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The LRB Podcast
By The London Review of BooksSociety & Culture
Based on Podcast App listening data
The LRB Podcast episodes
- Who were the English?
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived in Britain – perhaps invited at first, later as invaders – bringing their new customs, religion and language with them, and displacing, killing or subjugating the people who were already here. On this episode, Pablo joins Tom to explore the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss why none of the changes that took place was inevitable and why so few British words survive in modern English, even if the man said to be the first English poet was a cowherd with a British name.
Read Pablo's piece: https://lrb.me/pschefferlrbpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
34 min - On Politics: What is political writing?
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that emerged in the middle of the last century. She joins James to talk about the ways in which the public sphere has changed since Sartre’s book and how Big Tech has assumed an authority like the medieval church, demanding a new form of enlightened resistance.
Lea Ypi is the author of 'Free' (2021) and 'Indignity: A Life Reimagined' (2025)
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
57 min - Fascism in a time of AI
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘every age has its own fascism’, and in their recent book Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have identified ‘end-times fascism’ as a feature of our time, offering a portrait of arsonists and accelerationists who are knowingly pushing the world towards new and greater catastrophes.
On this episode Klein and Taylor join Adam Shatz to discuss what fascism looks like in the age of AI, drone warfare and influencers, and why we have reached a point where tech billionaires declare they are ‘unapologetically on Team Humanity’.
Further listening:
Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith on ecofascism:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/nicapplelrbpod
Spotify: https://lrb.me/nicspotifylrbpod
LRB wesbite: https://lrb.me/niclrbpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
55 min - An Alternative History of the Microphone
The first microphones were invented in the 1870s as components for telephones. By the 1930s, politicians as unalike as FDR and Hitler were using microphones as both audio devices and visual props for projecting power. The history of the microphone often focuses on its function as a technology of transmission, but as David Trotter wrote recently in the LRB, microphones ‘both receive and transmit’, and there is another tradition more concerned with listening than transmitting. In this episode, David joins Tom at the mic to discuss these alternative histories, as well as the role of microphones in the history of eavesdropping, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie The Conversation and the strange cry that Ted Hughes picked up on his RAF radio while doing his National Service.
Read David's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/trotterpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
48 min - On Politics: What happened to the intellectual?
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber's and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the ways in which Hayek’s anti-intellectualism has shaped discourse up to the present day. Where do politicians look for ideas and does the modern marketplace of algorithmic video platforms pose a challenge to independent thought?
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
1 hr 8 min - What’s the point of literary criticism?
As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several answers, and in this episode he joins Tom to discuss them, along with the work of the late Helen Vendler, one of the great critics of the second half of the 20th century, who dedicated a lifetime to the close reading of lyric poetry and ‘believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others’.
Read Colin's piece: https://lrb.me/burrowvendlerpod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
37 min - On Politics: Germany's Far-Right Future?
On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest share for any far-right party in post-1945 Germany. Among the many surprising aspects of the result was the broad, multigenerational support the AfD attracted, on an unusually high turnout of 77 per cent. In this episode, Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, talks to James Butler about the reasons behind the AfD’s success, from the background of economic malaise in the region to Ulrich Siegmund’s successful mix of TikTok and in-person campaigning. They also discuss the legacy of Angela Merkel’s migration policies and whether the ‘firewall’ against far-right coalitions can survive when mainstream parties keep copying the AfD’s rhetoric.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
1 hr 5 min - The Romantic History of the Bayeux Tapestry
The story of why, and how, an arrow ended up in Harold's eye in the Bayeux Tapestry is tied to the politics of the early 19th century, to Napoleon's ambitions and Britain's national pride, and the work of two antiquaries, Anne and Charles Stothard, who travelled to northern France several times to make drawings of the great embroidery.
In this episode from our series on Romantic History, originally released in 2022, Rosemary Hill talks to Roey Sweet about the emergence of the Bayeux Tapestry as an artefact of political importance in the early 1800s and the new breed of multi-disciplinary investigators, who, in the years after the French Revolution, studied everything from woollen threads to tombstones in their efforts to imagine the past.
Listen to other episodes in this series:
From Waterloo to the British Museum, with Neil MacGregor:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep4
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep4s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep4lrb
Salisbury Cathedral, with Tom Stammers:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep1
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep1s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep1lrb
Balmoral, with Colin Kidd:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep2
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep2s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep2lrb
Or find them in all in this Spotify playlist: https://lrb.me/rhspotify
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
1 hr - Roman Scandinavia
In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now Denmark. After Marcus’ death in 180, his German campaigns were abandoned and the Romans withdrew to the Danube. Some of the demobilised troops returned north and ‘revolutionised their cultural world’, as Michael Kulikowski wrote recently in the LRB, ‘by adapting the lessons they had learned in Roman service’. On this episode, Michael joins Tom to discuss his review of an ‘extraordinary book’ by Dagfinn Skre, ‘which gives Scandinavia an ancient history for the very first time’. There is no written record of the period, ‘no text to impose its tyranny of words’, but the proxy evidence – coins, arms, stones, seeds – ‘converges on the existence of a late second-century watershed that produced a complete transformation in Scandinavian society in response to interaction with Rome’. Whether or not a pair of polar bears made it to the Colosseum, however, remains an open question.
Read Michael's piece: https://lrb.me/kulikowskipod
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
35 min - Travel with Close Readings: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city.
In this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.
Listen to the full series of ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, and all our other Close Readings series, with a Close Readings subscription.
Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code SUMMER50 at checkout when you sign up here:
https://lrb.me/crtravelff
Find our full Close Readings travel playlist here: https://lrb.me/crtravelffweb
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 hr 38 min
About The LRB Podcast
From the publisher's feed
The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas, hosted by Thomas Jones and Malin Hay, and featuring our fortnightly 'On Politics' podcast hosted by James Butler.
From the LRB
Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod
Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod
LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod
Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod
Get in touch: [email protected]
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