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
Human Conditions: ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Du Bois
Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiography, history, biography, fiction, music criticism and po…
00:13:43 |
Tue 10 Sep 2024
On Satire: Byron's 'Don Juan'
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, …
00:17:54 |
Wed 04 Sep 2024
Political Poems: 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones
‘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 pol…
00:57:22 |
Wed 28 Aug 2024
Among the Ancients II: Lucan
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…
00:13:17 |
Sat 24 Aug 2024
Medieval LOLs: 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle'
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 c…
00:40:47 |
Sun 18 Aug 2024
Human Conditions: ‘Hope against Hope’ by Nadezhda Mandelstam
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…
00:14:12 |
Sat 10 Aug 2024
On Satire: Jane Austen's 'Emma'
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…
00:14:51 |
Sun 04 Aug 2024
Political Poems: 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' by Walt Whitman
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 …
00:10:35 |
Sun 28 Jul 2024
Among the Ancients II: Plautus and Terence
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 s…
00:14:27 |
Wed 24 Jul 2024
Medieval LOLs: Solomon and Marcolf
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 t…
00:49:33 |
Thu 18 Jul 2024
Human Conditions: ‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing
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, …
00:12:44 |
Wed 10 Jul 2024
On Satire: 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' by Laurence Sterne
'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 s…
00:14:53 |
Thu 04 Jul 2024
Political Poems: 'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen
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 Siegfrie…
00:10:36 |
Fri 28 Jun 2024
Among the Ancients II: Lucian
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 E…
00:14:03 |
Mon 24 Jun 2024
Medieval LOLs: The Second Shepherds' Pageant
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 Jesu…
00:35:19 |
Tue 18 Jun 2024
Human Conditions: ‘The Intimate Enemy’ by Ashis Nandy
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 …
00:13:21 |
Mon 10 Jun 2024
On Satire: 'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope
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, …
00:12:38 |
Tue 04 Jun 2024
Political Poems: 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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,…
00:13:12 |
Tue 28 May 2024
Among the Ancients II: Plato
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 Pelopo…
00:11:31 |
Fri 24 May 2024
Medieval LOLs: Dame Syrith
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…
00:36:11 |
Sat 18 May 2024
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