Close Readings

In ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’ (1979), James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is something like a single living organism, capable of manipulating its circumstances and the environment to suit its needs. While many scientists reject the fullest formulation of this idea, it has nonetheless had a profound influence on our understanding of the ways in which animal and plant life interact with the non-living parts of the environment, to the extent that observations in biological and earth systems science are often assessed for which version of Gaia they might support.

In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith look at the origins of the Gaia hypothesis in the radical work of Lynn Margulis and the contributions of Lovelock’s academic collaborator Dian Hitchcock, and in the science of cybernetics. They then consider the degree to which any formulation of Gaia can explain certain processes, from the impact of the ecological competition between daisies on the reflection of solar radiation to the carbon-silicate cycle and its control of carbon dioxide levels, and consider some of Lovelock’s wilder theories, including his suggestion that humans should merge their minds with those of whales.

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

Read more in the LRB:

Meehan Crist on ‘Novocene’: https://lrb.me/natureep501

Peter Godfrey-Smith on Lovelock: https://lrb.me/natureep502

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In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886).

To discuss The Death of Ivan Ilyich and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman. They consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening, and why the unique authority of his style has proved so resistant to the critiques of realism in the 20th century.

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:

Michael Wood on War and Peace: https://lrb.me/realismep501

James Meek on the death of Tolstoy: https://lrb.me/realismep502

John Bayley on Tolstoy's diaries: https://lrb.me/realismep503

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Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life. As well as its origins and afterlives, they consider the many systems that the novel draws on, challenges, reproduces and mutates – the laws of nature, philosophy, science, the human body, the traditional family – and ask whether the real horror at the heart of Frankenstein is not the creature so much as incest.

The Man Behind the Curtain is a bonus Close Readings series running this year. The next episode will be on ‘Middlemarch’, released in a couple of months.

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 in the LRB:

Anne Barton on Mary Shelley: ⁠https://lrb.me/frankensteincr01⁠

Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein: ⁠https://lrb.me/frankensteincr02

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If historians of medieval London had a patron saint, it might well be Edward I. While many English monarchs chose to leave London to its own devices, Edward decided from the start of his reign in 1272 to put pressure on the city to justify its liberties. The result was a profusion of bureaucracy, most notably in the Letter Books, that describe the life of London and its people in vivid detail, from disputes, petitions and regulations to the names of all the city’s apprentices. This record-keeping was good for the city too, reinforcing a powerful system of guilds supporting hundreds of trades and a flourishing merchant and consumer culture.

But when the Black Death arrived in England in 1348, London’s population was devastated, and its social and economic life transformed. In this episode, Rosemary is joined again by Matthew Davies, professor of urban history at Birkbeck, to continue the story of England’s capital through its rapid rise in the first half of the 14th century and a long period turmoil thereafter, including the Hundred Years’ War, the revolts of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, and the Wars of the Roses.

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

Read more in the LRB:

Tom Johnson: No More Baubles: ⁠https://lrb.me/lrep401⁠

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Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty. The incident caused an irreconcilable rift between the two families, who were both Catholic. Shortly afterwards, the young poet Alexander Pope, also Catholic, was approached by a friend who suggested he turn the incident into a comic poem. The result was one of the bestselling poems of the age, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712), a mock-epic that fused the grand styles of Homer, Virgil and Milton with an acerbic social satire, in which the gods are reimagined as airy sylphs guarding the honour of the heroine, Belinda.

William Hazlitt wrote of the poem that ‘you hardly know whether to laugh or weep’, and in this episode Seamus and Mark discuss why Pope's masterpiece is at once the funniest poem in the English language and an essay on the seriousness of trivial things.

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:

Claude Rawson on 'The Rape of the Lock': https://lrb.me/nppope01

Colin Burrow on Pope: https://lrb.me/nppope02

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The ‘great acceleration’ is a term used to describe the dramatic surge in the 1950s of both human and earth systems indicators that marked a shift from a relatively stable planetary state to one that's characterised by increasing environmental instability. Alongside measures of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane levels, this shift can be tracked in numerous other areas of human activity, such as GDP, financialisation, foreign direct investment and the spread of telecommunications.

In ‘The Burning Earth’ (2024), Sunil Amrith uses history as a way of understanding why we got to this moment, drawing on multiple strands of human activity over more than 500 years to trace the origins of environmental crisis. In this episode, Meehan and Peter interrogate some of Amrith’s major themes and examples, from the damaging impact of 18th-century ideas of freedom on our relationship to the natural world, to his analysis of postwar environmentalism through the figures of Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson and Indira Gandhi.

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

More from the LRB:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n24/alexander-bevilacqua/friend-or-food⁠

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/pooja-bhatia/the-end-of-the-plantocracy⁠

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n05/benjamin-kunkel/the-capitalocene⁠

Meehan Crist and Alison Bashford on Indira Gandhi and the anthropocene:

⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/climate-politics-and-procreation-alison-bashford⁠

Recommendations for the London Review Bookshop from Sunil Amrith: ⁠https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/blog/2025/october/british-academy-book-prize-2025-sunil-amrith-s-reading-recommendations⁠

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‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central to Chekhov’s radical realism. Unlike Flaubert and Ibsen, Chekhov sought to avoid imposing authorial meaning or irony, instead handing over perception to his characters. In this episode, James looks at three of Chekhov’s stories, ‘Gusev’ (1890), ‘The Bishop’ (1902) and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and the ways in which each seeks to curb the judgment or expectations of the reader to foreground the experiences of his characters, even beyond death.

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

Further reading in the LRB:

John Bayley on Chekhov's stories: https://lrb.me/realismep401

Donald Rayfield on Chekhov's love letters: https://lrb.me/realismep402

Joseph Frank on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep403

James Wood on Chekhov's life: https://lrb.me/realismep404

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When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling across England in the wake of the Roman retreat in the early fifth century, the city they found on the north bank of the Thames was hardly a city at all. Within its walls were the great abandoned ruins of antiquity, ‘the works of giants’ as one Anglo-Saxon poet put it, and little else. For hundreds of years the site was patchily inhabited, but two features indicated its future importance. In 604, the first Bishop of London was appointed, leading to the continuous presence of Christianity and the founding of St Paul’s Cathedral; and down the river, the emergence of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic near where Covent Garden is today confirmed the area’s prime position as a trading centre.

By the time Alfred repelled the Danes in the ninth century, London’s value had been realised, and the symbolic movement of the royal court from Winchester to Westminster under Edward the Confessor set London’s trajectory. In this episode, Rosemary is joined by Matthew Davies, professor of urban history at Birkbeck, to trace this story of London through the multiple invasions, grand projects and power struggles that took it from a field of ruins to a flourishing medieval capital.

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:

Eamon Duffy on Westminster: https://lrb.me/lrep301

Ferdinand Mount on Henry III: https://lrb.me/lrep304

Tom Shippey on Alfred: https://lrb.me/lrep302

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on the Strand: https://lrb.me/lrep303

Get in touch: [email protected]

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When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multiple genres and perspectives to interrogate the moral and emotional significance of ‘man’s first disobedience’, self-consciously drawing on the resources of Renaissance tragedy, pastoral and love poetry to achieve his great innovation, the Christian epic. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Milton’s study of temptation and free will became an unparalleled expression of poetic brilliance, from its thrillingly ambiguous and seductive depiction of Satan to its vivid dramatisation of the reproachful lovers confronting the consequences of their misdeeds, and ultimately its claim to being the finest love poem in English.

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:

Colin Burrow: Loving Milton https://lrb.me/npmilton01

Tom Paulin: Milton and the Regicides: https://lrb.me/mpmilton02

Tobias Gregory: Milton’s Theology: https://lrb.me/npmilton03

Get in touch: [email protected]

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In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible.

In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith reflect on the ways Czerski’s book has altered their thinking about the ocean, and whether new perspectives can ever be enough to change public policy.

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

Get the book: https://lrb.me/czerskicr

More from the LRB:

Richard Hamblyn on deep-sea exploration:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n21/richard-hamblyn/hurrah-for-the-dredge

Katherine Rundell on the greenland shark:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/katherine-rundell/consider-the-greenland-shark

Liam Shaw on coral:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n22/liam-shaw/in-the-photic-zone

Amia Srinivasan reviews Peter’s book on octopus minds:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n17/amia-srinivasan/the-sucker-the-sucker

Film: Forecasting D-Day

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/videos/lrb-films-interviews/forecasting-d-day

Next episode: ‘The Burning Earth’ by Sunil Amrith

https://lrb.me/amrithcr

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