Close Readings

The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular, not least for the energy and locations it provided for two great booms in London life: financial speculation and a genuinely public print culture. For this episode, Rosemary is joined by Markman Ellis, professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London, to look at the architecture, literature and culture of ‘politeness’ that emerged after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the stories spun out of it by Daniel Defoe and John Gay. They discuss the coffee houses where London’s stock exchange and marine insurance market were created, the front rooms where women enjoyed the new ‘visiting system’ and the increasingly hazardous streets where Moll Flanders and others sought their fortune.

Reading by Fiona Sheehan

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠

Read more in the LRB:

Steven Shapin on coffee: https://lrb.me/lrep901

Tom Paulin on Defoe: https://lrb.me/lrep902

Michael Ledger-Lomas on the South Sea Company: https://lrb.me/lrep903

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‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a kind of dream’, Browning recalled. ‘I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day.’ The result, inspired by a line spoken by Edgar (as Poor Tom) in Act III of King Lear, is a grim, hallucinatory quest poem that exemplifies Browning’s talent for what G.K. Chesterton called ‘the poetry of mean landscapes’.

In this episode, Seamus and Mark read Browning’s mysterious poem as a rejection of the resources and consolations established by the Romantics. They then turn to an earlier narrative poem, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (1843), in which Browning uses a comical, Byronic tone to tell the story of another prophetic figure.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more in the LRB:

Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep901

Matthew Reynolds: https://lrb.me/npep902

Donald Davie: https://lrb.me/npep903

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Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the species depicted by the artist John James Audubon, who lived in the area. Emily Raboteau’s ‘Lessons for Survival’ (2024) takes these murals, along with Raboteau’s own photographs of local birds, as a way into exploring the challenges faced by a mother of two Black sons in New York City living through Hurricane Sandy, the first Trump presidency, Covid and mounting climate breakdown.

In this episode, Meehan and Peter talk through the different aspects of Raboteau’s project of survival, from experiences of gentrification and medical racism to the models it offers for dealing with existential threat and ‘justifiable rage’, and Raboteau’s stylistic achievement of bringing together the urban and natural environment.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture

Further reading in the LRB:

Meehan Crist: When the ice melts: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep901⁠

Liam Shaw: Great Auks: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep902⁠

Richard Fortey: Sea Slugs, Wombats, Microbes: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep903⁠

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If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of postmodernism. Yet for all its playfulness, the book maintains, in its powers of noticing and subtle emotional intelligence, a strong commitment to the real. To examine the debts to realism in Nabokov’s story of a Russian-born academic in the United States, James Wood is joined by Patricia Lockwood, who wrote about Nabokov for the LRB in 2020. They discuss why, despite the cruelty of the narrator, Pnin offers one of Nabokov’s most affectionate portraits, and whether it’s possible to define the style of a writer often referred to as a ‘master stylist’.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor

Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor

Read more on (and by) Nabokov in the LRB:

Patricia Lockwood: https://lrb.me/realismep901

Vladimir Nabokov: ‘The University Poem’ (read by Ralph Fiennes): https://lrb.me/realismep902

Michael Wood: https://lrb.me/realismep903

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The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founded and the West End, with its squares, parks and fashionable ‘season’, was born. But the social whirl stopped abruptly in 1665 with the arrival of plague, which was followed in 1666 by the catastrophic Great Fire of London. To talk about these events and the new city that emerged from the ashes, Rosemary is again joined by Vanessa Harding, emerita professor of London history at Birkbeck. They look at the invaluable observations of Samuel Pepys, the continental ambitions of Christopher Wren and the emergence of political parties from the succession crisis of the 1680s.

Reading by Duncan Wilkins

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠

Further reading in the LRB:

Margaret Anne Doody on Aphra Behn: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep801⁠

Deborah Friedell on Samuel Pepys: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep802⁠

Simon Schaffer on Christopher Wren: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep803⁠

James Shapiro on plague writing: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep804⁠

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According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he was inspired to write his own account.

In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss Keats’s talent for sublime banality, the competing readings of the lover, Porphyro, and the poem's repurposing of Spenserian allegory for a contemporary love story.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/applesignupnp⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/scsignupnp

Read more on Keats in the LRB:

John Bayley: https://lrb.me/npep801

Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep802

Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/npep803

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In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical masterpiece, which marks a revolution in English fiction as significant in its way as the political, scientific and industrial revolutions that it's set against. They look at the novel’s philosophical underpinnings, its treatment of knowledge and desire, money and debt, sex and marriage, and whether or not Casaubon was onto something with his ‘Key to All Mythologies’.

This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/closereadingsmbtc

For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc

Read more on Eliot in the LRB:

Rosemary Ashton:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n14/rosemary-ashton/homage-to-mrs-brater

Terry Eagleton:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak

Rachel Bowlby

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n07/rachel-bowlby/waiting-for-the-dawn-to-come

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At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped to push the settlement to collapse. ‘How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?’ Roy Scranton asks near the start of ‘Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress’ (2025).

For Scranton, the fate of the civilisation at Chaco Canyon is a microcosm for the crisis now confronting humanity. The challenges we face, from climate change to political instability, are so intractable in part because of their complexity. In this episode, Meehan and Peter discuss Scranton’s analysis of our predicament and his proposal for ‘ethical pessimism’, based on resistance to our bias for optimism, as a way of coping with an uncertain future.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture⁠⁠

In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture

Further reading:

Adam Tooze: Trouble Transitioning: ⁠https://lrb.me/nicep8tooze⁠

Further listening:

Meehan Crist's series on 'Climate, Politics and Procreation' on the LRB Podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/meehanpod⁠

Get in touch: [email protected]

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‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wilhelm also bears the intervening influence of modernism, not least in its opening section in which, for twenty pages, our hero simply stands on the street thinking about his life.

In this episode, James Wood discusses the Bellovian prose style with its Melvillian love of words and biblical undertones, and explores the book’s evocation of a postwar Manhattan imbued with masculinist conventionality.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor

Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor

Read more in the LRB:

Saul Bellow talks to Melvyn Bragg:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n08/melvyn-bragg/in-conversation-with-melvyn-bragg-saul-bellow-talks-about-his-new-novel-and-about-the-women-of-eastern-europe⁠

Andrew O’Hagan on Saul Bellow’s letters:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n01/andrew-o-hagan/they-don-t-say-that-about-idi-amin⁠

James Wolcott on Bellow’s later life:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward⁠

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When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half of Westminster up in 1605. But the plot failed, and with James’s reign came a new, lavish court life, the emergence of the first newspapers amid the booming print industry around St Paul’s, and, with the guidance of Inigo Jones, the arrival of the renaissance in London’s architecture with the development of Covent Garden and the first of the city’s squares.

To continue her story of London, Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to see why James’s Stuart settlement eventually failed under the personal rule of Charles I, leading to a civil war in which London became the financial and military headquarters for the victorious Parliamentarians and James’s grand new banqueting house at Whitehall was used as the backdrop for his son’s execution.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applesignuplr⁠⁠

Other podcast apps: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/scsignuplr⁠

Read more in the LRB:

Perry Anderson on the Civil War:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n21/perry-anderson/maurice-thomson-s-war⁠

Blair Worden on the Civil War:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n16/blair-worden/conrad-russell-s-civil-war⁠

Maggie Kilgour on Milton and London:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/maggie-kilgour/pens-and-heads⁠

John Gallagher on Early Modern news:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n03/john-gallagher/quickly-quickly-quickly⁠

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