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Close Readings — Arts
Close Readings

Close Readings is a multi-series podcast 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: https://lrb.me/closereadings

RUNNING IN 2026

‘Who’s afraid of realism?’ with James Wood and guests

‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith

‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill and guests

Bonus Series: ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’ with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones

ALSO INCLUDED IN THE CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION:

‘Conversations in Philosophy’ with Jonathan Rée and James Wood

‘Fiction and the Fantastic’ with Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis

‘Love and Death’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

‘Novel Approaches’ with Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and other guests

‘Among the Ancients’ with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones

‘Medieval Beginnings’ with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley

‘The Long and Short’ with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry

‘Modern-ish Poets: Series 1’ with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry

‘Among the Ancients II’ with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones

‘On Satire’ with Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell

‘Human Conditions’ with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards

‘Political Poems’ with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry

‘Medieval LOLs’ with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Copyright: © London Review of Books

Latest Episodes:

Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop Feb 17, 2025

Show notes

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 conventions.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld

Read the poems here:

Ben Jonson: On My First Son

https://lrb.me/jonsoncrld

Anne Bradstreet:In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet

https://lrb.me/bradstreetcrld

Geoffrey Hill: September Song

https://lrb.me/hillcrld

Elizabeth Bishop: First Death in Nova Scotia

https://lrb.me/bishopcrld

Read more in the LRB:

Blair Worden on Ben Jonson

⁠https://lrb.me/ldch1⁠

Blair Worden on puritanism

⁠https://lrb.me/ldch2⁠

Colin Burrow in Geoffrey Hill:

⁠https://lrb.me/ldch3⁠

Helen Vendler on Elizabeth Bishop

⁠https://lrb.me/ldch4

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift Feb 10, 2025

Show notes

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 both writer and reader are liberated from having to decide what to think.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff

Further reading in the LRB:

Terry Eagleton: A Spot of Firm Government

⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift1⁠

Clare Bucknell: Oven-Ready Children

⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift2⁠

Thomas Keymer: Carry Up your Coffee Boldly

⁠https://lrb.me/ffswift3

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksff

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach Feb 03, 2025

Show notes

In The 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 remarkable translation of the work, published only thirteen years after the original, which not only ensured Feuerbach’s influence in the Anglophone world but invented a new philosophical vocabulary in English for German thought.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Further reading in the LRB:

James Wood: What next?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n08/james-wood/what-s-next

Terry Eagleton: George Eliot

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:

⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobookscip⁠

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen Jan 28, 2025

Show notes

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 approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrna

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsna

Further reading in the LRB:

John Mullan: Noticing and Not Noticing

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten1⁠

Colm Toíbìn: The Importance of Aunts

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten2⁠

W.J.T. Mitchell: In the Wilderness

⁠https://lrb.me/naausten3⁠

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Love and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas' Jan 20, 2025

Show notes

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, pre-Christian form to honour his friend.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld

Read more in the LRB:

Colin Burrow (on the 'two-handed engine'):

⁠https://lrb.me/ldmilton1⁠

Freya Johnston (on Samuel Johnson's criticism):

⁠https://lrb.me/ldmilton2⁠

Maggie Kilgour (on the young Milton):

h⁠ttps://lrb.me/ldmilton3⁠

LRB Audiobooks

Discover audiobooks from the LRB: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiobooksld

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ Jan 13, 2025

Show notes

The Thousand and One Nights is 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 stories in 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 ‘Abdullah of the Sea and Abdullah of the Land’ demonstrates how the fantastic can help us imagine new ways of living.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrff

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsff

Further reading in the LRB:

Marina Warner: Travelling Text

⁠https://lrb.me/ffnights1⁠

Steven Connor: One’s Thousand One Nightiness

⁠https://lrb.me/ffnights2⁠

William Gass: A Book at Bedtime

⁠https://lrb.me/ffnights3

Get the book: https://lrb.me/sealenightsff

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conversations in Philosophy: 'Fear and Trembling' by Søren Kierkegaard Jan 06, 2025

Show notes

The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), anexploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling appeared 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 of the Abrahamic religions was prepared to murder his own son. James and Jonathan consider whether Kierkegaard thinks we can understand anything, and what Fear and Trembling has in common with the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrcip

In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip

Further reading in the LRB:

Jonathan Rée: Dancing in the Service of Thought https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard1

James Butler: Reading Genesis https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard2

Roger Poole: A Walk with Kierkegaard https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard3

Terry Eagleton: A Long Way from Galilee https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard4

James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a contributor to the London Review of Books. His books include How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self.

Jonathan Rée is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and a freelance writer and philosopher. His most recent book on philosophy is Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English.

LRB AUDIOBOOKS

Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:

https://lrb.me/audiobookscip

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’ Jan 05, 2025

Show notes

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.

Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.

Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.

The full list of texts for the series:

Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen

Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray

North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell

Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Anthony Trollope (TBD)

Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot

Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens

Washington Square (1880)/Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James

Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy

New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing ‘Love and Death’ Jan 04, 2025

Show notes

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 and healing.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’ Jan 03, 2025

Show notes

Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes the scope of the series, in which she will also be joined by Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis. Together, Anna Della and Marina discuss the ways the fiction of wonder and astonishment can challenge social conventions and open up new ways of living.

Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.

Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.

Texts for the first four episodes:

The Thousand and One Nights (Yasmine Seale’s translation)

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

The Travels of Marco Polo (no particular translation) and Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (William Weaver translation)

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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