Alle afleveringen
488 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
-
On Politics: Can the UK economy ever change?
4 november 2026 · 1 uur 20 min
Despite Andy Burnham’s declared ambition to end forty years of neoliberalism, the first budget under his leadership was limited to cautious measures focused on cost-of-living pressures. What lies behind this inertia, and the apparent resistance of the British state to any transformative policies? James Butler is joined by Aditya Chakrabortty, the Guardian’s senior economics commentator, and Daniela Gabor, a professor of economics at SOAS, to examine the systemic and political obstacles successive governments have faced in delivering the radical reform they keep promising. Lees meer
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
How Prediction Markets Work
29 oktober 2026 · 1 uur
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many losers’. On this episode, he joins Thomas Jones to discuss how prediction markets work, who profits from them, who regulates them (or doesn’t), why they’re often a very bad tool for predicting the future, and what they may tell us about the state of the world. Lees meer
Read Geoff's piece: https://lrb.me/mannlrbpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book
24 oktober 2026 · 54 min
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’. 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://lrb.me/closereadingsmbtc
For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson
22 oktober 2026 · 53 min
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson also called Jameson a ‘great writer’. As Toril Moi wrote recently in the LRB, he was a great reader, too. Moi, who was recruited by Jameson to Duke University in the mid-1980s and remained his colleague there until his death in 2024, joins Thomas Jones on this episode to look back at Jameson’s earlier work, from Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) to The Political Unconscious (1981), and to retrace the intellectual path he took to arrive at that milestone. Lees meer
Read Toril Moi on Fredric Jameson:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n19/toril-moi/fredric-jameson-as-reader
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Who were the English?
14 oktober 2026 · 33 min
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived in Britain – perhaps invited at first, later as invaders – bringing their new customs, religion and language with them, and displacing, killing or subjugating the people who were already here. On this episode, Pablo joins Tom to explore the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss why none of the changes that took place was inevitable and why so few British words survive in modern English, even if the man said to be the first English poet was a cowherd with a British name. Lees meer
Read Pablo's piece: https://lrb.me/pschefferlrbpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: What is political writing?
8 oktober 2026 · 57 min
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that emerged in the middle of the last century. She joins James to talk about the ways in which the public sphere has changed since Sartre’s book and how Big Tech has assumed an authority like the medieval church, demanding a new form of enlightened resistance. Lees meer
Lea Ypi is the author of 'Free' (2021) and 'Indignity: A Life Reimagined' (2025)
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Fascism in a time of AI
6 oktober 2026 · 54 min
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘every age has its own fascism’, and in their recent book Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have identified ‘end-times fascism’ as a feature of our time, offering a portrait of arsonists and accelerationists who are knowingly pushing the world towards new and greater catastrophes. Lees meer
On this episode Klein and Taylor join Adam Shatz to discuss what fascism looks like in the age of AI, drone warfare and influencers, and why we have reached a point where tech billionaires declare they are ‘unapologetically on Team Humanity’.
Further listening:
Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith on ecofascism:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/nicapplelrbpod
Spotify: https://lrb.me/nicspotifylrbpod
LRB wesbite: https://lrb.me/niclrbpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
An Alternative History of the Microphone
1 oktober 2026 · 47 min
The first microphones were invented in the 1870s as components for telephones. By the 1930s, politicians as unalike as FDR and Hitler were using microphones as both audio devices and visual props for projecting power. The history of the microphone often focuses on its function as a technology of transmission, but as David Trotter wrote recently in the LRB, microphones ‘both receive and transmit’, and there is another tradition more concerned with listening than transmitting. In this episode, David joins Tom at the mic to discuss these alternative histories, as well as the role of microphones in the history of eavesdropping, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie The Conversation and the strange cry that Ted Hughes picked up on his RAF radio while doing his National Service. Lees meer
Read David's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/trotterpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: What happened to the intellectual?
23 september 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber's and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the ways in which Hayek’s anti-intellectualism has shaped discourse up to the present day. Where do politicians look for ideas and does the modern marketplace of algorithmic video platforms pose a challenge to independent thought? Lees meer
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
What’s the point of literary criticism?
18 september 2026 · 37 min
As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several answers, and in this episode he joins Tom to discuss them, along with the work of the late Helen Vendler, one of the great critics of the second half of the 20th century, who dedicated a lifetime to the close reading of lyric poetry and ‘believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others’. Lees meer
Read Colin's piece: https://lrb.me/burrowvendlerpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: Germany's Far-Right Future?
10 september 2026 · 1 uur 4 min
On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest share for any far-right party in post-1945 Germany. Among the many surprising aspects of the result was the broad, multigenerational support the AfD attracted, on an unusually high turnout of 77 per cent. In this episode, Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, talks to James Butler about the reasons behind the AfD’s success, from the background of economic malaise in the region to Ulrich Siegmund’s successful mix of TikTok and in-person campaigning. They also discuss the legacy of Angela Merkel’s migration policies and whether the ‘firewall’ against far-right coalitions can survive when mainstream parties keep copying the AfD’s rhetoric. Lees meer
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
The Romantic History of the Bayeux Tapestry
6 september 2026 · 1 uur
The story of why, and how, an arrow ended up in Harold's eye in the Bayeux Tapestry is tied to the politics of the early 19th century, to Napoleon's ambitions and Britain's national pride, and the work of two antiquaries, Anne and Charles Stothard, who travelled to northern France several times to make drawings of the great embroidery. Lees meer
In this episode from our series on Romantic History, originally released in 2022, Rosemary Hill talks to Roey Sweet about the emergence of the Bayeux Tapestry as an artefact of political importance in the early 1800s and the new breed of multi-disciplinary investigators, who, in the years after the French Revolution, studied everything from woollen threads to tombstones in their efforts to imagine the past.
Listen to other episodes in this series:
From Waterloo to the British Museum, with Neil MacGregor:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep4
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep4s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep4lrb
Salisbury Cathedral, with Tom Stammers:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep1
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep1s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep1lrb
Balmoral, with Colin Kidd:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep2
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep2s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep2lrb
Or find them in all in this Spotify playlist: https://lrb.me/rhspotify
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Roman Scandinavia
3 september 2026 · 35 min
In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now Denmark. After Marcus’ death in 180, his German campaigns were abandoned and the Romans withdrew to the Danube. Some of the demobilised troops returned north and ‘revolutionised their cultural world’, as Michael Kulikowski wrote recently in the LRB, ‘by adapting the lessons they had learned in Roman service’. On this episode, Michael joins Tom to discuss his review of an ‘extraordinary book’ by Dagfinn Skre, ‘which gives Scandinavia an ancient history for the very first time’. There is no written record of the period, ‘no text to impose its tyranny of words’, but the proxy evidence – coins, arms, stones, seeds – ‘converges on the existence of a late second-century watershed that produced a complete transformation in Scandinavian society in response to interaction with Rome’. Whether or not a pair of polar bears made it to the Colosseum, however, remains an open question. Lees meer
Read Michael's piece: https://lrb.me/kulikowskipod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Travel with Close Readings: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
30 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 37 min
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. Lees meer
In this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.
Listen to the full series of ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, and all our other Close Readings series, with a Close Readings subscription.
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/crtravelff
Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/crtravelffweb
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
-
Seamus Perry: Pluralism and the Modern Poet
26 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 20 min
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? Seamus Perry considers the ways in which modern poets have responded to the demands of pluralism, and whether Auden was right in thinking that a poem that exemplified the pluralist values of liberal democracy would be ‘formless, windy, banal and utterly boring’. Lees meer
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
23 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 11 min
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. Lees meer
Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss the novel that established Henry James as ‘the Master’. They dissect James’s and his characters’ complicated motivations, the significance of his 1905-6 revisions, and the ways in which a ‘primitive plot’ irrupts in a painstakingly subtle and stylish novel.
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/crtravelna
Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/crtravelwebna
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Adam Shatz: Visions of America
19 augustus 2026 · 56 min
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Donald Trump’s vision of Fortress America, at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists and itself, is a violent attempt to resolve what Baldwin called the ‘rich confusion’ of American identity. But there are other possible Americas, some, like Baldwin's, described from voluntary exile. What can they offer at the present moment? Lees meer
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Travel with Close Readings: Byron’s ‘Don Juan’
16 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 54 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. Lees meer
But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’?
In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is, in this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘On Satire'. They see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.
Introduced by Clare and Colin with Thomas Jones.
Listen to the full series of On Satire, and all our other Close Readings series, with a Close Readings subscription.
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/crtravelsatire
Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/crtravelsatireweb
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
-
Amia Srinivasan: The Impossible Patient
12 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us of politics, and to what practical purpose can this knowledge be put? Does psychoanalysis merely describe the world, or could it also change it? Lees meer
This lecture was delivered as part of the LRB's Winter Lecture series in December 2025.
Read more by Amia in the LRB: https://lrb.me/srinivasanwlpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Prelude’ (Books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth
9 augustus 2026 · 48 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
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/crtravelpp
Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/travelwebpp
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Adam Tooze: Electrostates, Petrostates and the New Cold War
5 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 15 min
China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel machismo. An alignment between the three major petrostates – the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia – no longer looks implausible. The outlines of a new Cold War are becoming visible, one which will be determined by a novel mixture of ideology, critical technologies, supply chains and control of energy flows. How will these geopolitical dynamics play out – and what will it mean for global warming? Lees meer
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. A columnist at Foreign Policy and a regular contributor to the LRB, he also writes Chartbook, a newsletter on economics, geopolitics and history. His books include ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’ and ‘Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy’.
Adam Tooze's LRB Autumn Lecture was delivered at the New School, NYC on 27 October 2025
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Travels of Sir John Mandeville’
2 augustus 2026 · 1 uur 3 min
To continue our summer of travel with Close Readings, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the medieval bestseller The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fictional traveller’s fantastical descriptions of different places, peoples and animals across the Holy Land and Asia are almost certainly drawn mainly from other textual sources, rather than direct experience by the unknown author, and yet the work was often used as a source of reference as well as entertainment or prurient interest. Many of the writer’s observations of different political and religious practices could be taken as radical critiques of his homeland. Yet while it often urges appreciation of other cultures, the book is undoubtedly xenophobic and racist in places, foreshadowing the European quest for colonisation: indeed, Christopher Columbus had a copy with him when the Santa Cruz sighted land on 12th October 1492. Lees meer
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' here: https://lrb.me/crtravelmb
Find our full Travel with Close Readings playlist here: https://lrb.me/travelwebmb
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
-
The long history of Black voter suppression in the US
31 juli 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
In April this year, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's voting map on the grounds that state lawmakers had violated the constitution by creating a second district with a majority of Black voters. This was followed by a similar decision by the court in June, giving Alabama the green light to eliminate a Black majority district. At the same time, President Trump has called for more restrictive voting laws and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming midterms. Lees meer
To discuss what the decision in Louisiana v. Callais means for future US elections and the long erosion of voting rights protections, from the limitations of the 15th amendment to the evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Adam Shatz is joined by Mara Gay, a staff writer at the New York Times, and Randall Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: Burnham’s First Week
29 juli 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
Andy Burnham’s early promises to end rough sleeping and sort out social care won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his political career, but his apparent interest in the structures of Whitehall was less expected. To discuss what we know so far about the direction of Britain’s new government, James is joined by Stephen Bush of the Financial Times and Sienna Rodgers of the House magazine. They talk through what the exclusions from Burnham’s cabinet reveal about his political intentions, and why the tax and spending plans inherited from the last government might push him to call a general election next year. Lees meer
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Nolan v. Homer
26 juli 2026 · 52 min
It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the themes of his earlier movies, as once again a male protagonist embarks on a desperate quest to recover a female love object. But, as Emily Wilson argues, while Homer’s Odyssey might seem the perfect source material for Nolan, the ancient Greek poem also excels at many things the director isn't so good at, not least dialogue and characterisation. Lees meer
Wilson, who has translated both the Odyssey and the Iliad, joins Thomas Jones to talk through the new adaptation, discussing its echoes of Nolan’s earlier films and his use of the Trojan Horse as a parable about wars built on lies. They also look at the compositional history of Homer’s poem and consider why this archetypal journey narrative is also a story about stasis and the desire to resist time.
Listen to Emily and Tom's Close Readings episode on the Odyssey here:
Apple: https://lrb.me/odysseyapple
Spotify: https://lrb.me/odysseyspotify
LRB website: https://lrb.me/odysseyweb
GET 50% OFF a 12-month Close Readings subscription with the code 'SUMMER50' when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/atasummer50
Read Emily Wilson on Nolan's ‘Odyssey’ in the LRB:
https://lrb.me/wilsonodysseypod
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Palantir and the NHS
22 juli 2026 · 47 min
The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government’, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin wrote recently in the LRB. The newsletter where they work, Democracy for Sale, ‘has been looking into Palantir’s business in the UK, and particularly its contracts with the NHS’. On this episode, Peter joins Thomas Jones to discuss the company's origins, rapid rise and expansion – with the help of Peter Mandelson – into the British state. They talk about the risks of handing our most personal data over to a company whose billionaire founders have poured millions into right-wing political campaigns in the US, and ask whether the software’s actually any good at doing what it promises. Lees meer
Read Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin on Palantir: https://lrb.me/palantirpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: The US at 250
15 juli 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
Would the Founding Fathers recognise the modern United States as the republic they declared in 1776? The nation formed from Britain’s North American colonies has become the most powerful and prosperous in the world, but the muted celebrations on 4 July reflected a divided country in which, for many of its citizens, the principles of the Declaration of Independence are hard to square with what’s happened to its democratic institutions. Lees meer
James is joined by Gary Gerstle, a professor of history at Cambridge, to reflect on some of the major changes in the political evolution of the United States, including the expansion of federal power in the 20th century, the perpetual state of war since 1941 and the voluntary ceding of influence by Congress to the executive under Trump. They also look at the past and future of the US ‘special relationship’ with the UK and what could come next for American democracy following this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpoliticsFrom the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Poetry and the Turning World: Money
13 juli 2026 · 1 uur 31 min
In the sixth episode of their series, Sarah and Sandeep look at poems that explore the complexities of money and its metaphorical power: Frederick Seidel’s ‘In Late December’ starts with an image of degradation in the symbolic heart of global capitalism but ends with an ambiguous vision of the undead in an apparent appeal to common humanity; in Ella Frears’s Goodlord, an email from an estate agent triggers a stream-of-consciousness tour through a series of barely-habitable rental properties and a reflection on a financial system that traps people in dehumanising accommodation; and Danez Smith’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ provides a satirical exploration of the relationship between race, poverty and systemic exploitation, describing a compressed history of the evolution of oppression from slavery to sharecropping to the modern exploitations of capitalism. Lees meer
Read Frederick Seidel's 'In Late December' in the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n24/frederick-seidel/in-late-december
Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Among the Private Spies
8 juli 2026 · 38 min
The Trump-Russia dossier, leaked to the press in 2017, contained multiple allegations of collusion between the US president and Putin, including reports of meetings between Kremlin officials and members of Trump’s campaign team, and the existence of kompromat in the form of the infamous ‘pee tape’. Shortly after the dossier was leaked, Christopher Steele, the head of a private business intelligence firm called Orbis, was named as its author. Steele claimed that his company had access to sources which allowed them to ‘illuminate Vladimir Putin’s autocratic and closed regime’. In a review of Steele’s memoir in the LRB, Vadim Nikitin called the dossier ‘shoddy’ and ‘full of uncorroborated and implausible’ material. None of its claims have been proven. Lees meer
In this episode, Vadim joins Thomas Jones to discuss the legacy of the dossier, Steele’s career before and after its release and how the internal workings of the business intelligence industry are influencing politics in both the US and the UK.
Archive:
‘The Rachel Maddow Show’/MSNBC
‘Russian oligarch met with Cohen at Trump tower’/CNN
‘This House Prefers Style Over Substance’/Cambridge Union
‘Special Report: Mueller report release’/CBS News
‘Your World’/Fox News
‘Times Radio Breakfast’/Times News
More from the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Poetry and the Turning World: Food
5 juli 2026 · 1 uur 23 min
The most popular modern food poem is probably William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’, in which the speaker confesses to eating the plums his wife was saving for breakfast. Food has often been a means for poetry to represent intimate relationships, but, as Sarah and Sandeep explore in this episode, it has also provided ways of thinking about alienation, societal change, survival and displacement. In Tony Harrison’s 'V.', supermarkets and food providers become central motifs in a discussion of Britain’s changing landscapes; Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart uses the memory of a grandfather planting yogurt under a tree as a means of understanding the aftermath of Partition; and in Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s ‘Communion’, set in the Beddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, lentils become part of a living archive through which experiences are transmitted across generations. Lees meer
Read Tony Harrison's 'V.' in the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v
Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: The Andy Burnham Show
1 juli 2026 · 1 uur 8 min
Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak economy. To dissect the collapse of the Starmer project and the prospects for a Burnham administration, James is joined by Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for the Times, and William Davies, a political economist at Goldsmiths. Lees meer
Patrick Maguire is the author of 'Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer',.
William Davies is a regular contributor to the LRB and the author of 'This is Not Normal: The collapse of liberal Britain' among other books.
Read William Davies on Burnham: https://lrb.me/opburnham01
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Poetry and the Turning World: Weather
28 juni 2026 · 1 uur 15 min
In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between internal and external experiences. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep look at the ways in which weather has functioned as a poetic tool, and consider three recent poems which describe the intimate and communal effects of atmospheric events: Maureen McLane's ‘Rocks’, with its ‘rain/when I’d just told her it would hold off’; ‘Surface Mapping’ by Jake Skeets, describing the death of 191 horses on Navajo land during a drought; and Ishion Hutchinson's ‘After the Hurricane’, in which the silence after a violent storm becomes a space to assess different forms of aftermath. Lees meer
Read Maureen McLane's 'Rocks' in the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/maureen-n.-mclane/rocks
Book tickets to a live recording of this series: https://lrb.me/ptwtickets
Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
World Cup Cupidity
24 juni 2026 · 51 min
‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is that a nostalgic illusion? The second competition, held in Italy in 1934, was a podium for Mussolini and, as Skinner puts it, ‘an early advertisement of the tournament’s potential service to politically repressive hosts’ that has continued through the years to Russia 2018, Qatar 2022 and the ‘Fifa-MAGA pageant’ of 2026. Lees meer
In this episode Simon Skinner and Natasha Chahal join Tom to talk about the long relationship between football and politics and why Roberto Baggio can offer us no consolation.
Read more:
Simon Skinner: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod1
Natasha Chahal: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod4
John Lanchester on Qatar: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod2
Thomas Jones on Maradonna: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod3
More from the LRB:
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce
21 juni 2026 · 1 uur 18 min
Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material for poetry, starting with a look at Milton’s prose arguments in favour of divorce and the ways in which ‘confessional’ poets such as Lowell and Sexton took on divorce as a subject alongside other taboo subjects and subverted the traditional poetry of romantic failure. Lees meer
They then turn to three more recent examples. In Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’, a picture of a marriage is constructed through defamiliarised domestic objects and the political metaphors of postwar Germany. Anne Carson’s ‘fictional essay’ The Beauty of a Husband draws on different genres and the writings of Keats to make sense of a chaotic, lonely experience with an untruthful husband. And in ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi chooses the palindromic form of the ‘specular’ as a metaphor for the non-linear collapse of a marriage.
Read Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’ in the LRB: https://lrb.me/divorcepoem
Further listening:
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford on Lowell and Carson: https://lrb.me/ldptwpod
Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: What went wrong with HS2 (and almost everything else)
17 juni 2026 · 1 uur 4 min
HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projected cost of more than £100 billion, and perhaps won’t even be ‘high speed’. To discuss what this failure tells us about Britain’s capacity to build things and the consequences for our everyday lives, James is joined by Gill Plimmer, the FT's infrastructure correspondent, and Matthew Lawrence, director of Common Wealth. They discuss the unique features of the UK’s ‘outsourcing state’, beset by bloated projects weighed down by the increasing costs of private capital, and the long, corrosive impact of the failure of David Cameron’s government to invest in infrastructure when borrowing was cheap. Lees meer
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Poetry and the Turning World: Technology
14 juni 2026 · 1 uur 30 min
When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider what happens when poetry, and poets, meet technology, and why a poem itself can, in Paul Valéry’s description, be such a powerful ‘kind of machine’. They explore ambivalent attitudes to technology in three poems: Mina Loy’s ‘Time Bomb’ is a reflection on the extreme destruction of the atomic bomb and the power of scientific discovery; Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘A World Where News Travelled Slowly’ charts a history of technology that involves the gradual removal of the human body from methods of communication; and in Jorie Graham’s ‘Honeycomb’, fragments of technology reveal a divided self sitting at a desk in front of a computer, seen but not known by multiple tools of surveillance. Lees meer
Read Jorie Graham's poem in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/ptwgraham
Mina Loy's 'Time Bomb' is published in 'The Lost Lunar Baedeker' (Carcanet, 1997, edited by Roger L Conover)
For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Poetry and the Turning World: Work
10 juni 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering the concepts of both work and play in the writing process. They then look at three poems that address workplace experiences. Valzhyna Mort’s ‘Factory of Tears’ and Robert Crawford’s ‘Jesus Christ endorses the new Hillman Imp’ both deploy technocratic, management speak to expose the emotional labour of manual work, in one case for someone trapped in a relentless system, in the other for someone cast out by redundancy. In 'During the Pandemic', Romalyn Ante describes the experience of being an NHS nurse at the start of the Covid pandemic and the role of language in carework. Lees meer
For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day.
Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry
Read Robert Crawford's poem in the LRB: https://lrb.me/crawfordtwep1
Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets
Watch this episode our YouTube channel: https://lrb.me/twep1yt
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: Myths of Populism
3 juni 2026 · 1 uur 12 min
The transformations of European politics over the past twenty years, including Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the rise of post-Soviet strongmen, are often explained as part of a ‘wave’ of populism. But as Jan-Werner Müller argues, populism is best understood as a form of politics that claims to represent the ‘real’ people and delegitimise its opponents, rather than a catch-all way to describe far-right and left-wing movements. Lees meer
In this episode, Müller talks to James Butler about why misleading interpretations of populism have proved so dangerous for traditional parties, and the role of technocracy and digital platforms in the rise of anti-democratic politics.
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Jane Austen's ‘Emma’ and the art of misreading
30 mei 2026 · 1 uur 8 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 the ways in which the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels. Lees meer
Listen to the full episode on the LRB's Close Readings podcast.
Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code EMMA25 when you sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Gaza after the Ceasefire
27 mei 2026 · 1 uur 10 min
Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza six months ago, 904 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded by the Israeli army. Last week, Trump’s Board of Peace released a report complaining of a ‘funding gap’ after reports emerged that it had received only a ‘tiny fraction’ of the $17 billion its members had pledged to rebuild the region.In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Muhammad Shehada and Jehad Abusalim to discuss the ongoing crisis on the ground in Gaza, the economic and political vision of the Board of Peace and the role of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, a transitional body of Palestinian technocrats, in the so-called reconstruction. Lees meer
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
A Rough Guide to Money Laundering
20 mei 2026 · 46 min
More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £1300 circulating for every individual; in the US it’s more than $7000, and the majority of this exists in the highest-denomination banknotes, such as the $100 and €500 bills. So where is it all? Remarkably, nobody really knows, but the assumption is that it’s underpinning much of the world’s criminal activity. Lees meer
John Lanchester joins Tom to talk through the many ways this money is hidden and processed, from the three classic stages of money laundering (placement, layering and integration) to the methods used to bypass banks entirely, through the purchase of agricultural equipment or the use of store cards and cash-only businesses such as vape shops and nail bars.
Read John Lanchester on money laundering: https://lrb.me/lanchester052026pod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
When will AI replace us?
14 mei 2026 · 43 min
Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? Paul Taylor has been looking at code since the time when computer games didn't even have screens, and in this episode he talks to Tom about the enormous changes generative AI has brought to programming and the world of work in the past couple of years, from the threat of Claude’s secretive Mythos to one-person companies, and they consider what jobs might be like in the future, if they exist at all. Lees meer
Read Paul Taylor on Claude: https://lrb.me/taylorclaude
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: A New Era for UK Politics
12 mei 2026 · 1 uur 4 min
In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely vanished in Wales, came a distant second in Scotland (tied with Reform UK), and lost nearly 1500 councillors in England. But while Plaid Cymru and the SNP were victorious in Wales and Scotland, in many ways the results in England were a disappointment for everybody, with no party making the breakthroughs they hoped for and the Conservatives pushed to the fringes. Lees meer
James is joined by Richard King, Rory Scothorne and Andy Beckett to makes sense of this new political map and consider what the collapse of old party loyalties and the rise of nationalist politics means across all three countries.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: The Fall of Orbán, the Rise of Magyar
7 mei 2026 · 1 uur 5 min
For more than a decade, Viktor Orbán has stood alongside Trump and Modi as a global figurehead for authoritarian nationalism, and an inspiration to popular strongmen everywhere with his model for the ‘illiberal’ democratic state. But on April 12 his sixteen-year tenure as Hungary’s prime minister came to an end with a surprisingly gracious concession speech to his opponent, Péter Magyar, who won the country’s general election by a landslide. Lees meer
But if Orbán has fallen, will Orbánism collapse with him? James is joined by journalist Dan Nolan and poet and translator George Szirtes to discuss why Orbán was finally voted out and the challenges Magyar faces in meeting his main election promises of tackling corruption and improving the economy.
Read Jan-Werner Müller on the Hungarian elections: https://lrb.me/ophungary01
Watch 'Magda's Boy: How George Szirtes invented his mother': https://lrb.me/ophungary02
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
James Lasdun's road trip to America's courts
29 april 2026 · 50 min
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun wrote recently in the LRB. Last October, he set out on a road trip across America, with the aim of attending as many different kinds of criminal and civil trials as possible in one month. His journey took him from immigration hearings in Chicago to jury trials in Deadwood to felony proceedings in Louisiana. Lees meer
On this episode of the LRB podcast, James joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ‘swerving tales’ he witnessed on his trip, and whether the ‘brazenly bad-faith goings-on at the Justice Department’ are showing up in local courts.
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: The Pope and the President
23 april 2026 · 1 uur 2 min
When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump has yet to question how many F35s Leo XIV has, but he may as well have done in his angry response to the American pope’s criticism of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran. With the US president’s supporters invoking the Catholic theory of ‘just war’ to defend the bombing of Iran, and the claims of Silicon Valley to offer their own paths to salvation, the Church of Rome faces multiple challenges to its role as a moral and diplomatic force. Lees meer
To consider why the conflict between the pope and the American right has escalated so quickly in the past few weeks, James is joined by Massimo Faggioli, a professor in ecclesiology at the Loyola Institute at Trinity College Dublin, and Jack Hanson, an associate editor at the Yale Review. They also discuss the nature of papal authority and its evolution since the loss of the papal states in 1870, and whether we’re seeing the return of faith to the public sphere or simply the shattering of a consensus about what constitutes religion.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
The War in Lebanon
17 april 2026 · 48 min
Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, designated all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River a ‘Hizbullah kill zone’. Lees meer
In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Joëlle Abi-Rached and Mohamad Bazzi to discuss life on the ground in Lebanon, Israel’s strategic objectives in the region and Hizbullah’s relationship to the the Lebanese state.
This episode was recorded shortly before Trump’s statement announcing the agreement of a ten-day ceasefire.
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
Men Looking at Men
15 april 2026 · 1 uur 7 min
In a recent issue of the LRB, Tom Crewe asked if the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte’s fixation with male figures and the male gaze is evidence not just of a homosocial milieu, but of homosexual desire. Meanwhile, in the same issue of the paper, James Butler reviewed Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations 1400-1750 by the historian Noel Malcolm, who excavates archival evidence of sexual relationships and interactions between men in northern and southern Europe while cautioning against applying modern ideas of queerness to historical figures. Lees meer
Tom and James join Malin to discuss the interplay between their pieces, and to reflect on the ways that modern interpreters attempt to read the history of homosexuality in sometimes patchy archives, as well as on gay art in the past and the present.
Read more in the LRB:
Tom Crewe: Men Watching Men https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142601
James Butler: Cultures of Homosexuality https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142602
Alice Hunt: Out of Rehab https://lrb.me/lrbpod04142603
Also from the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
The philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’
8 april 2026 · 46 min
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. Lees meer
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings when you use the code 'woolf' at checkout:
https://lrb.me/woolfcrpod
(Note: this offer is only available on the link above, through our partner Supporting Cast, and not if you subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts, but you can still listen in Apple Podcasts if you subscribe in Supporting Cast.)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices -
On Politics: Iran and the Oil Crisis
3 april 2026 · 1 uur 10 min
Trump’s war on Iran has highlighted recent dramatic changes in the politics of oil. While the United States still guarantees maritime security in the Middle East, it is no longer the primary beneficiary, with most oil and gas exports from the Persian Gulf going to Asia. In Britain, meanwhile, debates over drilling in the North Sea point to the urgent need for electrification, both to achieve greater energy security and to reach net zero by 2050. Lees meer
In this episode, James is joined by Helen Thompson, a professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge, who argues that the war, though far from inevitable, stems in part from regional and international tensions caused by the shifting of energy flows. They discuss the central role that finance, and insurance in particular, plays in deciding whether tankers can sail, and how energy requirements helped Trump to secure the backing of major US corporations in the 2024 presidential election.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices