The LRB Podcast

By The London Review of Books

What's The LRB Podcast about?

The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Hosted by Thomas Jones and Malin Hay, with guest episodes from the LRB's US editor Adam Shatz, Meehan Crist, Rosemary Hill and more. Find the LRB's new Close Readings podcast in on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or search 'LRB Close Readings' wherever you get your podcasts.

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The LRB Podcast episodes:

04.17.2024
Remembering the Future
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...
04.10.2024
Leaving Haiti
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...
04.04.2024
Gurle Talk
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...
03.28.2024
The Belgrano Diary: Half a Million Sheep Can't Be Wrong
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...
03.27.2024
Architecture Repopulated
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...
03.21.2024
Introducing: The Belgrano Diary
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...
03.20.2024
The Shoah After Gaza
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...
03.13.2024
The Acid House Revolution
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...
03.06.2024
On Giving Up
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...
02.28.2024
On the Jewish Novel
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...
02.21.2024
Dr Comfort, Mr Sex
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...
02.14.2024
The World's First Author
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...
02.07.2024
Protest, what is it good for?
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...
01.31.2024
Political Poems: Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'
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...
01.24.2024
War in Tigray
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...
01.17.2024
Medieval LOLs: Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale'
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...
01.10.2024
Proust in English
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...
01.03.2024
New TV/Old TV
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...
12.27.2023
Was Jane Austen Gay? And other questions from the LRB archive
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...
12.20.2023
Byron before Byron
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...
12.13.2023
Manutius, the Biblophile's Bibliophile
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...
12.06.2023
Camus in the Americas
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...
11.29.2023
Patricia Lockwood on Meeting the Pope
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...
11.22.2023
What was Orwell for?
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...
11.18.2023
Next Year on Close Readings: Among the Ancients II
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...
11.17.2023
Next Year on Close Readings: Human Conditions
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...
11.16.2023
Next Year on Close Readings: On Satire
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...
11.15.2023
The Infected Blood Scandal
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,...
11.08.2023
The Giant Crypto Fraud
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...
11.01.2023
What is British humour anyway?
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,...
10.31.2023
Colour Revolution at the Ashmolean (sponsored)
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...
10.25.2023
Who wrote the dictionary?
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...
10.18.2023
War in Gaza
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...
10.11.2023
Tom Crewe: Wrestling Days
Crass, violent, misogynistic, dumb, fake – and irresistible. Tom Crewe was one of many unlikely diehards who fell sway to the theatre of pro-wrestling, despite and because of its excesses. Here, he reads his 2021 piece unpacking his youthful obsession...
10.04.2023
Into the Volcano
Between 1630 and 1944, Mount Vesuvius was continually erupting, and remains one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes. Yet, as Rosemary Hill explains in a recent piece, the volcano exerted an irresistible pull on poets, tourists and statesmen. She tells...
09.27.2023
What is 'woke capital'?
For many on the right, Arif Naqvi epitomises the idea of the 'woke capitalist'. The private equity multimillionaire has promoted sustainable development and donated heavily to the Gates Foundation to invest in healthcare, but now awaits possible extradition to the...
09.20.2023
Think of a Number
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...
09.13.2023
Adolfo Kaminsky, Beyond Borders
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...
09.06.2023
Fact-Checking ‘Ulysses’
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....
08.30.2023
Amia Srinivasan: The Sucker, the Sucker!
‘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...
08.23.2023
John Lanchester: The Case of Agatha Christie
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...
08.16.2023
Terry Castle: Desperately Seeking Susan
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...
08.09.2023
Life in Kyiv
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,...
08.02.2023
Chaucer's Ovid
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...
07.26.2023
The Secrets of J. Edgar Hoover
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...
07.20.2023
On David Foster Wallace
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...
07.11.2023
Inflation Fixation
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...
07.04.2023
Cancelled
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....
06.27.2023
The Lives of Stonehenge: John Michell and Arthur Pendragon
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...
06.20.2023
The Lives of Stonehenge: Wordsworth and Blake
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...

What's The LRB Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The LRB Podcast episodes:

Remembering the Future

Leaving Haiti

Gurle Talk

The Belgrano Diary: Half a Million Sheep Can't Be Wrong

Architecture Repopulated

Introducing: The Belgrano Diary

The Shoah After Gaza

The Acid House Revolution

On Giving Up

On the Jewish Novel

Dr Comfort, Mr Sex

The World's First Author

Protest, what is it good for?

Political Poems: Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'

War in Tigray

Medieval LOLs: Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale'

Proust in English

New TV/Old TV

Was Jane Austen Gay? And other questions from the LRB archive

Byron before Byron

Manutius, the Biblophile's Bibliophile

Camus in the Americas

Patricia Lockwood on Meeting the Pope

What was Orwell for?

Next Year on Close Readings: Among the Ancients II

Next Year on Close Readings: Human Conditions

Next Year on Close Readings: On Satire

The Infected Blood Scandal

The Giant Crypto Fraud

What is British humour anyway?

Colour Revolution at the Ashmolean (sponsored)

Who wrote the dictionary?

War in Gaza

Tom Crewe: Wrestling Days

Into the Volcano

What is 'woke capital'?

Think of a Number

Adolfo Kaminsky, Beyond Borders

Fact-Checking ‘Ulysses’

Amia Srinivasan: The Sucker, the Sucker!

John Lanchester: The Case of Agatha Christie

Terry Castle: Desperately Seeking Susan

Life in Kyiv

Chaucer's Ovid

The Secrets of J. Edgar Hoover

On David Foster Wallace

Inflation Fixation

Cancelled

The Lives of Stonehenge: John Michell and Arthur Pendragon

The Lives of Stonehenge: Wordsworth and Blake