Mary Wellesley talks to Joanna Biggs about islands, blessed and not so blessed, from Homer to the Fyre Festival.

Read more by Mary Wellesley in the LRB:

On Blessed Isles

On anchorites

On Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

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Joanna Biggs talks to Thomas Jones about the life of Simone de Beauvoir.

Further reading on Beauvoir in the LRB:

Joanna Biggs: https://lrb.me/biggsdebeauvoirpod

Michael Rogin: https://lrb.me/rogindebeauvoirpod

Toril Moi: https://lrb.me/torilmoipod

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Lana Spawls talks to Thomas Jones about working on a paediatric ward during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the ways hospitals have changed in response to the virus.

Read Lana's latest piece in the LRB: Lana Spawls: How to set up an ICU

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Rupert Beale talks again to Thomas Jones about his work at the Francis Crick Institute, where he’s helping to set up a testing lab for Covid-19. He talks about the challenges of creating a scalable process, explains why a successful antibody test could be hard to achieve, and finds some reasons to be hopeful.

You can find a full transcript of this episode HERE.

Read more in the LRB:

Rupert Beale: Wash Your Hands

Lana Spawls: How to set up an ICU

Thomas Jones: Quaresima

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Erin Maglaque talks to Thomas Jones about the lockdown imposed by the city of Florence in January 1631 in response to a plague outbreak, the similarities with our current situation, and the differences.

Maglaque wrote about the plague in Florence in a recent issue of the LRB, reviewing Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City by John Henderson.

Read her piece here: https://lrb.me/maglaquepod

Read Tom's piece on Italy and the coronavirus pandemic: https://lrb.me/jonesitalypod

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Following his piece for the LRB about Covid-19, Rupert Beale talks to Thomas Jones about what the novel coronavirus is, how well countries are dealing with it, and what hopes there are for stopping the contagion.

Read Rupert's piece here: https://lrb.me/bealecoronaviruspod

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Akihito, who abdicated in April, was a paradoxical figure: a hereditary monarch, the son of the wartime emperor, Hirohito, strictly barred from political utterance, who even so stood out against the historical revisionism of the nationalist right. Richard Lloyd Parry considers the former emperor’s part in the intellectual and political debate over Japan’s wartime record, and its history of apology – or non-apology – for its conduct in East Asia.

Find more from Richard Lloyd Parry in the LRB here: lrb.me/richardlloydparrypod

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Given what we know about the future of the planet, is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us? Meehan Crist explores the debate about the ethics of childbearing in the age of climate crisis. She addresses the relationship between BP and the British Museum, the implications of culture-washing, and the logic of cultural divestment initiatives.

Read more from Meehan Crist in the LRB here: lrb.me/meehancristarticlespod

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The line between making a fiction and telling a lie has been blurry at least since Homer, and liars – from Odysseus and Iago to Austen’s Wickham and beyond – have often played central parts within fictions. This lecture will aim to tell some (though not all) of the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction from Homer to Ian McEwan, and will ask if fiction has responded adequately to the maggoty abundance of lies in public life at the present time.

Read more by Colin Burrow in the LRB: lrb.me/colinburrowpod

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Alan Bennett reads his Diary for 2019, with a few little extra bits.

Read more by Alan Bennett in the LRB: lrb.me/bennettpod

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