Alle afleveringen
488 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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At the Republican National Convention: Day Two
17 juli 2024 · 27 min
Andrew O'Hagan and Deborah Friedell return to the Republican National Convention. They explore second day's theme, Make America Safe Again, and discuss how this convention compares to the last one Andrew attended, the RNC in 2004. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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At the Republican National Convention: Day One
16 juli 2024 · 22 min
Andrew O'Hagan and Deborah Friedell report on day one of the Republican National Convention. They react to Trump's choice of vice president and reflect on the key note speech by Sean O'Brien, the first time the head of the Teamsters' Union has ever addressed the RNC. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Mendez: How I became an audiobook narrator
10 juli 2024 · 20 min
The worst thing you can say to anyone who works in hospitality, Mendez writes, is ‘Maybe you’ll meet someone!’ But a chance encounter while waiting tables lead to their new niche. In this episode, Mendez reads their recent piece about the art of audiobook narration and how they became the voice of Pelé.
Find the original piece and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/mendezpod
Learn more about the Charleston Trust: https://www.charleston.org.uk/exhibition/anne-rothenstein/
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Labour's Big Win
5 juli 2024 · 56 min
John Lanchester, Tom Crewe and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite join James Butler to dissect Keir Starmer's victory and the historic collapse of the Conservative Party. They discuss what the result tells us about the needs and frustrations of the country, the ways in which the new Labour government might achieve some of the things it’s promised and why comparisons with Harold Wilson have been so prevalent.
Read Tom Crewe on fourteen years of the Tories:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/tom-crewe/carnival-of-self-harm
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UK Election Special: The Economy
3 juli 2024 · 59 min
The day before the election, James Butler is joined by William Davies to talk about something everyone seems to agree on: the very poor state of the UK’s public finances. The past fourteen years of Conservative rule began with the technocratic austerity of George Osborne and ended with the return of the ‘grown-ups’, Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak, to inflict more pain. In between came the chaos of Brexit and the Truss-Kwarteng ‘mini-budget’. What will a likely Labour government pick up from this? Are we still stuck in the age of Osborne, or will something resembling the public investment strategy of Bidenomics emerge through initiatives such as the National Wealth Fund and Great British Energy, as Rachel Reeves has promised?
Read Will's latest LRB piece: https://lrb.me/davieselectionpod
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UK Election Special: Foreign Policy
29 juni 2024 · 1 uur 1 min
‘The world is growing more dangerous’ warns the Conservative manifesto, which puts security at the heart of its pitch. The Labour manifesto, on the other hand, doesn’t mention the world beyond the UK at all in its five ‘missions’. Are the Tories simply being honest with voters, or trying to distract from their domestic record? In this episode, James Butler is joined by Tom Stevenson and Iona Craig to discuss the challenges facing the next foreign secretary, from Gaza to the pressures of a possible Trump presidency. Labour’s current approach seems to promise ‘Blair without the Iraq War’, but how far will this allow UK foreign policy to depart from its normal attitude of subservience to the United States?
Read more in the LRB:
Tom Stevenson on diplomacy: https://lrb.me/stevensonelectionpod
James Butler's latest election post: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/june/new-order
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Faked Editions
26 juni 2024 · 43 min
For forty years, Thomas James Wise made a fortune forging copies of books that had never existed, sometimes even convincing their authors they were the real deal. Despite a damning exposé by amateur detectives in the 1930s, Wise never confessed or faced legal repercussions, and his fakes have become collectors’ pieces in their own right. Gill Partington joins Tom to explain Wise’s success and final undoing, and to discuss the value of forgeries, hoaxes and reproductions as art.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/wisepod
Find out more about the Royal Literary Fund: https://rlf.org.uk
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UK Election Special: The Broken State
19 juni 2024 · 54 min
For the second episode of our series on the UK election, James Butler is joined by Sam Freedman to talk about the enormous challenges facing the next government. From hospital waiting lists to criminal court backlogs and even potholes, the fabric of the British state seems to be beyond repair. It’s not simply a problem of funding: poor management, a lack of scrutiny and extreme centralisation combined with the almost total destruction of local government have all played a part. James and Sam consider whether there’s anything to be done about this chronic dysfunction, and whether the next official opposition could in fact be the Liberal Democrats.
Sam Freedman is co-author of the substack Comment is Freed. His book Failed State: Why Britain’s Institutions are Broken and How We Fix Them will be released in July 2024.
Read more from James Butler the LRB:
James Butler on the crisis in care: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/james-butler/this-concerns-everyone
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UK Election Special: Climate
13 juni 2024 · 57 min
In the first in a series of episodes on the UK general election, James Butler is joined by Ann Pettifor and Adrienne Buller to discuss climate policy and its apparent absence from the campaign so far. Several years ago the Labour Party was committed to a Green New Deal but has since backed away from that promise, while the Conservatives have decided that abandoning their own climate commitments is a vote-winner. Ann, Adrienne and James consider why political leadership and courage have disappeared on this issue, what environmental policy might look like with a Labour government, and how Chinese bicycles demonstrate the problem of international climate action.
Read James's latest blog post on the election: https://lrb.me/butlersunakpod
And more on climate in the LRB:
Will Davies on why capitalism won't save the planet: https://lrb.me/daviesclimatepod
James Butler on Andreas Malm and ecoterrorism: https://lrb.me/butlerclimatepod2
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What was the Venetian ghetto?
12 juni 2024 · 41 min
From the ghetto's creation in 1516 until its dissolution at the end of the 18th century, Jews in Venice were confined to a district enclosed by canals, patrolled by guards and locked at night. Yet its residents were essential players in Venetian life, and in practice the ghetto saw far more traffic through its gates than its founders intended. Erin Maglaque joins Tom to discuss what life in the ghetto was like, and why an open-air prison could be considered relatively tolerant by the standards of early modern Europe. Lees meer
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/ghettopod
From the LRB
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Forecasting D-Day
5 juni 2024 · 14 min
The D-Day planners said that everything would depended the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days'. But who would make the forecast? The Meteorological Office? The US Air Force? The Royal Navy? In the event, it was all three. In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence Hogben, a New Zealand-born meteorologist and Royal Navy officer, describes the way this forecasting by committee worked, and why they very almost chose the wrong day.
Read by Stephen Dillane
Find the article and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/ddaypod
Watch the short film based on this piece: https://lrb.me/ddayyt
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On J.G. Ballard
29 mei 2024 · 38 min
J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the Daily Mail and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appealing to both Spielberg and Cronenberg. In a recent piece, Edmund Gordon unpicks the contradictions and contrarianism in Ballard’s non-fiction writing, and he joins Tom to continue the dissection. They explore Ballard’s strange combination of ‘whisky and soda’ conservatism and the avant-garde, what he was trying to achieve through his fiction, and how ‘Ballardian’ Empire of the Sun really is.
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On Festac ’77
22 mei 2024 · 48 min
Marilyn Nance was 23 when she photographed Festac ’77, a global celebration of Black and African art that she described as ‘the Olympics, plus a Biennial, plus Woodstock’. In his review of Nance’s book, Sean Jacobs traces a more fraught history of the festival than her photographs would suggest. Sean joins Tom to discuss what Festac meant for politicians, attendees and the proponents of négritude, third worldism and pan-Africanism.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/festacpod
Find out more about Serious Readers: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb
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Rebecca Solnit: In the Shadow of Silicon Valley
15 mei 2024 · 45 min
Rebecca Solnit has lived in San Francisco since 1980, but the city she used to know is fast disappearing, ‘fully annexed’, as she puts it, by the tech firms from Silicon Valley. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Solnit reads her piece from the 8 February issue of the paper, both a eulogy for the city that’s been lost and a dissection of the dystopia that’s replacing it, ‘returning us’, as she puts it, ‘to a kind of feudalism’.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/solnitpod
Find out more about Coram Boy at Chichister Festival Theatre here: https://www.cft.org.uk/events/coram-boy
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Women in Philosophy
8 mei 2024 · 59 min
The recovery of history’s ‘lost’ women is often associated with the advent of feminism, but, Sophie Smith writes, women’s contributions to Western philosophy have been regularly rediscovered since at least the 14th century. She joins Tom to discuss what we can learn from the women who held their own alongside Plato, Descartes and Hume.
Find Sophie’s piece and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/sophiesmithpod
Find out more about Pace Gallery’s upcoming exhibitions here: https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/
Find out more about Coram Boy at Chichister Festival Theatre here: https://www.cft.org.uk/events/coram-boy
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Unspeakable Acts
1 mei 2024 · 49 min
James Pratt and John Smith were the last men hanged in England for the crime of sodomy, reported to the authorities by nosy landlords who later petitioned for clemency. Tom Crewe joins Thomas Jones to explain how exceptional – and unexceptional – the case was, the historical forces that led to the death sentence and the surprising ambivalence many Londoners felt about ‘unnatural crimes’ in the 1830s.
Find out more about Bluets at the Royal Court theatre here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
Find Tom Crewe’s piece and further reading at the episode page: https://lrb.me/prattsmithpod
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Where does culture come from?
24 april 2024 · 1 uur 11 min
The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. In the closing LRB Winter Lecture for 2024, Terry Eagleton examines various aspects of that history – culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology – in an attempt to broaden the argument and understand where we are now.
Terry Eagleton delivered this lecture as part of the LRB's Winter Lecture series at St James's Church, Clerkenwell, London on 27 March 2024.
Read Terry Eagleton’s lecture in the LRB: https://lrb.me/eagletonwl
Watch the lecture on YouTube: https://lrb.me/eagletonwlyt
Find out more about Bluets here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
LRB Audio
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Remembering the Future
17 april 2024 · 39 min
In her recent LRB Winter Lecture, Hazel V. Carby discussed ways contemporary Indigenous artists are rendering the ordinarily invisible repercussions of ecocide and genocide visible. She joins Adam Shatz to expand on the artists discussed in her lecture, and how they disrupt the ways we’re accustomed to seeing borders, landmasses, and landscapes empty – or emptied – of people.
Find the lecture and further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/carbypod
Watch the lecture on YouTube: lrb.me/carbyyt
Find out more about Bluets at the Royal Court theatre here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
Listen to the We Society Podcast here: https://acss.org.uk/we-society-podcast/
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Leaving Haiti
10 april 2024 · 45 min
Since the 2010 earthquake, ordinary life in Haiti has become increasingly untenable: in January this year, armed gangs controlled around 80 per cent of the capital. Pooja Bhatia joins Tom to discuss Haitian immigration to Chile and the US, the self-defeating nature of US immigration policy and the double binds Haitian refugees find themselves in. Should you pay a bribe if it marks you out as a candidate for kidnapping? Can you be deported to a country without an operating airport? And if asylum laws protect people who are being persecuted, what happens when that covers an entire nation?
Find Pooja's Haiti coverage on the episode page: lrb.me/haitipod
Find out more about Bluets at the Royal Court theatre here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
Listen to the We Society Podcast here: https://acss.org.uk/we-society-podcast/
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Gurle Talk
4 april 2024 · 35 min
Modern English speakers struggle to find sexual terms that aren’t either obscene or scientific, but that wasn’t always the case. In a recent review of Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue, Mary Wellesley connects our linguistic squeamishness to changing ideas about women and sexuality. She joins Tom to discuss the changing language of women’s anatomy, work and lives.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/gurletalk
Listen to Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu on medieval humour: lrb.me/millerstale Lees meerHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The Belgrano Diary: Half a Million Sheep Can't Be Wrong
28 maart 2024 · 33 min
When Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher sends a huge flotilla on an 8000-mile rescue mission – to save a forgotten remnant of the empire, and her premiership. Onboard the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror, Lieutenant Narendra Sethia starts to keep a diary.
This is an extract from the first episode. To listen to the rest of it, and the full series, find 'The Belgrano Diary' in:
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Archive:
‘Good Morning Britain’/ITV/TV-Am, ‘Newsnight’/BBC/BBC News, ‘Falkands War – The Untold Story’/ITV/Yorkshire Television, ‘Leach, Henry Conyers (Oral history)’/Imperial War Museum, ‘President Regan’s Press Briefing in the Oval Office on April 5, 1982’/White House Television Office, ‘Diary’/James M. Rentschler, TV Publica/Radio y Televisión Argentina S.E, The Falklands War: Recordings from the Archive/BBC Worldwide, Parliamentary Recording Unit
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Architecture Repopulated
27 maart 2024 · 51 min
Rosemary Hill, reviewing Steven Brindle’s Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530-1830, celebrates his approach to architecture as a social, collaborative endeavour, where human need (and human greed) stymies starchitectural vision. Rosemary takes Tom on a tour of British and Irish architecture, from the Reformation through industrialisation, featuring big egos, unexpected outcomes and at least one architect she thinks it’s ‘completely fair’ to call a villain.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/brindlepod
Listen to Rosemary on the design of Bath: lrb.me/stonehengepod
And on Salisbury Cathedral: lrb.me/salisburypod
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Introducing: The Belgrano Diary
21 maart 2024 · 4 min
On 2 May 1982, the British submarine HMS Conqueror sank the Argentinian warship, the General Belgrano, killing 323 men. It was the bloodiest event of the Falklands War – and the most controversial.
The account of the sinking given by Thatcher's government was inaccurate in every crucial detail – and the truth would only emerge from the pages of a private diary, written by an officer onboard the submarine.
The Belgrano Diary is a story of war in the South Atlantic, iron leadership, cover-ups and conspiracies, crusading politicians and competing journalists, and an unlikely whistleblower.
A new six-part series from the Documentary Team at the London Review of Books, hosted by Andrew O’Hagan.
Episode One coming 28 March. Find it wherever you're listening to this podcast.
Archive:
‘Good Morning Britain’/ITV/TV-Am
Parliamentary Recording Unit Lees meerHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The Shoah After Gaza
20 maart 2024 · 1 uur
Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss his recent LRB Winter Lecture, in which he explores Israel’s instrumentalisation of the Holocaust. He expands on his readings of Jean Améry and Primo Levi, the crisis as understood by the Global South and Zionism’s appeal for Hindu nationalists.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/aftergazapod
Watch the lecture on YouTube: lrb.me/mishrayt
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The Acid House Revolution
13 maart 2024 · 1 uur 3 min
Between 1988 and 1994, the UK scrambled to make sense of acid house, with its radical new sounds, new drugs and new ways of partying. In a recent piece for the paper, Chal Ravens considers a reappraisal of the origins and political ramifications of the Second Summer of Love. She joins Tom to unpack the social currents channelled through the free party scene and the long history of countercultural ‘collective festivity’ in England.
Read more, and listen ad free, on the LRB website: lrb.me/acidhousepod
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On Giving Up
6 maart 2024 · 55 min
When is giving up not failure, but a way of succeeding at something else? In his new book, which began as a piece for the LRB, the psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips explores the ways in which knowing our limitations can be an act of heroism. This episode was recorded at the London Review Bookshop, where Phillips was joined by the biographer and critic Hermione Lee in a conversation about giving up and On Giving Up, his approach to writing and the purpose of psychoanalysis.
Find Phillips’s 2022 piece On Giving Up and further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/ongivingup
Find future events at the Bookshop: lrb.me/eventspod
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On the Jewish Novel
28 februari 2024 · 57 min
When Deborah Friedell and Adam Thirlwell met twenty years ago, they started a discussion about Jewish identity they are still puzzling over today. Revisiting Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1986), an American take on British antisemitism and the escapist allure of aliyah, Adam and Deborah discuss the nuances of Jewish experience and novel-writing across the Atlantic.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/jewishnovelpod
Watch Judith Butler’s 2011 Winter Lecture: ‘Who owns Kafka?’
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Dr Comfort, Mr Sex
21 februari 2024 · 55 min
Gerontologist, pacifist, novelist, medical doctor and mollusc expert – Alex Comfort was far more than just the author of the staggeringly popular Joy of Sex. In her review of a new biography, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite navigates the convictions and contradictions of this bewilderingly polymathic thinker. She joins Tom to trace Comfort’s life from evangelical child prodigy to the anarchist free love advocate who became emblematic of the sexual liberation movement.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/comfortpod Lees meerHosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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The World's First Author
14 februari 2024 · 47 min
Enheduana was a Sumerian princess who lived around 2300 BCE and composed what is now regarded as the earliest poetry by a known author. Her father, Sargon of Akkad, is said to have created the world’s first empire, stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and as part of his imperial mission he installed his daughter as the high priestess of the temple of the moon god, Nanna, in the city of Ur. In that capacity, Enheduana composed hymns of remarkable beauty, often governed by a powerful authorial voice.
Anna Della Subin joins Tom to discuss a new translation of Enheduana’s complete poems, read some of them in the original Sumerian, and consider the ways in which they challenge our ideas of authorship and literary history.
Read more, and listen ad free, on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/enheduanapod
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Protest, what is it good for?
7 februari 2024 · 1 uur 2 min
From the Egyptian Revolution to Extinction Rebellion, the 2010s were marked by a global wave of spontaneous and largely structureless mass protests. Despite overwhelming numbers and popular support, most of these movements failed to achieve their aims, and in many cases led to worse conditions. James Butler joins Tom to make sense of the ‘mass protest decade’, sharing historical examples, theoretical approaches and first-hand experiences that help explain the defeats of the 2010s.
Find further reading and listen ad free on the episode page: lrb.me/protestdecade
Find the Close Readings podcast in Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or just search 'Close Readings'.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen to all our series in full:
Directly in Apple Podcasts
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Political Poems: Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'
31 januari 2024 · 36 min
In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, described by Frank Kermode as ‘braced against folly by the power and intelligence that make it possible to think it the greatest political poem in the language’.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:
Directly in Apple Podcasts
In other podcast apps
Read the poem here
Further reading in the LRB:
Blair Worden: Double Tongued
Frank Kermode: Hard Labour
David Norbrook: Political Verse
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War in Tigray
24 januari 2024 · 46 min
Ethiopia is one of the world’s most populous countries, and yet the 2020-22 Tigray War and ongoing suffering in the region has been largely ignored by the world at large. Tom Stevenson joins the podcast to break down the history of the conflict, and explore why Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel laureate, has come to preside over such a brutal civil war. He also considers Abiy’s future intentions, both within and beyond his country’s borders.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/tigraypod
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Medieval LOLs: Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale'
17 januari 2024 · 31 min
Were the Middle Ages funny? Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their series in quest of the medieval sense of humour with Chaucer’s 'Miller’s Tale', a story that is surely still (almost) as funny as when it was written six hundred years ago. But who is the real butt of the joke? Mary and Irina look in detail at the mechanics of the plot and its needless but pleasurable complexity, and consider the social significance of clothes and pubic hair in the tale.
Find the Close Readings podcast in Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, or just search 'Close Readings'.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen to all our series in full:
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Proust in English
10 januari 2024 · 49 min
Did the foundational event of Proust’s great novel really happen? Michael Wood talks to Tom about several English translations of In Search of Lost Time, old and new, and what they reveal about different ways of reading the novel. If the dipping of the madeleine in his tea conjures an overwhelming memory of the narrator’s childhood, it is also a challenge to the conscious mind, a product of chance that Proust suggests might easily not have occurred at all.
Find more by Michael on Proust here: lrb.me/woodproustpod
Sign up to Close Readings Plus: lrb.me/plus
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New TV/Old TV
3 januari 2024 · 53 min
James Meek joins Tom to talk about a recent book by Peter Biskind on ‘the New TV’, reviewed by James in the latest issue of the paper. They discuss the rise of cable TV in the 1990s, the emergence of the streaming giants, the power of the showrunner and whether the golden age of television drama is really coming to an end.
Read James's piece: https://lrb.me/meektvpod
Sign up to Close Readings: lrb.me/closereadingspod
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Was Jane Austen Gay? And other questions from the LRB archive
27 december 2023 · 41 min
Tom Crewe, Patricia Lockwood, Deborah Friedell, John Lanchester, Rosemary Hill and Colm Tóibín talk to Tom about some of their favourite LRB pieces, including Terry Castle’s 1995 essay on Jane Austen's letters, Hilary Mantel’s account of how she became a writer, and Alan Bennett’s uncompromising take on Philip Larkin.
Read the pieces:
Terry Castle on Jane Austen
Wendy Doniger: Calf and Other Loves
Hilary Mantel: Giving up the Ghost
Angela Carter: Noovs' hoovs in the trough
Penelope Fitzgerald on Stevie Smith
Alan Bennett on Philip Larkin
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Byron before Byron
20 december 2023 · 41 min
Byron’s early poems – his so-called ’dark tales’ – have been dismissed by critics as the tawdry, slapdash products of an uninteresting mind, and readers ever since have found it difficult not to see them in light of the poet’s dramatic and public later life. In a recent piece for the LRB, Clare Bucknell looked past the famous biography to observe the youthful Byron’s mind at work in poems such as The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814) and Lara (1814), where early versions of the Byronic hero were often characterised by passivity, rumination and choicelessness.
Clare discusses the piece with Tom, and talks about her new Close Readings series, On Satire, with Colin Burrow, which features Don Juan alongside works by Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, John Donne, Muriel Spark and others.
Read Clare's piece on Byron: https://lrb.me/byronpod
Join Clare and Colin Burrow for their series on satire next year, and receive all the books under discussion, access to online seminars and the rest of the Close Readings audio, with Close Readings Plus: https://lrb.me/plusyt
To subscribe to the audio only, and access all our other Close Readings series:
Sign up directly in Apple here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
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Manutius, the Biblophile's Bibliophile
13 december 2023 · 45 min
In Renaissance Venice, Aldus Manutius turned his mid-life crisis into a publishing revolution, printing books that permanently changed the way we read. In a recent review, Erin Maglaque celebrates Aldus as the progenitor of the paperback and a model for late bloomers. She tells Tom about Aldus’s achievements, his monumental ego and his part in the creation of one of the most bizarre books in publishing history.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/manutiuspod
Subscribe to Close Readings Plus here: https://lrb.me/plus
Or just sign up to the Close Readings podcast subscription:
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Camus in the Americas
6 december 2023 · 46 min
Feverish, homesick, bored, awed and on rollerskates: Albert Camus’s travel diaries are a fascinating window into an easily mythologised life. Camus visited the New World twice, and a new translation of his journals reveals his struggle to make sense of his experiences. Adam Shatz joins Tom to explain the ways Camus’s ambivalence towards the Americas sheds light on his tumultuous personal life, his conflicted stance on colonialism and where his humanism deviates from his existentialist peers.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/camuspod
If you want to join Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards on revolutionary thinkers next year, and receive all the books under discussion, access to online seminars and the rest of the Close Readings audio, you can sign up to Close Readings Plus here: https://lrb.me/plus
Or just sign up to the Close Readings podcast subscription:
In Apple Podcasts: lrb.me/camusapple
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Patricia Lockwood on Meeting the Pope
29 november 2023 · 51 min
In June, the pope invited dozens of artists to Rome for the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum’s contemporary art collection. Patricia Lockwood, the author of Priestdaddy and a contributing editor at the LRB, was one of them. She tells Tom more about the surreal experience and why irony, in the words of Pope Francis, is ‘a marvellous virtue’.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/popepod
Read John Lanchester’s pick from the archive: lrb.me/lanchesterpick
Subscribe to the LRB here: lrb.me/now
Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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What was Orwell for?
22 november 2023 · 54 min
George Orwell wasn’t afraid to speak against totalitarianism – but what was he for? Colin Burrow joins Tom to unpick the cultural conservatism and crackling violence underpinning Orwell’s writing, to reassess his vision of socialism and to figure out why teenagers love him so much.
LRB Audio
Discover the LRB's subscription podcast, Close Readings, and audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiopod
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/orwellpod
Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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Next Year on Close Readings: Among the Ancients II
18 november 2023 · 12 min
For the final introduction to next year’s full Close Readings programme, Emily Wilson, celebrated classicist and translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, returns for a second season of Among the Ancients, to take on another twelve vital works of Greek and Roman literature with the LRB’s Thomas Jones, loosely themed around ‘truth and lies’ – from Aesop’s Fables to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
Authors covered: Hesiod, Aesop, Herodotus, Pindar, Plato, Lucian, Plautus, Terence, Lucan, Tacitus, Juvenal, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius.
First episode released on 24 January 2024, then on the 24th of each month for the rest of the year.
How to Listen
Close Readings subscription
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Close Readings Plus
In addition to the episodes, receive all the books under discussion; access to webinars with Emily, Tom and special guests including Amia Srinivasan; and shownotes and further reading from the LRB archive.
On sale here from 22 November: lrb.me/plus
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Next Year on Close Readings: Human Conditions
17 november 2023 · 27 min
In the second of three introductions to our full Close Readings programme for 2024, Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’ll be talking separately to three guests – Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards – about some of the most revolutionary thought of the 20th century.
Judith, Pankaj and Brent will each discuss four texts over four episodes, as they uncover the inner life of the 20th century through works that have sought to find freedom in different ways and remake the world around them. They explore, among other things, the development of arguments against racism and colonialism, the experience of artistic expression in oppressive conditions and how language has been used in politically substantive ways.
Authors covered: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, V. S. Naipaul, Ashis Nandy, Doris Lessing, Nadezhda Mandelstam, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka and Audre Lorde.
First episode released on 14 January 2024, then on the fourteenth of each month for the rest of the year.
How to Listen
Close Readings subscription
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Close Readings Plus
In addition to the episodes, receive all the books under discussion; access to webinars with Adam and his guests; and shownotes and further reading from the LRB archive.
On sale here from 22 November: lrb.me/plus
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Next Year on Close Readings: On Satire
16 november 2023 · 14 min
In the first of three introductions to our full 2024 Close Readings programme, starting in January, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell present their series, On Satire. Over twelve episodes, Colin and Clare will attempt to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in English literature, as they ask what satire is, what it’s for and why we seem to like it so much.
Authors covered: Erasmus, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Earl of Rochester, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark.
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and regular contributors to the LRB.
First episode released on 4 January 2024, then on the fourth of each month for the rest of the year.
How to Listen
Close Readings subscription
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Close Readings Plus
In addition to the episodes, receive all the books under discussion; access to webinars with Colin, Clare and special guests including Lucy Prebble and Katherine Rundell; and shownotes and further reading from the LRB archive.
On sale here from 22 November: lrb.me/plus
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The Infected Blood Scandal
15 november 2023 · 54 min
In the 1970s and '80s, thousands of haemophiliacs in the UK were infected with HIV and hepatitis C through blood products known to be contaminated. In a recent piece, Florence Sutcliffe-Braithewaite outlines the magnitude of the scandal, exacerbated by carelessness, corporate greed and, in one instance, deliberate human experimentation. She joins Malin to discuss the findings and what they mean for survivors. They are joined by Tom Crewe, who reckoned with the Aids crisis in his 2018 article ‘Here was a plague’.
Find Florence and Tom’s articles on the episode page: lrb.me/bloodinquirypod
Read Colm Tóibín's pick from the LRB archive: lrb.me/colmpod
Subscribe to the LRB here: lrb.me/now
Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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The Giant Crypto Fraud
8 november 2023 · 58 min
When Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of fraud last week, the only surprise was how quickly the jury reached their verdict. John Lanchester joins Tom to discuss how the former crypto billionaire ended up facing a life sentence, from his early career in finance and embrace of Effective Altruism to the simple but audacious nature of his crime, and why he found himself in a US court, even though US citizens were banned from using his trading company, FTX.
Read John Lanchester on Sam Bankman-Fried: lrb.me/sbfpod
Read Rosemary Hill's pick from the LRB archive: lrb.me/rosemarypod
Subscribe to the LRB here: lrb.me/now
Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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What is British humour anyway?
1 november 2023 · 38 min
Anglophiles abroad love the British sense of humour – but what does that actually mean? In a recent review for the paper, Jonathan Coe takes a scalpel to the satire boom and its aftermath to find out what, if anything, sets British comedy apart. He joins Malin for a serious chat about comedy and its double-edged role in the UK’s political life.
Further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/coecomedy
Subscribe to the LRB here: lrb.me/now
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Colour Revolution at the Ashmolean (sponsored)
31 oktober 2023 · 5 min
Nineteenth-century Britain is often imagined as gloomy and dark, epitomised by Dickensian grime and Queen Victoria’s prolonged state of black-clad mourning. But in reality this period saw an explosion of colour, following a number of scientific discoveries.
In this short discussion, Charlotte Ribeyrol, co-curator of Colour Revolution, a major new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, talks about some of those technical advances and the dazzling objects visitors will find on display at the show, from jewel-like Pre-Raphaelite paintings to bookcases and socks, as well as some of the debates of the time – between Ruskin, Darwin and others – about the meaning of colour in nature and society.
Colour Revolution runs at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford until 18th February 2024. Find out more here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design
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Who wrote the dictionary?
25 oktober 2023 · 38 min
Compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a seventy-year endeavour that called on thousands of volunteers from all walks of life. The Dictionary People, reviewed by Daisy Hay in the LRB, is a recent attempt to track down the various characters who made the OED possible. Daisy joins Tom to discuss how contributors and their enthusiasms shaped the dictionary to this day.
Further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/dictionarypod
Learn more about the Irish Pages Press: irishpages.org/
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War in Gaza
18 oktober 2023 · 58 min
As the siege on Gaza intensifies, many observers are describing the current Hamas-Israel conflict as a complete overhaul of the region’s status quo. Amjad Iraqi, a senior editor at +972 Magazine, and Michael Sfard, a leading human rights lawyer, join Adam Shatz to discuss the roots and ramifications of the current crisis. This conversation was recorded on 17 October.
Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/waringazapod
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