Close Readings - TopPodcast.com

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

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:

On Satire: Byron's 'Don Juan' Sep 04, 2024

Show notes

Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is: they see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.

Get 50% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code 'SUMMER50' at checkout when you sign up here:

https://lrb.me/travel26pod

Read more in the LRB:

Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/clare-bucknell/his-own-dark-mind

Marilyn Butler: Success

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/marilyn-butler/success

John Mullan: Hidden Consequences

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n21/john-mullan/hidden-consequences

Thomas Jones: On Top of Everything

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/thomas-jones/on-top-of-everything

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Political Poems: 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones Aug 28, 2024

Show notes

‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was working at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for sex workers and women who had had non-marital sex. Anxieties around ‘fallen women’ were explored by many writers of the day, but Rossetti's treatment is striking both for the rich intensity of its physical descriptions and the unusual vision of redemption it offers, in which the standard Christian imperatives are rethought in sisterly terms. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society.

Read the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market

This episode features a full reading of 'Goblin Market' by Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. Watch the reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHW9MevJk

Find more about the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation here: https://www.thepoetryhour.com/foundation

Subscribe to Close Readings:

In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast to unlock all the episodes;

In other podcast apps here: https://lrb.me/ppsignup

Read more in the LRB:

Penelope Fitzgerald: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n05/penelope-fitzgerald/christina-and-the-sid

Jacqueline Rose: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/jacqueline-rose/undone-defiled-defaced

John Bayley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n06/john-bayley/missingness

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Among the Ancients II: Lucan Aug 24, 2024

Show notes

In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Age’, Tom and Emily dive into this brutal and unforgiving epic poem. They explore Lucan’s slippery relationship to power, his rhetorical virtuosity and the influence of Stoicism on his worldview.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract form this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading in the LRB:

John Henderson: Dead Eyes and Blank Faces

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n07/john-henderson/dead-eyes-and-blank-faces

Nora Goldschmidt: Pompeian Group Therapy

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/nora-goldschmidt/pompeian-group-therapy

Thomas Jones: See you in hell, punk

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk

Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Medieval LOLs: 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle' Aug 18, 2024

Show notes

The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. In 'Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight', his most well-known incarnation, Gawain faces a series of peculiar tests and apparently fails them all. 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle', a later poem, takes many elements from 'The Greene Knight' and exaggerates them to the extreme: the cups the knights drink from are so large they’re impossible to drink from, and Gawain faces an even more peculiar sequence of tests, but meets them all perfectly. Irina and Mary discuss the degree to which this exaggeration can be taken as a satire on chivalric expectations, and whether by this point the character of Gawain should be considered more monastic than knightly.

Read the text here:

https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-sir-gawain-and-the-carle-of-carlisle

Read some Arthurian background in the LRB here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n24/tom-shippey/so-much-smoke

Subscribe to Close Readings:

Directly in Apple Podcasts by clicking 'subscribe' at the top of this feed;

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

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Human Conditions: ‘Hope against Hope’ by Nadezhda Mandelstam Aug 10, 2024

Show notes

After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope.

Hope against Hope is a testimony of life under Stalin, and of the ways in which ordinary people challenge and capitulate to power. It’s also a compendium of gossip, an account of psychological torture, a description of the poet’s craft and a love story.

Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to discuss his final selection for Human Conditions. They explore the qualities that make Hope against Hope so compelling: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s uncompromising honesty, perceptiveness and irrepressible humour.

Subscribe to Close Readings:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

On Satire: Jane Austen's 'Emma' Aug 04, 2024

Show notes

What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels.

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

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Read more in the LRB:

Barbara Everett

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romance

John Bayley

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screaming

Marilyn Butler

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-process

Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Political Poems: 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' by Walt Whitman Jul 28, 2024

Show notes

Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and reconfigure the assassination as a symbolic birth of the new America. Seamus and Mark discuss Whitman’s cosmic vision, with its grand democratic vistas populated by small observations of rural and urban life, and his use of a thrush as a redemptive poetic voice.

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

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/ppapplesignup

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

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Among the Ancients II: Plautus and Terence Jul 24, 2024

Show notes

In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting the conventions they simultaneously established. Plautus’ ‘Menaechmi’ is full of coinages, punning and madcap doubling. Terence’s troubling ‘Hecyra’ tells a much darker story of Roman sexual mores while destabilizing misogynistic stereotypes. Emily and Tom discuss how best to navigate these very early and enormously influential plays, and what they lend to Shakespeare, Sondheim and the modern sitcom.

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

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Medieval LOLs: Solomon and Marcolf Jul 18, 2024

Show notes

The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in this dialogue with Solomon, printed in Antwerp in 1492, that we find him at his irreverent and scatological best as they engage in a battle of proverbial wisdom. Mary and Irina consider some of the more startling and perplexing of the riddles and discuss how the development of Marcolf’s earthy rejoinders tells a story about justice and political power.

Read the text here:

https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/bradbury-solomon-and-marcolf

Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:

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

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

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Human Conditions: ‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing Jul 10, 2024

Show notes

Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, politically engaged – Lessing wrestles with the breakdown of Stalinism, settler colonialism and traditional gender roles. Pankaj and Adam explore the lived experiences that shaped the novel, its feminist reception and why Pankaj considers it to be one of the best representations of ‘the strange uncapturable sensation of living from day to day.’

Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:

Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading:

Anita Brookner: Women Against Men

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n16/anita-brookner/women-against-men

Frank Kermode: The Daughter Who Hated Her

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n14/frank-kermode/the-daughter-who-hated-her

Jenny Diski: Why can‘t people just be sensible?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n15/jenny-diski/why-can-t-people-just-be-sensible

Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Related Podcasts