When Sheila Fitzpatrick first went to Moscow in the 1960s as a young academic, the prevailing understanding of the Soviet Union in the West was governed by the ‘totalitarian hypothesis’, of a system ruled entirely from the top down. Her examination of the ministry papers of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment after the Revolution, challenged this view, beginning a long career in which she has frequently questioned the conventional understanding of Soviet history and changed the field with works such as Everyday Stalinism. In this episode, Sheila talks to Daniel about her work in the Soviet archives, about some of the obstacles researchers face, and her latest books, Lost Souls and The Death of Stalin.

Read more by Sheila in the LRB: https://lrb.me/fitzpatrickpod

Sponsored links:

To find out about financial support for professional writers visit the Royal Literary Fund here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/

LRB Audio

Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2013, a group of French and Egyptian archaeologists discovered of cache of papyri as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Some of the texts were written by people who had worked on the pyramids: a tally of their daily labour ferrying stones, for instance, between quarry and building site, and the payment they received in fabrics and beer. Robert Cioffi reviewed The Red Sea Scrolls: How Ancient Papyri Reveal the Secrets of the Pyramids by Pierre Tallet and Mark Lehner in the latest issue of the paper. On the podcast this week, he joins Tom to discuss how and why the pyramids were built, and by whom, as well as his own, hair-raising experiences helping to raise a fallen column at an Egyptian archaeological site.

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

Sponsored links:

To find out about financial support for professional writers visit the Royal Literary Fund here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in 1941 to foster connections with Allied countries and encourage British and US women to ‘invest personally’ in the war effort. Two years later, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship in New York started its own letter-writing programme. The correspondence between a few hundred pairs of women in the US and the Soviet Union – sharing the details of their everyday lives, discovering what they had in common as well as their differences – carried on until the mid-1950s, even as hostilities between their governments escalated. In this episode, Miriam Dobson joins Tom to talk about her recent review of Dear Unknown Friend by Alexis Peri, which documents this ‘remarkable correspondence’. Drawing on her own research, Dobson also discusses other exchanges between ordinary people on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, and how the letter-writing changed the women's ideas about their own lives.

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

LRB Audio

Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair', is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, taken from our Close Readings podcast series 'Novel Approaches', Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use of clothes, curry and the rapidly changing topography of London to construct a turbulent society full of peril and opportunity for his heroine, Becky Sharp, and consider why the Battle of Waterloo was such a recurrent preoccupation in literature of the period.

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

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

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

Sponsored Links:

'Wahnfried' at Longborough Festival Opera: https://lfo.org.uk/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's now possible to take a home pregnancy test eight days after ovulation, yet in the 16th century, women sometimes turned to astrologers for confirmation. And in the 1950s and 1960s, one might send a urine sample to an address in Sloane Street where they would inject it into a tropical frog that would lay eggs. In this episode of the LRB Podcast, Erin Maglaque joins Thomas Jones to discuss how the understanding of conception has changed over the centuries since the early modern period, what knowledge has been gained but also what may have been lost.

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

LRB Audio

Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Judith Butler and Aziz Rana join Adam Shatz to discuss Donald Trump’s use of executive orders to target birthright citizenship, protest, support of Palestinian rights, academic freedom, constitutionally protected speech and efforts to ensure inclusion on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation. They consider in particular the content of Executive Order 14168, which ‘restores’ the right of the government to decide what sex people are, as well as the wider programme of rights-stripping implied by Trump’s agenda.

Read Judith's piece here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/judith-butler/this-is-wrong

Read Adam on Columbia University:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/march/submission

LRB Audio

Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mavis Gallant is best known for her short stories, 116 of which were first published in the New Yorker. Extraordinarily varied and prolific, she arranged her life around the solitary pleasure of writing while battling extreme self-doubt. Tessa Hadley joins Joanne O’Leary to discuss her recent review of 44 previously uncollected Gallant stories and her own forthcoming selection for Pushkin Press. They explore what makes Gallant a ‘writer’s writer’, where her reporting and fiction intersect, and why her novels fail where her short stories succeed.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this extended extract from episode three of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss the book’s intricate structure, Brontë’s inventive use of language and the extraordinary hold that her story continues to exert over the imaginations of readers and non-readers alike.

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

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

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The folk tales collected and rewritten by the Brothers Grimm may ‘seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone’, Colin Burrow wrote recently in the LRB, but ‘this is an illusion’. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Colin joins Thomas Jones to talk about the distinctive place and time in which Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm lived and worked, as well as the enduring appeal and ‘vital weirdness’ of the tales.

Sponsored links:

Visit the Munch exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery: https://www.npg.org.uk/munch

See The Years at the Harold Pinter Theatre: https://theyearsplay.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two recent books, by Peter Beinart and Rachel Shabi, discuss the response of Jewish communities in the West to the Hamas attacks of 7 October and Israel’s subsequent destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, and the shifting politics of antisemitism. In this episode Adam Shatz talks to Peter and Rachel about the moral rupture Israel’s actions have caused, particularly along generational lines, among Jews in both the US and UK, and why the question of antisemitism has become separated from the larger politics of anti-racism, allowing the political right to claim this moral territory in defence of Israel.

Sponsored Link:

Visit the Munch exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery: https://www.npg.org.uk/munch

LRB Audio

Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.