The LRB Podcast

At the Republican National Convention: Day One

16 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Andrew O'Hagan and Deborah Friedell report on day one of the Republican National Convention. They react to Trump's choice of vice president and reflec...

Mendez: How I became an audiobook narrator

10 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The worst thing you can say to anyone who works in hospitality, Mendez writes, is ‘Maybe you’ll meet someone!’ But a chance encounter while wait...

Labour's Big Win

05 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

John Lanchester, Tom Crewe and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite join James Butler to dissect Keir Starmer's victory and the historic collapse of the Con...

UK Election Special: The Economy

03 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The day before the election, James Butler is joined by William Davies to talk about something everyone seems to agree on: the very poor state of the U...

UK Election Special: Foreign Policy

29 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

‘The world is growing more dangerous’ warns the Conservative manifesto, which puts security at the heart of its pitch. The Labour manifesto, on th...

Faked Editions

26 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For forty years, Thomas James Wise made a fortune forging copies of books that had never existed, sometimes even convincing their authors they were th...

UK Election Special: The Broken State

19 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For the second episode of our series on the UK election, James Butler is joined by Sam Freedman to talk about the enormous challenges facing the next ...

UK Election Special: Climate

13 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In the first in a series of episodes on the UK general election, James Butler is joined by Ann Pettifor and Adrienne Buller to discuss climate policy ...

What was the Venetian ghetto?

12 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the ghetto's creation in 1516 until its dissolution at the end of the 18th century, Jews in Venice were confined to a district enclosed by canals...

Forecasting D-Day

05 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The D-Day planners said that everything would depended the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too mu...

On J.G. Ballard

29 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the Daily Mail and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appe...

On Festac ’77

22 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Marilyn Nance was 23 when she photographed Festac ’77, a global celebration of Black and African art that she described as ‘the Olympics, plus a B...

Rebecca Solnit: In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

15 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Rebecca Solnit has lived in San Francisco since 1980, but the city she used to know is fast disappearing, ‘fully annexed’, as she puts it, by the ...

Women in Philosophy

08 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The recovery of history’s ‘lost’ women is often associated with the advent of feminism, but, Sophie Smith writes, women’s contributions to Wes...

Unspeakable Acts

01 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

James Pratt and John Smith were the last men hanged in England for the crime of sodomy, reported to the authorities by nosy landlords who later petiti...

Where does culture come from?

24 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. ...

Remembering the Future

17 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In her recent LRB Winter Lecture, Hazel V. Carby discussed ways contemporary Indigenous artists are rendering the ordinarily invisible repercussions o...

Leaving Haiti

10 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Since the 2010 earthquake, ordinary life in Haiti has become increasingly untenable: in January this year, armed gangs controlled around 80 per cent ...

Gurle Talk

04 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Modern English speakers struggle to find sexual terms that aren’t either obscene or scientific, but that wasn’t always the case. In a recent revie...

The Belgrano Diary: Half a Million Sheep Can't Be Wrong

28 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When Argentina invades the Falkland Islands, Margaret Thatcher sends a huge flotilla on an 8000-mile rescue mission – to save a forgotten remnant of...

Architecture Repopulated

27 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Rosemary Hill, reviewing Steven Brindle’s Architecture in Britain and Ireland, 1530-1830, celebrates his approach to architecture as a social, colla...

Introducing: The Belgrano Diary

21 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On 2 May 1982, the British submarine HMS Conqueror sank the Argentinian warship, the General Belgrano, killing 323 men. It was the bloodiest event ...

The Shoah After Gaza

20 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss his recent LRB Winter Lecture, in which he explores Israel’s instrumentalisation of the Holocaust. He expa...

The Acid House Revolution

13 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1988 and 1994, the UK scrambled to make sense of acid house, with its radical new sounds, new drugs and new ways of partying. In a recent pie...

On Giving Up

06 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When is giving up not failure, but a way of succeeding at something else? In his new book, which began as a piece for the LRB, the psychoanalyst and ...

On the Jewish Novel

28 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When Deborah Friedell and Adam Thirlwell met twenty years ago, they started a discussion about Jewish identity they are still puzzling over today. Rev...

Dr Comfort, Mr Sex

21 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Gerontologist, pacifist, novelist, medical doctor and mollusc expert – Alex Comfort was far more than just the author of the staggeringly popular J...

The World's First Author

14 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Enheduana was a Sumerian princess who lived around 2300 BCE and composed what is now regarded as the earliest poetry by a known author. Her father, Sa...

Protest, what is it good for?

07 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the Egyptian Revolution to Extinction Rebellion, the 2010s were marked by a global wave of spontaneous and largely structureless mass protests. D...

Political Poems: Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'

31 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

War in Tigray

24 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Medieval LOLs: Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale'

17 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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’...

Proust in English

10 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

New TV/Old TV

03 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 discus...

Was Jane Austen Gay? And other questions from the LRB archive

27 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Tom Crewe, Patricia Lockwood, Deborah Friedell, John Lanchester, Rosemary Hill and Colm Tóibín talk to Tom about some of their favourite LRB piece...

Byron before Byron

20 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Byron’s early poems – his so-called ’dark tales’ – have been dismissed by critics as the tawdry, slapdash products of an uninteresting mind,...

Manutius, the Biblophile's Bibliophile

13 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In Renaissance Venice, Aldus Manutius turned his mid-life crisis into a publishing revolution, printing books that permanently changed the way we read...

Camus in the Americas

06 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Feverish, homesick, bored, awed and on rollerskates: Albert Camus’s travel diaries are a fascinating window into an easily mythologised life. Camus ...

Patricia Lockwood on Meeting the Pope

29 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In June, the pope invited dozens of artists to Rome for the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum’s contemporary art collection. Patricia Lockwood,...

What was Orwell for?

22 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

George Orwell wasn’t afraid to speak against totalitarianism – but what was he for? Colin Burrow joins Tom to unpick the cultural conservatism and...

Next Year on Close Readings: Among the Ancients II

18 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For the final introduction to next year’s full Close Readings programme, Emily Wilson, celebrated classicist and translator of Homer’s Iliad and O...

Next Year on Close Readings: Human Conditions

17 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the second of three introductions to our full Close Readings programme for 2024, Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’...

Next Year on Close Readings: On Satire

16 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the first of three introductions to our full 2024 Close Readings programme, starting in January, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell present their seri...

The Infected Blood Scandal

15 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The Giant Crypto Fraud

08 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 To...

What is British humour anyway?

01 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 scalp...

Colour Revolution at the Ashmolean (sponsored)

31 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Nineteenth-century Britain is often imagined as gloomy and dark, epitomised by Dickensian grime and Queen Victoria’s prolonged state of black-clad m...

Who wrote the dictionary?

25 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was a seventy-year endeavour that called on thousands of volunteers from all walks of l...

War in Gaza

18 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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....

Tom Crewe: Wrestling Days

11 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Crass, violent, misogynistic, dumb, fake – and irresistible. Tom Crewe was one of many unlikely diehards who fell sway to the theatre of pro-wrestli...

Into the Volcano

04 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Between 1630 and 1944, Mount Vesuvius was continually erupting, and remains one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes. Yet, as Rosemary Hill expla...

What is 'woke capital'?

27 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For many on the right, Arif Naqvi epitomises the idea of the 'woke capitalist'. The private equity multimillionaire has promoted sustainable developme...

Think of a Number

20 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In a world where communication is only as effective as its ‘truthiness’, numbers are vital to political success. But, as John Lanchester explains ...

Adolfo Kaminsky, Beyond Borders

13 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Fact-Checking ‘Ulysses’

06 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Armed with Thom’s Directory, James Joyce strove to recreate 1904 Dublin as accurately as possible, down to the last solicitor and street railing. B...

Amia Srinivasan: What’s it like to be an octopus?

30 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

‘Octopuses,’ Amia Srinivasan writes, ‘are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.’...

John Lanchester: The Case of Agatha Christie

23 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 r...

Terry Castle: Desperately Seeking Susan

16 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 rem...

Life in Kyiv

09 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Almost eighteen months since Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv residents have resumed something resembling pre-war life. James Meek recently returned to th...

Chaucer's Ovid

02 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

The Secrets of J. Edgar Hoover

26 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover exercised a dictatorial influence over the department – and, it seems, everyone else. Meticulous and vindict...

On David Foster Wallace

20 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Inflation Fixation

11 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 Febr...

Cancelled

04 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Last month, the UK government appointed their first “free speech tsar”, whose stated mission is to protect free speech and academic freedom in uni...

The Lives of Stonehenge: John Michell and Arthur Pendragon

27 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

The Lives of Stonehenge: Wordsworth and Blake

20 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 e...

Africa’s Cold War

13 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Kevin Okoth and Jeremy Harding join Tom to discuss two recent books reassessing decolonisation. Textbook histories used to describe African independen...

The Lives of Stonehenge: John Aubrey and William Stukeley

06 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Why did Erdoğan win?

30 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

The Lives of Stonehenge: Inigo Jones and John Wood

23 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

How radical is Scotland?

16 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 shif...

What Spotify Wants

09 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 discu...

Modi's Big Con

02 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Accused of ‘the largest con in corporate history’, Indian magnate Gautam Adani has lost half his net worth and the indulgence of financial journal...

Thomas Hardy's Medieval Mind

25 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 V...

Sisters Come Second

18 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In his introduction to our twelfth collection of LRB archive pieces, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only ...

Mary Renault's Worldbuilding

11 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Miranda Carter joins Tom to talk about the life and historical fiction of Mary Renault, whose popular and ingenious retellings of stories from Ancient...

Sorry State

05 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Pirates of Madagascar

28 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Francis Gooding joins Tom to discuss Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber’s posthumously published study of 17th- and 18th-century piracy. Golden A...

BookTok

21 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 corn...

How to Plot an Abortion

14 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Expanding on her recent Winter Lecture, Clair Wills talks to Tom about the stories people tell about abortions – stories conditioned by tradition, c...

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Jade Sasser

07 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the final episode of this series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to the feminist scholar Jade Sasser. Jade discusses...

The Reaction Economy

28 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

William Davies talks to Tom about his recent LRB Winter Lecture, looking at why reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – have become...

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Alison Bashford

21 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the third episode of a four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to historian Alis...

The Weirdness of Paul Newman

14 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The screen legend and salad dressing philanthropist Paul Newman recorded hundreds of personal interviews before destroying the tapes. The surviving tr...

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Banu Subramaniam

07 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the second episode of a four-part series on climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist speaks to Banu Subramaniam, the evolutionary biolo...

The Hayek Puzzle

31 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Long before Margaret Thatcher told her cabinet that The Constitution of Liberty was “what we believe”, neoliberal poster boy Friedrich Hayek had...

Climate, Politics and Procreation: Loretta J. Ross

24 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the first episode of a four-part series exploring the intersection of climate chaos and reproductive justice, Meehan Crist talks to activist and fe...

The Woman Who Interviewed Hitler

17 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In 1939, Dorothy Thompson was on the cover of Time, the ‘First Lady of American journalism’ and a major celebrity. By 1945, she’d been widely d...

What do management consultants do?

10 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Laleh Khalili, a former management consultant, talks to Tom about how firms such as McKinsey, Accenture and Bain go about their business, the conseque...

How to Choose the Greatest Film of All Time

03 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Michael Wood talks to Malin Hay about the recent list from Sight and Sound of the ‘greatest films of all time’ (in which he voted), and what con...

Alan Bennett: Diary for 2022

27 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Alan Bennett reads his 2022 diary (with some extra bits), in which he buys his dad a violin, goes to Venice with a goat, and tries to make the queen l...

After the Midterms

13 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Thomas B. Edsall, a columnist for the New York Times, talks to Adam Shatz about the landscape of US politics following the recent elections. They co...

Introducing Among the Ancients

09 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Listen to a sample from the first episode of our twelve-part Close Readings series, Among the Ancients, with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones, which we'l...

The Dahl Factory

06 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Roald Dahl's key skill, as Colin Burrow puts it, 'was his ability to repress nastiness while keeping it visible'.  Following his review of a new biog...

Introducing Medieval Beginnings

02 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley return with a new twelve-part Close Readings series, Medieval Beginnings, exploring the strange and wonderful l...

Who killed Jane Stanford?

29 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, was murdered with strychnine in 1905. Her killer was never discovered – until now (perhaps). J...

Introducing The Long and Short

25 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford return with a new twelve-part Close Readings series, The Long and Short, taking a fresh look at 19th and 20th-century li...

Consider the Pangolin, and Other Animals

22 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Katherine Rundell has been writing about endangered animals in the LRB since 2018. Her new book, The Golden Mole, gathers those essays and new pieces...

What is Coral?

15 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Corals have held our fascination for thousands of years, but much of what we know about them has only been discovered recently. Liam Shaw talks to Tom...

Fathers and Sons in Palestine

08 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh talks to Adam Shatz about his recent memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, which refl...