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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:

On Satire: 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' by Laurence Sterne Jul 04, 2024

Show notes

'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and irreducible depiction of idiosyncratic country-dwellers that makes a point of never making its point. Yet many of the familiar satirical tricks are there – from radical shifts in scale to the liberal use of innuendo – and in this episode Clare and Colin look at the ways in which the novel stays true to the traditions of satire while drawing on Cervantes, Rabelais, Locke and the fashionable notion of ‘sentiment’ to advance a new kind of nuanced social comedy.

This is 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

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

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Political Poems: 'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen Jun 28, 2024

Show notes

Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other great influences, Keats and Shelley. Mark and Seamus discuss the unstable mixture of these forces and the innovative use of rhyme in a poem where the politics is less about ideology or argument than an intuitive response to the horror of war.

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): https://lrb.me/pp6heaney

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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Among the Ancients II: Lucian Jun 24, 2024

Show notes

The broad theme of this series, truth and lies, was a favourite subject of Lucian of Samosata, the last of our Greek-language authors. A cosmopolitan and highly cultured Syrian subject of the Roman Empire in the second century CE, Lucian wrote in the classical Greek of fifth-century Athens. His razor-sharp satire was a model for Erasmus, Voltaire and Swift. Emily and Tom share some of their favourite excerpts from ‘A True History’ and other works – with trips to the moon, boundary-pushing religious scepticism and wildly improbable but not technically untrue readings of Homer – and discuss why they still read as fresh and funny today.

Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. 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:

Tim Whitmarsh: Target Practice

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n04/tim-whitmarsh/target-practice

James Davidson: Stomach-Churning

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n02/james-davidson/stomach-churning

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: The Second Shepherds' Pageant Jun 18, 2024

Show notes

In their quest for the medieval sense of humour Mary and Irina come to The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, a 15th-century reimagining of the nativity as domestic comedy that’s less about the birth of Jesus and more about sheep rustling, taxes, the weather and the frustrations of daily life. The pageant was part of a mystery cycle, a collection of plays that revealed religious mysteries through performances of the Christian story and were a central part of community life. Mary and Irina discuss the porous relationship between player and audience in medieval theatre, and the expert stage management of this knockabout semi-biblical farce.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Human Conditions: ‘The Intimate Enemy’ by Ashis Nandy Jun 10, 2024

Show notes

Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western conceptions of masculinity and adulthood served as tools of conquest. Using figures as disparate as Gandhi, Oscar Wilde and Aurobindo Ghosh, Nandy suggests ways in which alternative models of age and gender can provide compelling challenges to colonial authority. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to unpack Nandy’s subtle and unexpected lines of thought and to explain why The Intimate Enemy remains as innovative today as it did in 1983.

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

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: 'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope Jun 04, 2024

Show notes

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mock-epic tells the story of the Empire of Dullness and its lineage of terrible writers, the Dunces. Unlike other satires featured in this series so far, it makes no effort to hide the identities of its targets. Clare and Colin provide an ABC for understanding this vast and knotty fulmination, and explore the feverish, backstabbing and politically turbulent world in which it was created.

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

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: 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley May 28, 2024

Show notes

Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members of the government, before eventually unfolding into a vision of England freed from the tyranny and anarchy of its institutions. As Mark and Seamus discuss in this episode, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, with its incoherence and inconsistencies, amounts to perhaps the purest expression in verse both of Shelley’s political indignation and his belief that, with the right way of thinking, such chains of oppression can be shaken off ‘like dew’.

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

Read more in the LRB:

Seamus Perry: Wielded by a Wizard https://lrb.me/perrypp

Thomas Jones: Hard Eggs and Radishes https://lrb.me/jonespp

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Among the Ancients II: Plato May 24, 2024

Show notes

Plato’s Symposium, his philosophical dialogue on love, or eros, was probably written around 380 BCE, but it’s set in 416, during the uneasy truce between Athens and Sparta in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. A symposium was a drinking party, though Socrates and his friends, having had a heavy evening the night before, decide to go easy on the wine and instead take turns making speeches in praise of love – at least until Alcibiades turns up, very late and very drunk. In this episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom discuss the dialogue’s philosophical ideas, historical context and narrative form, and why Aristophanes gets the hiccups.

Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. 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:

Donald Davidson: Plato’s Philosopher

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n14/donald-davidson/plato-s-philosopher

Anne Carson: Oh What a Night (Alkibiades)

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/anne-carson/oh-what-a-night-alkibiades

M.F. Burnyeat: Art and Mimesis in Plato’s Republic

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n10/m.f.-burnyeat/art-and-mimesis-in-plato-s-republic

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: Dame Syrith May 18, 2024

Show notes

As Mary and Irina discussed in the previous episode of Medieval LOLs, fabliaux had an enormous influence on Chaucer, but outside of his work, only one survives in Middle English. Dame Syrith, a story of lust, deception and a mustard-eating dog, is medieval humour at its silliest and most troubling. Mary and Irina explore the surprising representations of old women, magic and consent in fabliaux, the poem’s possible role as a pedagogical tool, and medieval audiences’ love for the procuress trope.

Read Dame Syrith here: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/salisbury-trials-and-joys-dame-sirth

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

Further reading in the LRB:

Irina Dumitrescu: Making My Moan

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/irina-dumitrescu/making-my-moan

Tom Shippey: Women Beware Midwives

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n09/tom-shippey/women-beware-midwives

Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Human Conditions: ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul May 10, 2024

Show notes

In A House for Mr Biswas, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naipaul’s fraught relationship to modernity, and the tensions between his attachment to individual freedom and his insistence on the constraints imposed by history.

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

Read more in the LRB:

D.A.N. Jones: The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/d.a.n.-jones/the-enchantment-of-vidia-naipaul

Frank Kermode: What Naipaul Knows

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/frank-kermode/what-naipaul-knows

Paul Theroux: Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/paul-theroux/diary

Sanjay Subramahnyam: Where does he come from?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/where-does-he-come-from

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

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