On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money.

In this abridged version of the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.

To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

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Find further reading and viewing on the episode page: https://lrb.me/mansfieldparkpod

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Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s racism’. His presidency left the United States a far more unequal place at home, with a renewed commitment to deadly imperial adventures abroad. Yet he had a gift for making up stories that ‘made America feel good about itself again’. On the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Lears joins Tom to discuss Reagan’s life and self-made legend, from his hardscrabble Midwestern boyhood to the White House by way of Hollywood, and to consider the lasting effects of his presidency.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/reaganpod

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In the month since Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by a coalition of rebel forces, thousands of political prisoners have been released while many more remain missing, assumed lost to the regime. The most powerful group among the rebels, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has moved to take control of the country while Israel has seized the opportunity to carry out extensive bombing of Syria’s military facilities. In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Loubna Mrie and Omar Dahi to discuss these events and consider what the end of fifty years of Ba’athist tyranny means for the Syrian people both at home and in exile.

Loubna Mrie is a Syrian activist and writer living in the United States.

Omar Dahi is a professor of economics at Hampshire College and a research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Read more in the LRB:

Tom Stevenson: Assad's Fall

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/tom-stevenson/assad-s-fall

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‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn’s zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the blink.’ By the late 1990s, Abba ‘were basically tap water’. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Chal joins Thomas Jones to discuss the foursome’s rise to global domination from distinctly Swedish origins, and whether the arc of history bends towards disco.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/abbamaniapod

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Neal Ascherson has worked as a journalist for more than six decades, reporting from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, its successor states and elsewhere. He has also written more than a hundred pieces for the London Review of Books, from its seventh issue (in February 1980) to its most recent. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on the journalist Claud Cockburn and about his own life and career, from his time as propaganda secretary for the Uganda National Congress to the moment he witnessed preparations for the kidnapping of Mikhail Gorbachev in Crimea but ‘missed the scoop of a lifetime’.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/aschersonpod

Listen to Neal Ascherson deliver his 2012 LRB Winter Lecture: https://lrb.me/aschersonwl

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This week on the LRB Podcast, a free episode from one of our Close Readings series. For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Said by Machiavelli to be the last of the ‘five good emperors’ who ruled Rome for most of the second century CE, Marcus oversaw devastating wars on the frontiers, a deadly plague and economic turmoil. The writings known in English as The Meditations, and in Latin as ‘to himself’, were composed in Greek in the last decade of Marcus’ life. They reveal his preoccupation with illness, growing old, death and posthumous reputation, as he urges himself not to be troubled by such transient things.

Readings by Hazel Holder.

To listen to more Among the Ancients and all other Close Readings series in full, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

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Or purchase a gift subscription: https://lrb.me/audiogifts

Further reading in the LRB:

Mary Beard: Was he quite ordinary?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n14/mary-beard/was-he-quite-ordinary

Emily Wilson: I have gorgeous hair

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n11/emily-wilson/i-have-gorgeous-hair

Shadi Bartsch: Dying to Make a Point

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n22/shadi-bartsch/dying-to-make-a-point

M.F. Burnyeat: Excuses for Madness

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n20/m.f.-burnyeat/excuses-for-madness

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Wynne Godley was by turns a professional oboist, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, an economist at the Treasury and a director of the Royal Opera House. Yet at thirty he found himself ‘living through an artificial self’ and turned to psychoanalysis for help.

Masud Khan was a protégé of D.W. Winnicott and the darling of British psychoanalysis. He was also much else besides. In this unforgettable piece from 2001, Godley describes his baffling and disastrous sessions with Khan.

Read by Duncan Wilkins.

Find the original piece and further reading at the episode page: https://lrb.me/godleypod

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Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the experiences of Gazans during Israel’s subsequent – and ongoing – devastation of the territory.

More in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: Israel's Descent

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent

Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza

Also available to watch: https://youtu.be/_w3Pe00I_Ro

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As Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley was burdened from birth with extraordinary, largely unwanted fame. Before her death in 2023, she spent years as tabloid fodder, less for her sporadic music career than for her highly publicised relationships with Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and Scientology.

In a recent review of her posthumous memoir, Jessica Olin celebrates Lisa Marie’s resilience and charisma in the face of ruthless publicity. Jessica joins Tom to discuss Lisa Marie’s ambivalent relationship with fame, and how a new generation are encountering the Presley family saga through her daughter, Riley Keough.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/lisamariepod

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William Davies joins Tom to assess the efforts of the new Labour government in tackling the UK's many economic challenges. They consider whether Rachel Reeves’s first budget, with its substantial tax rises, can do anything more than arrest the decline of the public finances, and what Keir Starmer hopes to achieve with his public overtures to the likes of Google and BlackRock. Will their technocratic style of government be able to survive the pressures of populist politics, or is their long-term thinking simply too long-term to bring election-winning improvements to people’s everyday lives?

Read William Davies's piece: https://lrb.me/davies4622pod

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