The LRB Podcast

Why you can’t change someone’s mind

25 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does d...

Ordinary Abuse

18 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, ...

On Politics: Keir Starmer’s Mess

12 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to th...

What Next in Iran?

11 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In a press conference on 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Earlier that day, his secretary of ...

Caravaggio’s Bodies

04 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘...

On Politics: The Rearmament Consensus

25 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

‘We must build our hard power because that is the currency of the age,’ Keir Starmer declared to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month...

Early Modern News

18 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a hors...

On Politics: Mandelson and the Private Life of Power

11 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted o...

Jessica Mitford’s Handbag

04 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to ...

On Politics: A New Age of Protest in Iran

28 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

The protests that began in Iran last month have been suppressed with a level of state violence not seen since the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic exe...

Buckley, MAGA’s Patron Saint

21 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

‘Anti-communist​ dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White ...

On Politics: Venezuela and the Trump Doctrine

14 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions i...

Will the AI bubble burst?

07 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The ...

What Don Quixote Knew

31 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and ...

What Dickens taught Mariah Carey

24 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when...

Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ amoral?

19 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Emily Brontë died on the 19 December 1848. As Patricia Lockwood said in an episode of Close Readings, there is evidence that Brontë was writing a se...

Who owns Judy Garland?

17 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For a century, Judy Garland’s joyous and vulnerable singing voice has captivated audiences at the theatre, over the airwaves and in the cinema. Cami...

On Politics: Inside Britain’s Asylum System

10 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general e...

The Life and Death of a Photographer in Gaza

03 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Fatma Hassona was a Palestinian photographer from Gaza City who was killed with her family by an Israeli airstrike in April 2025. A year earlier, the ...

Next Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London

29 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and gu...

On Politics: The Bust-up at the BBC

26 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The BBC is in crisis, again. A leaked dossier alleging a lack of impartiality in its reporting on Trump, Israel, race and gender has felled its direct...

Aftershock: The War on Terror – Episode 1: With Us or Against Us

21 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush declared a state of emergency and initiated what would become an unprecedented expansion of US power. Public ...

Where does our waste go?

19 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since the 1980s, Brett Christophers wrote recently in the LRB, ‘firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the gl...

Introducing ‘Aftershock: The War on Terror’

15 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

After 9/11, George W. Bush launched a global War on Terror. What followed was an unprecedented expansion of American power, from Guantánamo Bay to dr...

On Politics: Latin America’s Right-Wing Shift

12 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

At the end of the 20th century and across the first decade of the 21st, a swathe of countries across Latin America elected left-wing governments in wh...

Pollution and Other Serial Killers

05 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, an astonishingly large number of serial killers grew up or operated in America’s Pacific Northwest. C...

On Politics: Do bond markets and the Bank of England run Britain?

29 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Andy Burnham recently said that the government is ‘in hock to the bond markets’, and the political turbulence of the past few years, not least the...

Extinction, Fast and Slow

22 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challeng...

On Politics: The Online Right (and Left)

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For the best part of a decade, a new type of anti-systemic, nationalist politics has been emerging from different corners of the online world. In Brit...

Lessons from the Peace Process

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Adam is joined by Robert Malley to discuss the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and the long history of the peace process, in which Malley has been...

Why should we listen to Amanda Knox?

08 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's nearly eighteen years since Amanda Knox was arrested on suspicion of murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, and more than ten since...

On Politics: The Death of the Conservative Party?

01 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In its nearly two hundred years of existence the Conservative Party has survived through a combination of protean adaptability and ruthlessness, not l...

How to Write Like Elmore Leonard

24 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Elmore Leonard ‘did more with less than any crime writer I can think of’ J. Robert Lennon wrote in the latest issue of the LRB. Leonard was bor...

On Politics: Labour's Problems

17 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When Keir Starmer brought Labour back to government last year with a majority of 174, many talked about two or even three terms in power. But over fou...

Selling the Manosphere

10 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The manosphere, Emily Witt writes in a recent piece for the LRB, is the ‘online network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channe...

The Debt to David Graeber

03 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile b...

What’s so great about Formula One?

27 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the LRB, has been following Formula One since she was a child. Thomas Jones wrote recently in the LRB about the life a...

Close Readings: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

20 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooz...

The Psychology of Tennis

13 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As well as raw talent and incredible athleticism, professional tennis ‘requires extraordinary psychological capacities’, Edmund Gordon wrote recen...

Why you should care about golf

06 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

With the world's most famous amateur golfer now in charge of the 'free world', the sport has never been more important in the lives of non-golfers. Wh...

Close Readings: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley

30 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary She...

Rat Universes

23 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun ...

Pinochet and the Nazis

16 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in t...

Israel's War of Opportunity

09 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by t...

Close Readings: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg

02 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documen...

The Best-Paid Woman in NYC

25 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, entrusted with building his collection, Belle da Costa Greene could ‘spend more money in an afternoon than any ...

Silicon Valley Warriors

18 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Donald Trump recently announced a defence budget of more than one trillion dollars, much of which will be funnelled to private companies – and incre...

The Best French Novel of the 20th Century

11 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years e...

Is this fascism?

04 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

‘How useful is it,’ Daniel Trilling asked recently in the LRB, ‘to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism?’...

Close Readings: Nietzsche's 'Schopenhauer as Educator'

28 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this extended extract from their series 'Conversations in Philosophy', part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast, Jonathan Rée and James Wood look ...

Old Pope, New Pope

21 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

‘The Church​ needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,’ Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he ...

In the Soviet Archives: a conversation with Sheila Fitzpatrick

14 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 govern...

How They Built the Pyramids

07 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 writt...

Cold War Pen-Pals

30 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ‘in...

Close Readings: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair', is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackera...

Conceiving Pregnancy

16 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 confirm...

Trump’s War by Executive Order

09 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Judith Butler and Aziz Rana join Adam Shatz to discuss Donald Trump’s use of executive orders to target birthright citizenship, protest, support of ...

On Mavis Gallant

02 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mavis Gallant is best known for her short stories, 116 of which were first published in the New Yorker. Extraordinarily varied and prolific, she arra...

Close Readings: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

26 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The Grimms’ Weird Tales

19 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The folk tales collected and rewritten by the Brothers Grimm may ‘seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone’, Colin Burrow wrote recentl...

Weaponising Antisemitism

12 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 Isra...

Who is Paul Marshall?

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A decade ago, the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall was known as a Lib Dem donor and founder of the Ark academy chain. Now, as the owner of UnHerd, GB...

Close Readings: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle ...

Deaths in Custody

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Since 1995, at least 51 young people have died in Scottish prisons. These include Katie Allan and William Lindsay, who shared strong support networks ...

Have we surrendered to climate breakdown?

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2015, a vigorous response to climate change seemed possible: even fossil fuel companies talked about transitioning to cleaner energy. But explorati...

On Vigdis Hjorth

05 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

The Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth is a master of the collapsing relationship. In her twenty books, five of which have been translated into English,...

Close Readings: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen

29 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness,...

Ronald Reagan’s Make-Believe

23 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s ra...

After Assad

15 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the month since Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by a coalition of rebel forces, thousands of political prisoners have been released...

Abbamania

08 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘B...

A Conversation with Neal Ascherson

01 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Neal Ascherson has worked as a journalist for more than six decades, reporting from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, its successor states and elsewhe...

Close Readings: Marcus Aurelius

24 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week on the LRB Podcast, a free episode from one of our Close Readings series. For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and ...

Saving Masud Khan

18 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Wynne Godley was by turns a professional oboist, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, an economist at the Treasury and a director of the Royal Ope...

Gaza, Before and After

13 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack ...

On Lisa Marie Presley

04 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley was burdened from birth with extraordinary, largely unwanted fame. Before her death in 2023, she spent yea...

Labour's Economic Conundrum

27 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

William Davies joins Tom to assess the efforts of the new Labour government in tackling the UK's many economic challenges. They consider whether Rache...

Endgame in Ukraine

20 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

James Meek talks to Tom about his latest report from Ukraine, where he spent time in Kharkiv and Kupiansk in the east of the country. In Kharkiv, he f...

The Trump Takeover

14 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Adam Shatz is joined by Jamelle Bouie and Deborah Friedell to pick through the results and implications of Trump’s victory. The US has a booming e...

The Mendel Inheritance

06 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When Gregor Mendel published the results of his experiments on pea plants in 1866 he initiated a fierce debate about the nature of heredity and geneti...

Early Modern Maths

30 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On budget day, Tom Johnson joins Malin Hay to discuss the revolution in numeracy and use of numbers in Early Modern England, from the black and white ...

On Binyavanga Wainaina

23 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the latest issue of the LRB, Jeremy Harding reviews How to Write about Africa, a posthumous collection of essays and stories by Binyavanga Wainai...

A New War in Lebanon

18 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In his third conversation looking at the crisis in the Middle East, Adam talks to Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s expansion of its war into Lebanon and...

The End of Hamas?

17 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the second of three conversations about the crisis in the Middle East, recorded shortly before the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was reported,...

Inside Israel

16 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the first of three episodes on the crisis in the Middle East, Adam Shatz is joined by Mairav Zonszein and Amjad Iraqi to discuss the experiences of...

The Death and Life of the Department Store

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

‘The department store is dying,’ Rosemary Hill wrote recently in the LRB, reviewing an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris on t...

After Grenfell

02 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The final report of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry established that the fire on 14 June 2017, which killed 72 people, was the ‘culmination of decades o...

Euripides Unbound

25 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In November 2022, archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Philadelphia, two hours south of Cairo, discovered a clump of papyri in a shallow grav...

Streisand’s Way

19 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Singing, acting, directing, writing: Barbra Streisand always insisted on doing it her way. Malin Hay, who recently reviewed Streisand’s 992-page aut...

‘The Cleverest Woman in England’

11 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Jane Ellen Harrison was Britain’s first female career academic, a maverick public intellectual burdened with the label ‘the cleverest woman in En...

On Edith Piaf

06 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This episode is a chapter from Complicated Women by Bee Wilson, a new LRB audiobook, based on pieces first published in the London Review of Boo...

Jean-Paul Sartre: 'Being and Nothingness'

04 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week, a chapter from a new LRB audiobook, Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre by Jonathan Rée. This collection of ten biographical pie...

Great Auks!

28 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The great auk was a flightless, populous and reportedly delicious bird, once found widely across the rocky outcrops of the North Atlantic. By the 1860...

Jane Austen, Simone de Beauvoir and Herodotus

21 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What do Jane Austen, Simone de Beauvoir and Herodotus have in common?  They all appear in three of this year’s Close Readings series, in which a pa...

How to Read Genesis

14 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Book of Genesis begins with the creation of the universe and ends with the death of Jacob, patriarch of the Israelites. Between these two events, ...

The First Pandemic?

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the 160s CE, Rome was struck by a devastating disease which, a new book argues, may have been the world’s first pandemic. Galen began his career ...

On Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When Wittgenstein published his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in 1921, he claimed to have solved all philosophical problems. One problem that hasn’...

Patrick McGuinness: Back to Bouillon

24 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Patrick McGuinness reads his diary from our 6th June issue about his family’s hometown of Bouillon in Belgium. He reflects on the linguistic and nat...

At the Republican National Convention: Day Four

20 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s the final day of the Republican National Convention. Andrew O'Hagan and Deborah Friedell dissect Trump’s marathon acceptance speech and ask w...

At the Republican National Convention: Day Three

18 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

At day three of the Republican National Convention, Andrew O'Hagan and Deborah Friedell discuss what a second Trump presidency would mean for American...

At the Republican National Convention: Day Two

17 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Andrew O'Hagan and Deborah Friedell return to the Republican National Convention. They explore second day's theme, Make America Safe Again, and discus...