Close Readings
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: https://lrb.me/closereadings
RUNNING IN 2025:
'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
ALSO INCLUDED IN THE CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION:
'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: [email protected]
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- Update frequency
- every 6 days
- Average duration
- 19 minutes
- Episodes
- 165
- Years Active
- 2022 - 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley
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…
00:14:44 |
Mon 28 Apr 2025
Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
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 t…
00:32:52 |
Mon 21 Apr 2025
Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop
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 R…
00:12:11 |
Mon 14 Apr 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
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…
00:15:41 |
Mon 07 Apr 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill
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 dee…
00:14:13 |
Mon 31 Mar 2025
Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
When Wuthering Heights was 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 ‘…
00:26:38 |
Mon 24 Mar 2025
Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray
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 famou…
00:15:21 |
Mon 17 Mar 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is 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, ov…
00:15:35 |
Mon 10 Mar 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
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.…
00:15:10 |
Mon 03 Mar 2025
Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock
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. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should rev…
00:36:12 |
Mon 24 Feb 2025
Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop
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 i…
00:13:37 |
Mon 17 Feb 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift
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…
00:15:41 |
Mon 10 Feb 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach
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…
00:10:29 |
Mon 03 Feb 2025
Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen
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 n…
00:31:53 |
Tue 28 Jan 2025
Love and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas'
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 Engla…
00:12:31 |
Mon 20 Jan 2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’
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, M…
00:14:41 |
Mon 13 Jan 2025
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Fear and Trembling' by Søren Kierkegaard
The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling app…
00:12:24 |
Mon 06 Jan 2025
Introducing ‘Novel Approaches’
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 Briti…
00:07:57 |
Sun 05 Jan 2025
Introducing ‘Love and Death’
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…
00:05:13 |
Sat 04 Jan 2025
Introducing ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’
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 …
00:08:06 |
Fri 03 Jan 2025
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