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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

16:06

Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka

Close Readings ·

2025/05/04

In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it confronts the nightmares of modernity. In this episode, Marina Warner is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss the ways in which Kafka extended the realist tradition of the European novel by drawing on ‘simple forms’ – proverbs, wisdom literature and animal fables – to

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14:44

Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its...

Close Readings ·

2025/04/28

T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where his only obligation was not to get married. Yet in over fifty years of slow, meticulous writing he articulated a series of unusual and arresting ideas that attacked Kantian and utilitarian notions of duty and morality. In this episode,

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32:52

Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace...

Close Readings ·

2025/04/21

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex story of fractured families, bad marriages and the tyranny of debt. In this episode, Colin Burrow and Rosemary Hill join Tom to discuss Thackeray’s use

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12:11

Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell...

Close Readings ·

2025/04/14

The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mark and Seamus turn to elegies for poets by poets, tracing the intricate connections between them. Lowell, Berryman and Bishop’s work was offset by a deep

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15:41

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by...

Close Readings ·

2025/04/07

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular.Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of

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14:13

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John...

Close Readings ·

2025/03/31

Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s deeply repressed, coming to terms with the uncompromising educational experiment his father subjected him to as a child – described by Isaiah Berlin as ‘an appalling success’. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Mill’s startlingly honest account of this

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26:38

Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

Close Readings ·

2025/03/24

WhenWuthering Heightswas published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of Heathcliff’s mysterious origins and ‘obscene’ wealth, of Cathy’s ghost, bad weather, gnarled trees, even gnarlier characters and savage dogs, they discuss

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15:21

Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country...

Close Readings ·

2025/03/17

Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their peculiar emotional power. They discuss Gray’s ambiguous sexuality, his procrastination and class anxieties, and where his humour shines through –

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15:35

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by...

Close Readings ·

2025/03/10

Italo Calvino’s novellaInvisible Citiesis a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della readInvisible Citiesalongside theTravelsof Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love

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15:10

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other...

Close Readings ·

2025/03/03

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which individuals are bounded by self-created horizons, and the extent to which this fits with Transcendentalist notions of progress and independence. They

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36:12

Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love...

Close Readings ·

2025/02/24

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. InCrotchet Castlehe rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thamesbefore heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among

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13:37

Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson,...

Close Readings ·

2025/02/17

This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the way each poem deals with the traditional demand of the elegy for consolation, and what happens when the form and language of love poetry subverts elegiac

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15:41

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by...

Close Readings ·

2025/02/10

Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Travels as a text in which empiricism and imagination are tightly woven, where fantastical realms are created to give different perspectives on reality and

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10:29

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of...

Close Readings ·

2025/02/03

InThe Essence of Christianity(1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity. In this episode, Jonathan and James discuss the ways in which the book applies this thought to various aspects of Christian doctrine, from sexual relations to the Trinity, and consider why Feuerbach would never have described himself as an atheist. They also look at George Eliot’s

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31:53

Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen

Close Readings ·

2025/01/28

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money.In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic

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12:31

Love and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas'

Close Readings ·

2025/01/20

Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal for Milton’s later role as a writer of national epic. In the first episode of their new series, Seamus and Mark discuss the political backdrop to the poem, Milton’s virtuosic mix of poetic tradition and innovation, and why such a fervent puritan would choose an unfashionable,

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14:41

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’

Close Readings ·

2025/01/13

TheThousand and One Nightsis an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious storiesin the context of the wider mysteries and pleasures of the Nights. ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’ highlights the pleasures of dreaming, the power of language and the imagination’s essential role in eroticism, while

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12:24

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Fear and Trembling' by...

Close Readings ·

2025/01/06

The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’sFear and Trembling(1843), anexploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work,Fear and Tremblingappeared under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, and its playful relationship to the reader doesn’t stop there. Described as a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the title page, the book works through a variety of formats in its attempt to understand the nature of faith and the apparently unsolvable paradox that the father

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7:57

Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’

Close Readings ·

2025/01/05

Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property.The first episode will come out on Monday 27 January, on Austen’s Mansfield Park.Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings

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5:13

Introducing ‘Love and Death’

Close Readings ·

2025/01/04

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why the elegy can be a particularly energising form for poets engaging with their craft and the poetic tradition, and how elegy serves an important role in public grieving, remembering andhealing.The first episode will come out on Monday 20 January, on Milton's ‘Lycidas’.Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is

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