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PODCAST

Close Readings

London Review of Books

Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books. Two contributors explore areas of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to some episodes for free here, and extracts from our ongoing subscriber-only series. How To Subscribe In Apple Podcasts, click "subscribe" at the top of this podcast feed to unlock the full episodes. Or for other podcast apps, sign up here:

arts books

All Episodes

30:03

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

Close Readings ·

2024/01/17

Were the Middle Ages funny? In this bonus Close Readings series running throughout this year, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their quest for 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

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12:06

Human Conditions: ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ by Jean-Paul...

Close Readings ·

2024/01/14

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look atJean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew, originally published in French as Réflexions Sur La Question Juive. Sartre’s ‘portraits’ of the ‘anti-Semite’ and the ‘Jew’, as he saw them, caused controversy at the time for directly confronting anti-Jewish bigotry in France and how Jewish people had been treated under the Vichy government and before the war.Judith and Adam discuss Sartre’s attempt to develop a

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11:56

On Satire: What is satire?

Close Readings ·

2024/01/04

Clare and Colin begin their twelve-part series on satire with the big question: what is satire? Where did it come from? Is it a genre, or more of a style, or an attitude? They then plunge into their first text, The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, a prose satire from 1511 that lampoons pretty much the whole of sixteenth century life in the voice of Folly herself.This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:Directly in Apple

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11:27

The Long and Short: Elizabeth Bowen

Close Readings ·

2023/12/24

In the final episode of The Long and Short, we turn to Elizabeth Bowen, widely considered one of the finest writers of the short story. Mark and Seamus unpack ‘the Bowen effect’ and her singularly haunting style: subtle social commentary cut through with humour, and occasionally outright romanticism. A culmination of the short fiction explored in this series, Bowen’s work proves that life ‘with the lid on’ can be just as exhilarating, moving and funny as any sensationalist story.This is an extract

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11:28

Among the Ancients: Seneca

Close Readings ·

2023/12/14

For the final episode inAmong the Ancients, Emily and Tom look at Seneca, whose life is relatively well known to us. A child of the established Roman Empire, born around the same time as Jesus, Seneca hadturbulent relationships with the emperors of his time: exiled by Caligula, he returned to tutor the young Nero, but was eventually forced to commit suicide after being accused of a treasonous plot. For a long time, Seneca the Philosopher was often assumed to be a different person from Seneca the

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11:09

Medieval Beginnings: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Close Readings ·

2023/12/04

For the final episode ofMedieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina look at by far the most popular text (in its time) of all that have featured in the series:The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fictional traveller’s fantastical descriptions of different places, peoples and animals across the Holy Land and Asia are almost certainly drawn mainly from other textual sources, rather than direct experience by the unknown author, and yet the work was often used as a source of reference as well as

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11:50

The Long and Short: Alice Oswald's ‘Dart’ and ‘Memorial’

Close Readings ·

2023/11/24

The eleventh episode of the Long and Short brings us to the present day and the distant past, as we turn to two multivocal, monumental poems by Alice Oswald. The dazzlingly polyphonicDart(2002) celebrates the voices of the river Dart, and the people, animals and supernatural forces entwined with it.Memorial(2011) translates and transfigures theIliad, stripping back the narrative to reveal the epic’s ‘bright unbearable reality’. Mark and Seamus explore the thematic throughlines in Oswald’s work,

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11:41

Next Year on Close Readings: Among the Ancients II

Close Readings ·

2023/11/18

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 and Roman literature with the LRB’s Thomas Jones, loosely themed around ‘truth and lies’ – from Aesop’s Fables to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.Authors covered: Hesiod, Aesop, Herodotus, Pindar, Plato, Lucian, Plautus, Terence, Lucan, Tacitus, Juvenal,

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25:33

Next Year on Close Readings: Human Conditions

Close Readings ·

2023/11/17

In the second of three introductions to our fullClose Readingsprogramme 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 – about some of the most revolutionary thought of the 20th century.Judith, Pankaj and Brent will each discuss four texts over four episodes, as they uncover the inner life of the 20th century through works that have sought to find freedom in different ways and

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14:15

Next Year on Close Readings: On Satire

Close Readings ·

2023/11/16

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 some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in English literature, as they ask what satire is, what it’s for and why we seem to like it so much.Authors covered: Erasmus, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Earl of Rochester, John

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11:08

Among the Ancients: Ovid

Close Readings ·

2023/11/14

Ovid was perhaps the most prolific poet of Ancient Rome, certainly in the amount of his poetry which has survived (around 30,000 lines). This episode focuses on his 15-book epic, theMetamorphoses, a patchwork of hundreds of stories of transformation, including numerous retellings of famous myths from Apollo and Daphne to the Trojan War.In this episode from Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom consider the poem’s depictions of trauma, redemption and the transformation of gender roles, and the formal

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11:54

Medieval Beginnings: The Digby Mary Magdalene Play

Close Readings ·

2023/11/04

For sheer scale and spectacle, surely few plays of any period can match The DigbyPlay of Mary Magdalene. Boasting at least fifty speaking parts, with multiple locations, scaffolds and pyrotechnics, including an ascent into heaven, this wildly ambitious piece of late Medieval theatre mixes traditional hagiographic drama with magical adventure, romance and broad comedy. For audiences of the time this was not just entertainment, but a profound social and religious experience which, despite its

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11:40

The Long and Short: Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and...

Close Readings ·

2023/10/24

In the tenth episode of the series, Seamus and Mark turn to two figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’ is taut, tense and tartly stylish take on the Jamesian short story, redolent with ironies and ambiguities, and feels just as relevant today. Widely considered his masterwork, Langston Hughes’s ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred’ draws on the modernist tradition, a documentarian sensibility and the freedoms of bebop to capture the multiplicity of Harlem voices.This is an extract from

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9:17

Among the Ancients: Horace

Close Readings ·

2023/10/15

Emily and Tom follow Virgil with one of his contemporaries, Horace, whose poetry played an important political role in the early years of Augustan Rome and has had an enormous influence on subsequent European lyric verse. They consider the original meanings of some of Horace’s famous phrases –carpe diem,in medias res,nunc est bibendum– and look at the ways his often complex poetics interrogate the art and value of poetry itself.This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other

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11:18

Medieval Beginnings: Middle English Lyrics

Close Readings ·

2023/10/04

From the first recorded instance of the word ‘fart’ in English, to nuanced vignettes of sexual power dynamics, the numerous Middle English lyrics that have survived down the centuries, often scribbled in the margins of more ‘serious’ texts, offer a vivid snapshot of everyday medieval life. In the tenth episode of Medieval Beginings, Irina and Mary analyse several of these short, fleeting verses, probably set to music, and consider their possible origins and purpose, their delicious ambiguity, and

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12:52

The Long and Short: Ted Hughes's 'Gaudete'

Close Readings ·

2023/09/24

Originally conceived as a film script, 'Gaudete' is Ted Hughes’s apocalyptic vision of an English village in the throes of pagan forces. While it may be ‘the weirdest poem by a very weird poet’, as Mark puts it in this episode, 'Gaudete' shines a light on many Hughesian preoccupations and paved the way for his best-selling collection, Birthday Letters. A strange fusion of Twin Peaks and Midsomer Murders, 'Gaudete' is the former Poet Laureate at his most uninhibited and brilliant.This is an extract

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12:03

Among the Ancients: Virgil

Close Readings ·

2023/09/14

In the ninth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom arrive at Virgil, focusing on his 12-book epic theAeneid, which describes the wanderings of the Trojan prince Aeneas after the fall of Troy.They discuss the political background to Virgil’s life, which saw the fall of the Roman Republic, and the complex, ambiguous space his poetry inhabits, blending the mythical and historical, the geographical and imaginary, while interrogating the costs of empire and triumph in his own time.This is an

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11:36

Medieval Beginnings: Troilus and Criseyde

Close Readings ·

2023/09/04

Chaucer’s 14th century tale of ‘double sorrow’, Troilus and Criseyde, set during the siege of Troy, is the subject of Irina and Mary’s ninth episode of Medieval Beginnings. Based largely on Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, Chaucer’s novelistic long poem displays a psychological realism that would make Henry James envious, and, with the matchmaker-uncle Pandarus, introduces a character of startling and often perplexing opacity.This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close

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10:24

The Long and Short: James Joyce's Dubliners

Close Readings ·

2023/08/24

James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection,Dubliners,when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In their eighth episode, Mark and Seamus discuss the astonishing confidence of Joyce’s early work, which not only launched his literary career, but also initiated the grand project of his writing life. InDubliners, the reader

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10:15

Among the Ancients: Lucretius

Close Readings ·

2023/08/14

In their eighth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom look at a contemporary of Catullus, Lucretius, and the only poem we have from him, De rerum natura (The Nature of Things), which sets out ideas about how to live one’s life based on the Epicurean philosophical tradition, embracing friends, gardens, materialism and moderation.This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn

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