meer
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Samuel Hynes: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n05/samuel-hynes/like-the-trees-on-primrose-hill
Ian Hamilton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n05/ian-hamilton/smartened-up
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Among the Ancients II: Tacitus
24 september 2024 · 14 min
The Annals, Tacitus’ study of the emperors from Tiberius to Nero, covers some of the most vivid and ruthless episodes in Roman history. A masterclass in political intrigue (and how not to do it), the Annals features mutiny, senatorial backstabbing, wars on the imperial frontiers, political purges and enormous egos. Emily and Tom explore the many ambiguities that make the Annals rewarding, as well as difficult, reading and discuss Tacitus’ knotty style and approach to history. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Mary Beard: Four-Day Caesar
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n02/mary-beard/four-day-caesar
Anthony Grafton: Those Limbs We Admire
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n14/anthony-grafton/those-limbs-we-admire
Shadi Bartsch: Fratricide, Matricide and the Philosopher
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n12/shadi-bartsch/fratricide-matricide-and-the-philosopher
Mark Ford: The Death of Petronius
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/mark-ford/the-death-of-petronius
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: Boccaccio's 'Decameron', Part One
18 september 2024 · 47 min
In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been hurt by love, a love ‘more fervent than any other love’, and intends his work as a guide to life and love for young women in particular. In the first of two episodes on Boccaccio’s hundred novelle of sex, dishonesty and foolishness, Mary and Irina consider why both the preface and first story – about the disreputable merchant Cepparello – start with a confession, before looking at the later tale of the gardener Masetto and his noble efforts tending to the needs of every nun in a convent in Lamporecchio. Lees meer
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Read more on Boccaccio the LRB: https://lrb.me/decameronpod
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Human Conditions: ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Du Bois
10 september 2024 · 14 min
Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiography, history, biography, fiction, music criticism and political science, its fourteen essays set the tone for Black literature, political debate and scholarly production for the course of the 20th century. Souls was an immediate bestseller, the subject of furious debate and a foundational work in the new field of sociology. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Subscribe to Close Readings:
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Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: Byron's 'Don Juan'
4 september 2024 · 1 uur 29 min
Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is: they see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness. Lees meer
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Read more in the LRB:
Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/clare-bucknell/his-own-dark-mind
Marilyn Butler: Success
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/marilyn-butler/success
John Mullan: Hidden Consequences
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n21/john-mullan/hidden-consequences
Thomas Jones: On Top of Everything
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/thomas-jones/on-top-of-everything
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones
28 augustus 2024 · 58 min
‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was working at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for sex workers and women who had had non-marital sex. Anxieties around ‘fallen women’ were explored by many writers of the day, but Rossetti's treatment is striking both for the rich intensity of its physical descriptions and the unusual vision of redemption it offers, in which the standard Christian imperatives are rethought in sisterly terms. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society. Lees meer
Read the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
This episode features a full reading of 'Goblin Market' by Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. Watch the reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHW9MevJk
Find more about the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation here: https://www.thepoetryhour.com/foundation
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Read more in the LRB:
Penelope Fitzgerald: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n05/penelope-fitzgerald/christina-and-the-sid
Jacqueline Rose: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/jacqueline-rose/undone-defiled-defaced
John Bayley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n06/john-bayley/missingness
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Among the Ancients II: Lucan
24 augustus 2024 · 14 min
In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Age’, Tom and Emily dive into this brutal and unforgiving epic poem. They explore Lucan’s slippery relationship to power, his rhetorical virtuosity and the influence of Stoicism on his worldview. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract form this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
John Henderson: Dead Eyes and Blank Faces
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n07/john-henderson/dead-eyes-and-blank-faces
Nora Goldschmidt: Pompeian Group Therapy
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/nora-goldschmidt/pompeian-group-therapy
Thomas Jones: See you in hell, punk
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle'
18 augustus 2024 · 42 min
The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. In 'Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight', his most well-known incarnation, Gawain faces a series of peculiar tests and apparently fails them all. 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle', a later poem, takes many elements from 'The Greene Knight' and exaggerates them to the extreme: the cups the knights drink from are so large they’re impossible to drink from, and Gawain faces an even more peculiar sequence of tests, but meets them all perfectly. Irina and Mary discuss the degree to which this exaggeration can be taken as a satire on chivalric expectations, and whether by this point the character of Gawain should be considered more monastic than knightly. Lees meer
Read the text here:
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-sir-gawain-and-the-carle-of-carlisle
Read some Arthurian background in the LRB here:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n24/tom-shippey/so-much-smoke
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Human Conditions: ‘Hope against Hope’ by Nadezhda Mandelstam
10 augustus 2024 · 15 min
After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope. Lees meer
Hope against Hope is a testimony of life under Stalin, and of the ways in which ordinary people challenge and capitulate to power. It’s also a compendium of gossip, an account of psychological torture, a description of the poet’s craft and a love story.
Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to discuss his final selection for Human Conditions. They explore the qualities that make Hope against Hope so compelling: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s uncompromising honesty, perceptiveness and irrepressible humour.
Subscribe to Close Readings:
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Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: Jane Austen's 'Emma'
4 augustus 2024 · 16 min
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Barbara Everett
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romance
John Bayley
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screaming
Marilyn Butler
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-process
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' by Walt Whitman
28 juli 2024 · 11 min
Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and reconfigure the assassination as a symbolic birth of the new America. Seamus and Mark discuss Whitman’s cosmic vision, with its grand democratic vistas populated by small observations of rural and urban life, and his use of a thrush as a redemptive poetic voice. Lees meer
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Among the Ancients II: Plautus and Terence
24 juli 2024 · 15 min
In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting the conventions they simultaneously established. Plautus’ ‘Menaechmi’ is full of coinages, punning and madcap doubling. Terence’s troubling ‘Hecyra’ tells a much darker story of Roman sexual mores while destabilizing misogynistic stereotypes. Emily and Tom discuss how best to navigate these very early and enormously influential plays, and what they lend to Shakespeare, Sondheim and the modern sitcom. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: Solomon and Marcolf
18 juli 2024 · 50 min
The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in this dialogue with Solomon, printed in Antwerp in 1492, that we find him at his irreverent and scatological best as they engage in a battle of proverbial wisdom. Mary and Irina consider some of the more startling and perplexing of the riddles and discuss how the development of Marcolf’s earthy rejoinders tells a story about justice and political power. Lees meer
Read the text here:
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/bradbury-solomon-and-marcolf
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
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Human Conditions: ‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing
10 juli 2024 · 13 min
Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, politically engaged – Lessing wrestles with the breakdown of Stalinism, settler colonialism and traditional gender roles. Pankaj and Adam explore the lived experiences that shaped the novel, its feminist reception and why Pankaj considers it to be one of the best representations of ‘the strange uncapturable sensation of living from day to day.’ Lees meer
Non-subscriber 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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading:
Anita Brookner: Women Against Men
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n16/anita-brookner/women-against-men
Frank Kermode: The Daughter Who Hated Her
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n14/frank-kermode/the-daughter-who-hated-her
Jenny Diski: Why can‘t people just be sensible?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n15/jenny-diski/why-can-t-people-just-be-sensible
Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' by Laurence Sterne
4 juli 2024 · 16 min
'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and irreducible depiction of idiosyncratic country-dwellers that makes a point of never making its point. Yet many of the familiar satirical tricks are there – from radical shifts in scale to the liberal use of innuendo – and in this episode Clare and Colin look at the ways in which the novel stays true to the traditions of satire while drawing on Cervantes, Rabelais, Locke and the fashionable notion of ‘sentiment’ to advance a new kind of nuanced social comedy.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: 'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen
28 juni 2024 · 11 min
Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other great influences, Keats and Shelley. Mark and Seamus discuss the unstable mixture of these forces and the innovative use of rhyme in a poem where the politics is less about ideology or argument than an intuitive response to the horror of war. Lees meer
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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/ppapplesignup
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Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): https://lrb.me/pp6heaney
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Among the Ancients II: Lucian
24 juni 2024 · 15 min
The broad theme of this series, truth and lies, was a favourite subject of Lucian of Samosata, the last of our Greek-language authors. A cosmopolitan and highly cultured Syrian subject of the Roman Empire in the second century CE, Lucian wrote in the classical Greek of fifth-century Athens. His razor-sharp satire was a model for Erasmus, Voltaire and Swift. Emily and Tom share some of their favourite excerpts from ‘A True History’ and other works – with trips to the moon, boundary-pushing religious scepticism and wildly improbable but not technically untrue readings of Homer – and discuss why they still read as fresh and funny today. Lees meer
Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Tim Whitmarsh: Target Practice
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n04/tim-whitmarsh/target-practice
James Davidson: Stomach-Churning
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n02/james-davidson/stomach-churning
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: The Second Shepherds' Pageant
18 juni 2024 · 36 min
In their quest for the medieval sense of humour Mary and Irina come to The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, a 15th-century reimagining of the nativity as domestic comedy that’s less about the birth of Jesus and more about sheep rustling, taxes, the weather and the frustrations of daily life. The pageant was part of a mystery cycle, a collection of plays that revealed religious mysteries through performances of the Christian story and were a central part of community life. Mary and Irina discuss the porous relationship between player and audience in medieval theatre, and the expert stage management of this knockabout semi-biblical farce.
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
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Human Conditions: ‘The Intimate Enemy’ by Ashis Nandy
10 juni 2024 · 14 min
Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western conceptions of masculinity and adulthood served as tools of conquest. Using figures as disparate as Gandhi, Oscar Wilde and Aurobindo Ghosh, Nandy suggests ways in which alternative models of age and gender can provide compelling challenges to colonial authority. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to unpack Nandy’s subtle and unexpected lines of thought and to explain why The Intimate Enemy remains as innovative today as it did in 1983. Lees meer
Non-subscriber 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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: 'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope
4 juni 2024 · 13 min
Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mock-epic tells the story of the Empire of Dullness and its lineage of terrible writers, the Dunces. Unlike other satires featured in this series so far, it makes no effort to hide the identities of its targets. Clare and Colin provide an ABC for understanding this vast and knotty fulmination, and explore the feverish, backstabbing and politically turbulent world in which it was created. Lees meer
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley
28 mei 2024 · 14 min
Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members of the government, before eventually unfolding into a vision of England freed from the tyranny and anarchy of its institutions. As Mark and Seamus discuss in this episode, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, with its incoherence and inconsistencies, amounts to perhaps the purest expression in verse both of Shelley’s political indignation and his belief that, with the right way of thinking, such chains of oppression can be shaken off ‘like dew’. Lees meer
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read more in the LRB:
Seamus Perry: Wielded by a Wizard https://lrb.me/perrypp
Thomas Jones: Hard Eggs and Radishes https://lrb.me/jonespp
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Among the Ancients II: Plato
24 mei 2024 · 12 min
Plato’s Symposium, his philosophical dialogue on love, or eros, was probably written around 380 BCE, but it’s set in 416, during the uneasy truce between Athens and Sparta in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. A symposium was a drinking party, though Socrates and his friends, having had a heavy evening the night before, decide to go easy on the wine and instead take turns making speeches in praise of love – at least until Alcibiades turns up, very late and very drunk. In this episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom discuss the dialogue’s philosophical ideas, historical context and narrative form, and why Aristophanes gets the hiccups. Lees meer
Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading:
Donald Davidson: Plato’s Philosopher
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n14/donald-davidson/plato-s-philosopher
Anne Carson: Oh What a Night (Alkibiades)
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/anne-carson/oh-what-a-night-alkibiades
M.F. Burnyeat: Art and Mimesis in Plato’s Republic
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n10/m.f.-burnyeat/art-and-mimesis-in-plato-s-republic
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: Dame Syrith
18 mei 2024 · 37 min
As Mary and Irina discussed in the previous episode of Medieval LOLs, fabliaux had an enormous influence on Chaucer, but outside of his work, only one survives in Middle English. Dame Syrith, a story of lust, deception and a mustard-eating dog, is medieval humour at its silliest and most troubling. Mary and Irina explore the surprising representations of old women, magic and consent in fabliaux, the poem’s possible role as a pedagogical tool, and medieval audiences’ love for the procuress trope. Lees meer
Read Dame Syrith here: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/salisbury-trials-and-joys-dame-sirth
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
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Further reading in the LRB:
Irina Dumitrescu: Making My Moan
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/irina-dumitrescu/making-my-moan
Tom Shippey: Women Beware Midwives
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n09/tom-shippey/women-beware-midwives
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Human Conditions: ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul
10 mei 2024 · 12 min
In A House for Mr Biswas, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naipaul’s fraught relationship to modernity, and the tensions between his attachment to individual freedom and his insistence on the constraints imposed by history. Lees meer
Non-subscriber 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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
D.A.N. Jones: The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/d.a.n.-jones/the-enchantment-of-vidia-naipaul
Frank Kermode: What Naipaul Knows
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/frank-kermode/what-naipaul-knows
Paul Theroux: Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/paul-theroux/diary
Sanjay Subramahnyam: Where does he come from?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/where-does-he-come-from
Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera'
4 mei 2024 · 14 min
In The Beggar’s Opera we enter a society turned upside down, where private vices are seen as public virtues, and the best way to survive is to assume the worst of everyone. The only force that can subvert this state of affairs is romantic love – an affection, we discover, that satire finds hard to cope with. John Gay’s 1727 smash hit ‘opera’, which ran for 62 performances in its first run, put the highwaymen, criminal gangs and politicians of the day up on stage, and offered audiences a tuneful but unnerving reflection of their own corruption and mortality. Clare and Colin discuss how this satire on the age of Walpole came about, what it did for its struggling author, and why it’s an infinitely elusive, strangely modernist work. Lees meer
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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Political Poems: 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
28 april 2024 · 12 min
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s deeply disturbing 1847 poem about a woman escaping slavery and killing her child was written to shock its intended white female readership to the abolitionist cause. Browning was the direct descendant of slave owners in Jamaica and a fervent anti-slavery campaigner, and her dramatic monologue presents a searing attack on the hypocrisy of ‘liberty’ as enshrined in the United States constitution. Mark and Seamus look at the origins of the poem and its story, and its place among other abolitionist narratives of the time. Lees meer
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read more in the LRB
Matthew Bevis: Foiled by Pleasure: https://lrb.me/bevispp
Alethea Hayter: Reader, I married you: https://lrb.me/hayterpp
John Bayley: A Question of Breathing: https://lrb.me/bayleypp
Colin Grant: Leave them weeping: https://lrb.me/grantpp
Fara Dabhoiwala: My Runaway Slave, Reward Two Guineas: https://lrb.me/dabhoiwalapp
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Among the Ancients II: Pindar and Bacchylides
24 april 2024 · 12 min
In the fifth episode of Among the Ancients II we turn to Greek lyric, focusing on Pindar’s victory odes, considered a benchmark for the sublime since antiquity, and the vivid, narrative-driven dithyrambs of Bacchylides. Through close reading, Emily and Tom tease out allusions, lexical flourishes and formal experimentation, and explain the highly contextual nature of these tightly choreographed, public-facing poems. They illustrate how precarious work could be for a praise poet in a world driven by competition – striking the right note to please your patron, guarantee the next gig, and stay on good terms with the gods.
Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Leofranc Holford-Strevens: Dithyrambs for Athens
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/leofranc-holford-strevens/dithyrambs-for-athens
Barbara Graziosi: Flower or Fungus?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/leofranc-holford-strevens/dithyrambs-for-athens
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Medieval LOLs: Fabliaux
18 april 2024 · 36 min
Fabliaux were short, witty tales originating in northern France between the 12th and 14th centuries, often featuring crafty characters in rustic settings and overwhelmingly concerned with money and sex. In this episode Irina and Mary look at two of these comic verses, both containing surprisingly explicit sexual language, and consider the ways in which they influenced Boccaccio, Chaucer and others. Lees meer
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
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Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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Human Conditions: ‘The Human Condition’ by Hannah Arendt
10 april 2024 · 13 min
In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, the last of the series with Judith Butler, we fittingly turn to The Human Condition (1956). Hannah Arendt defines action as the highest form of human activity: distinct from work and labour, action includes collaborative expression, collective decision-making and, crucially, initiating change. Focusing on the chapter on action, Judith joins Adam to explain why they consider this approach so innovative and incisive. Together, they discuss Arendt’s continued relevance and shortcomings, The Human Condition’s many surprising and baffling turns, and the transformative power of forgiveness. Lees meer
Non-subscriber 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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Jenny Turner: We must think!
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n21/jenny-turner/we-must-think
Judith Butler: 'I merely belong to them'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n09/judith-butler/i-merely-belong-to-them
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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On Satire: The Earl of Rochester
4 april 2024 · 14 min
According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s certainly hard to miss Rochester's enthusiastic use of obscenities, though their precise meanings can sometimes be obscure. As a courtier to Charles II, his poetic subject was most often the licentiousness and intricate political manoeuvring of the court’s various factions, and he was far from a passive observer. In this episode Clare and Colin consider why Restoration England was such a satirical hotbed, and describe the ways in which Rochester, with a poetry rich in bravado but shot through with anxiety, transformed the persona of the satirist. Lees meer
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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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