In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, described by Frank Kermode as ‘braced against folly by the power and intelligence that make it possible to think it the greatest political poem in the language’.

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Read the poem here

Further reading in the LRB:

Blair Worden: Double Tongued

Frank Kermode: Hard Labour

David Norbrook: Political Verse

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Ethiopia is one of the world’s most populous countries, and yet the 2020-22 Tigray War and ongoing suffering in the region has been largely ignored by the world at large. Tom Stevenson joins the podcast to break down the history of the conflict, and explore why Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel laureate, has come to preside over such a brutal civil war. He also considers Abiy’s future intentions, both within and beyond his country’s borders.

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

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Were the Middle Ages funny? Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their series in quest of the medieval sense of humour with Chaucer’s 'Miller’s Tale', a story that is surely still (almost) as funny as when it was written six hundred years ago. But who is the real butt of the joke? Mary and Irina look in detail at the mechanics of the plot and its needless but pleasurable complexity, and consider the social significance of clothes and pubic hair in the tale.

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Did the foundational event of Proust’s great novel really happen? Michael Wood talks to Tom about several English translations of In Search of Lost Time, old and new, and what they reveal about different ways of reading the novel. If the dipping of the madeleine in his tea conjures an overwhelming memory of the narrator’s childhood, it is also a challenge to the conscious mind, a product of chance that Proust suggests might easily not have occurred at all.

Find more by Michael on Proust here: lrb.me/woodproustpod

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James Meek joins Tom to talk about a recent book by Peter Biskind on ‘the New TV’, reviewed by James in the latest issue of the paper. They discuss the rise of cable TV in the 1990s, the emergence of the streaming giants, the power of the showrunner and whether the golden age of television drama is really coming to an end.

Read James's piece: https://lrb.me/meektvpod

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Tom Crewe, Patricia Lockwood, Deborah Friedell, John Lanchester, Rosemary Hill and Colm Tóibín talk to Tom about some of their favourite LRB pieces, including Terry Castle’s 1995 essay on Jane Austen's letters, Hilary Mantel’s account of how she became a writer, and Alan Bennett’s uncompromising take on Philip Larkin.

Read the pieces:

Terry Castle on Jane Austen

Wendy Doniger: Calf and Other Loves

Hilary Mantel: Giving up the Ghost

Angela Carter: Noovs' hoovs in the trough

Penelope Fitzgerald on Stevie Smith

Alan Bennett on Philip Larkin

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Byron’s early poems – his so-called ’dark tales’ – have been dismissed by critics as the tawdry, slapdash products of an uninteresting mind, and readers ever since have found it difficult not to see them in light of the poet’s dramatic and public later life. In a recent piece for the LRB, Clare Bucknell looked past the famous biography to observe the youthful Byron’s mind at work in poems such as The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814) and Lara (1814), where early versions of the Byronic hero were often characterised by passivity, rumination and choicelessness.

Clare discusses the piece with Tom, and talks about her new Close Readings series, On Satire, with Colin Burrow, which features Don Juan alongside works by Jane Austen, Laurence Sterne, John Donne, Muriel Spark and others.

Read Clare's piece on Byron: https://lrb.me/byronpod

Join Clare and Colin Burrow for their series on satire next year, and receive all the books under discussion, access to online seminars and the rest of the Close Readings audio, with Close Readings Plus: https://lrb.me/plusyt

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In Renaissance Venice, Aldus Manutius turned his mid-life crisis into a publishing revolution, printing books that permanently changed the way we read. In a recent review, Erin Maglaque celebrates Aldus as the progenitor of the paperback and a model for late bloomers. She tells Tom about Aldus’s achievements, his monumental ego and his part in the creation of one of the most bizarre books in publishing history.

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

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In Apple Podcasts: lrb.me/camusapple

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Feverish, homesick, bored, awed and on rollerskates: Albert Camus’s travel diaries are a fascinating window into an easily mythologised life. Camus visited the New World twice, and a new translation of his journals reveals his struggle to make sense of his experiences. Adam Shatz joins Tom to explain the ways Camus’s ambivalence towards the Americas sheds light on his tumultuous personal life, his conflicted stance on colonialism and where his humanism deviates from his existentialist peers.

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

If you want to join Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards on revolutionary thinkers next year, and receive all the books under discussion, access to online seminars and the rest of the Close Readings audio, you can sign up to Close Readings Plus here: https://lrb.me/plus

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In Apple Podcasts: lrb.me/camusapple

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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 Tom more about the surreal experience and why irony, in the words of Pope Francis, is ‘a marvellous virtue’.

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

Read John Lanchester’s pick from the archive: lrb.me/lanchesterpick

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Find out about the Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum here:

https://www.ashmolean.org/exhibition/colour-revolution-victorian-art-fashion-design

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