The LRB Podcast

By The London Review of Books

Society & Culture

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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Patricia Lockwood on Meetin...

11.29.2023

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 ...

The LRB Podcast episodes:

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 ...
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 – ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
06.13.2023 Africa’s Cold War Kevin Okoth and Jeremy Harding join Tom to discuss two recent books reassessing decolonisation. Textbook histories used to describe African independence as more or less complete by the mid-1960s, but millions of people were fighting white minority rule into the ...
06.06.2023 The Lives of Stonehenge: John Aubrey and William Stukeley In the second episode of her short series looking at why Stonehenge has occupied such an important place in the story of Britain, Rosemary Hill talks to Kate Bennett about the two antiquarians, John Aubrey and William Stukeley, who first ...
05.30.2023 Why did Erdoğan win? Following the Turkish president’s success in the run-off election on Sunday, Izzy Finkel and Tom Stevenson join Tom to discuss whether Erdoğan’s victory was ever in doubt, why the recent devastating earthquakes and economic turmoil seem to have had so ...
05.23.2023 The Lives of Stonehenge: Inigo Jones and John Wood Rosemary Hill begins a new four-part series looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge over the past few hundred years, and why it’s come to matter so much in the story of Britain. In the first episode she talks ...
05.16.2023 How radical is Scotland? Rory Scothorne joins Tom to discuss the evolution of Scottish politics over the past century or so, and how best to understand a country that’s shifted from a centre right electoral majority in the 1950s to a Labour stronghold in ...
05.09.2023 What Spotify Wants Spotify, a company worth $23 billion, has come out on top of the streaming wars, and yet it’s never made a profit. Daniel Cohen joins Malin to discuss the history of the platform and how it's changed the way music ...
05.02.2023 Modi's Big Con Accused of ‘the largest con in corporate history’, Indian magnate Gautam Adani has lost half his net worth and the indulgence of financial journalists. As Adani comes under increasing scrutiny, so do his troubling political connections – not least with ...
04.25.2023 Thomas Hardy's Medieval Mind Two worlds collide in this Close Readings fusion episode in which Mary Wellesley talks to Mark Ford about the medieval in Thomas Hardy and the wider Victorian imagination. They discuss why Hardy liked to present himself as an Arthurian knight, ...
04.21.2023 Introducing Past Present Future Past Present Future is a new weekly podcast with David Runciman, host of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most ...
04.18.2023 Sisters Come Second In his introduction to our twelfth collection of LRB archive pieces, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and Andrew O’Hagan, both younger sons in big ...
04.11.2023 Mary Renault's Worldbuilding Miranda Carter joins Tom to talk about the life and historical fiction of Mary Renault, whose popular and ingenious retellings of stories from Ancient Greece have never been out of print. They discuss her eventful life, which took her from ...
04.05.2023 Sorry State In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising to ...
03.28.2023 Pirates of Madagascar Francis Gooding joins Tom to discuss Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber’s posthumously published study of 17th- and 18th-century piracy. Golden Age pirates maintained surprisingly egalitarian working practices, Graeber argues, and legendary pirate republics may have been run on similar grounds. Tom ...
03.21.2023 BookTok With the future of TikTok increasingly uncertain in the US and other countries, Malin Hay talks to Tom about the app’s powerful reading-focused corner, BookTok: what it is, how it works, and the tropes which dominate its favourite genre, romance ...
03.14.2023 How to Plot an Abortion Expanding on her recent Winter Lecture, Clair Wills talks to Tom about the stories people tell about abortions – stories conditioned by tradition, coerced by the courts, compelled by politics and shared in solidarity. They discuss some of the radical ...
03.07.2023 Climate, Politics and Procreation: Jade Sasser In the final episode of this series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to the feminist scholar Jade Sasser. Jade discusses how advocates for population control harness the language of social justice, her students’ highly personal responses ...
02.28.2023 The Reaction Economy William Davies talks to Tom about his recent LRB Winter Lecture, looking at why reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – have become the main currency of the digital public sphere. Ubiquitous surveillance and smartphones have made the spontaneous ...
02.21.2023 Climate, Politics and Procreation: Alison Bashford In the third episode of a four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to historian Alison Bashford. Alison discusses the history of efforts to control population size, how population is thought about in ...
02.14.2023 The Weirdness of Paul Newman The screen legend and salad dressing philanthropist Paul Newman recorded hundreds of personal interviews before destroying the tapes. The surviving transcripts, worked into a recent memoir and documentary series, reveal a more complex Newman than his on-screen laconicism would suggest. ...
02.07.2023 Climate, Politics and Procreation: Banu Subramaniam In the second episode of a four-part series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to Banu Subramaniam, the evolutionary biologist and feminist science scholar. They discuss the global persistence of Malthusian thinking, why the focus of policymakers ...
01.31.2023 The Hayek Puzzle Long before Margaret Thatcher told her cabinet that The Constitution of Liberty was “what we believe”, neoliberal poster boy Friedrich Hayek had been denounced by his mentor as a socialist. Following his review of a new biography, Jonathan Rée speaks ...
01.24.2023 Climate, Politics and Procreation: Loretta J. Ross In the first episode of a four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist talks to activist and feminist scholar Loretta J. Ross. Ross discusses how she's worked to prevent sexual violence by talking to ...

Older episodes

The LRB Podcast

What's The LRB Podcast about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The LRB Podcast episodes:

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

Africa’s Cold War

The Lives of Stonehenge: John Aubrey and William Stukeley

Why did Erdoğan win?

The Lives of Stonehenge: Inigo Jones and John Wood

How radical is Scotland?

What Spotify Wants

Modi's Big Con

Thomas Hardy's Medieval Mind

Introducing Past Present Future

Sisters Come Second

Mary Renault's Worldbuilding

Sorry State

Pirates of Madagascar

BookTok

How to Plot an Abortion

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Jade Sasser

The Reaction Economy

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Alison Bashford

The Weirdness of Paul Newman

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Banu Subramaniam

The Hayek Puzzle

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Loretta J. Ross