The LRB Podcast

In a world where communication is only as effective as its ‘truthiness’, numbers are vital to political success. But, as John Lanchester explains on this week’s episode, some of the most influential stats in UK politics are ‘pants’. John joins Tom to discuss why GDP, immigration numbers and English Premier League odds are so frequently misleading, and how we can be better attuned to the misuse of...

Adolfo Kaminsky, a first-class forger while still a teenager, saved thousands of lives as an agent of the French Resistance. After the war, he turned his counterfeiting skills towards anticolonialist causes while building his reputation as a photographer. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Adam Shatz reads his piece on Kaminsky, whom he met in 2019. 'Forgery wasn‘t just an art he perfected,' Shat...

Armed with Thom’s Directory, James Joyce strove to recreate 1904 Dublin as accurately as possible, down to the last solicitor and street railing. But, as Colm Tóibín explains in a recent piece, the novel is pockmarked with errors, only some intentional. Colm joins Tom to discuss Joyce’s deliberate and accidental mistakes, Trieste’s essential influence on the novel, and why a queer reading of Ulyss...

‘Octopuses,’ Amia Srinivasan writes, ‘are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.’ In our third summer reading, Srinivasan explores the paradoxical nature of octopus lives, and the difficulties humans have in understanding them. Read more by Amia Srinivasan in the LRB: lrb.me/srinivasanpod Let us know your thoughts: lrb.me/podsurvey Prod...

Agatha Christie, writes John Lanchester, ‘is the only writer by whom I’ve read more than fifty books. So – why?’ In the second of our summer readings, Lanchester dissects Christie’s compulsive readability, and considers why, despite her brazen lack of style, she was a great experimental formalist. Read more John Lanchester in the LRB: lrb.me/lanchesterpod Let us know your thoughts: lrb.me/podsurve...

In the first of our summer readings, Terry Castle reads her 2005 piece about her “on-again, off-again, semi-friendship” with Susan Sontag. She remembers Sontag as a “great comic character”: a high-minded hobnobber, a moralist and a gossip, seductive and snobbish and a catalytic force for modern feminism. Read more Terry Castle in the LRB: lrb.me/castlepod Let us know your thoughts: lrb.me/podsurve...

Almost eighteen months since Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv residents have resumed something resembling pre-war life. James Meek recently returned to the city, and joins Tom to discuss the new normal: how language is changing and ravers are rebuilding destroyed villages, and what we can expect in the coming months of warfare. Find further reading, and an example of Repair Together in action, on the...

Irina Dumitrescu joins Tom for a Close Readings fusion episode looking at Chaucer’s classical mind, and in particular his use of Ovid’s Heroides in The Legend of Good Women, in which the poet does penance for his poor depictions of women by retelling the stories of Ariadne, Phaedra, Lucrece and others in a more sympathetic light. They discuss Chaucer’s playful attitude to his sources and his mix o...

As Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover exercised a dictatorial influence over the department – and, it seems, everyone else. Meticulous and vindictive, he frequently weaponised secrets while carefully guarding his own. Deborah Friedell grapples with his overwhelming and disturbing legacy in her sweeping review of G-Man, the first Hoover biography in thirty years. She joins Tom to discuss some of...

In her recent piece for the paper, Patricia Lockwood revisits David Foster Wallace’s work in the light of posthumous publications and the shadow of #MeToo. Lockwood joined Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the paper, to discuss Wallace’s troubled status as Saint Dave, where his writing was at its best and whether a novel can benefit from being left unfinished. Find further reading on the episode page:...

As inflation continues to outstrip wage growth for all but the top ten per cent of earners, interest rates look set to keep rising at least until February 2024. The political economist William Davies joins Tom to consider the reasons for high inflation and the Bank of England’s response, what government policies could alleviate the crisis and whether next year’s general election will lead to any s...

Last month, the UK government appointed their first “free speech tsar”, whose stated mission is to protect free speech and academic freedom in universities. But, as Amia Srinivasan argues in a recent article, there's an inherent conflict in those goals. Amia joins Malin to discuss the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) act, whether students are increasingly leaning left and how activists across...

For her final leg across Salisbury Plain, Rosemary Hill is joined by folklorist Jeremy Harte to look at the many groups and stories that have emerged throughout the 20th century to challenge the narratives about Stonehenge presented by archaeologists. From astro-archaeology to the Earth Mysteries Movement, they look out how colonial models of Stonehenge’s history have been overturned and the whole...

For the third episode in her short series on Stonehenge, Rosemary Hill is joined by Seamus Perry to experience the stone circle through the mind and eyes of a Romantic, with the likes of Wordsworth, Blake, Turner and Constable. For these poets and artists, Salisbury Plain took on a gloomy and richly psychological presence, lit with intense personal and political drama, and animated with revolution...

Kevin Okoth and Jeremy Harding join Tom to discuss two recent books reassessing decolonisation. Textbook histories used to describe African independence as more or less complete by the mid-1960s, but millions of people were fighting white minority rule into the 1970s and 1980s, while Cold War rivalry between the US, the Soviet Union and China played out across the continent, often with catastrophi...

In the second episode of her short series looking at why Stonehenge has occupied such an important place in the story of Britain, Rosemary Hill talks to Kate Bennett about the two antiquarians, John Aubrey and William Stukeley, who first treated the stone circle as a material object whose secrets could be revealed through careful measurement, observation and comparison, and so pioneered many of th...

Following the Turkish president’s success in the run-off election on Sunday, Izzy Finkel and Tom Stevenson join Tom to discuss whether Erdoğan’s victory was ever in doubt, why the recent devastating earthquakes and economic turmoil seem to have had so little impact on his support, the challenges faced by the opposition, and the growing importance of xenophobia in Turkey’s politics. Find further re...

Rosemary Hill begins a new four-part series looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge over the past few hundred years, and why it’s come to matter so much in the story of Britain. In the first episode she talks to architectural historian Vaughan Hart about how Inigo Jones and John Wood were inspired by Stonehenge in their designs for Covent Garden and Bath, and how those in turn had an...

Rory Scothorne joins Tom to discuss the evolution of Scottish politics over the past century or so, and how best to understand a country that’s shifted from a centre right electoral majority in the 1950s to a Labour stronghold in the 1980s, to being governed by the SNP since 2007. Is Scotland’s left-wing tradition a myth? And with the loss of Nicola Sturgeon as SNP leader, and the recent scandals...

Spotify, a company worth $23 billion, has come out on top of the streaming wars, and yet it’s never made a profit. Daniel Cohen joins Malin to discuss the history of the platform and how it's changed the way music is made and listened to, and the strangeness of streaming culture, rife with ethical dilemmas. Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/spotifypod Subscribe to Close Readings: lr...

Accused of ‘the largest con in corporate history’, Indian magnate Gautam Adani has lost half his net worth and the indulgence of financial journalists. As Adani comes under increasing scrutiny, so do his troubling political connections – not least with India's prime minister, Narendra Modi. Pankaj Mishra joins Tom to discuss Adani and Modi’s intertwined careers, and their shared role in shaping an...

Two worlds collide in this Close Readings fusion episode in which Mary Wellesley talks to Mark Ford about the medieval in Thomas Hardy and the wider Victorian imagination. They discuss why Hardy liked to present himself as an Arthurian knight, his satirisation of the chivalric ideal in his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, and the way his training as an architect influenced his devotion to poetic spontan...

In his introduction to our twelfth collection of LRB archive pieces, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and Andrew O’Hagan, both younger sons in big families. Their conversation considers the examples of the brothers Mann, Yeats, James and Windsor, and why, as  Czesław Miłosz observed, when there’s a write...

Miranda Carter joins Tom to talk about the life and historical fiction of Mary Renault, whose popular and ingenious retellings of stories from Ancient Greece have never been out of print. They discuss her eventful life, which took her from Edwardian East London to apartheid South Africa, and her meticulous classical reconstructions. Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/maryrenaultpod S...

In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising to do to alleviate (or exacerbate) them. Find further reading on the episode page: lrb.me/sorrystate Subscribe to Close Readings Plus: lrb.me/closereadings Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pri...