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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Education Books Arts Courses

Update frequency: every 6 days
Average duration: 19 minutes
Episodes: 165
Years Active: 2022 - 2025

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Human Conditions: ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul

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 e…

00:10:58 | Fri 10 May 2024

On Satire: John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera'

In The Beggar’s Opera we enter a society turned upside down, where private vices are seen as public virtues, and the best way to survive is to assume the worst of everyone. The only force that can su…

00:12:59 | Sat 04 May 2024

Political Poems: 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s deeply disturbing 1847 poem about a woman escaping slavery and killing her child was written to shock its intended white female readership to the abolitionist cause. Brow…

00:10:56 | Sun 28 Apr 2024

Among the Ancients II: Pindar and Bacchylides

In the fifth episode of Among the Ancients II we turn to Greek lyric, focusing on Pindar’s victory odes, considered a benchmark for the sublime since antiquity, and the vivid, narrative-driven dithyr…

00:11:19 | Wed 24 Apr 2024

Medieval LOLs: Fabliaux

Fabliaux were short, witty tales originating in northern France between the 12th and 14th centuries, often featuring crafty characters in rustic settings and overwhelmingly concerned with money and s…

00:34:45 | Thu 18 Apr 2024

Human Conditions: ‘The Human Condition’ by Hannah Arendt

In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, the last of the series with Judith Butler, we fittingly turn to The Human Condition (1956). Hannah Arendt defines action as the highest form of human activi…

00:11:49 | Wed 10 Apr 2024

On Satire: The Earl of Rochester

According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths, which, upon any sort of provocation, came a…

00:13:14 | Thu 04 Apr 2024

Political Poems: 'Easter 1916' by W.B. Yeats

Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts t…

00:11:57 | Thu 28 Mar 2024

Among the Ancients II: Herodotus

Some of the most compelling stories of the Classical world come from Herodotus‘ Histories, an account of the Persian Wars and a thousand things besides. Emily and Tom chart a course through Herodotus…

00:10:30 | Sun 24 Mar 2024

Medieval LOLs: Old English Riddles

Riddles are an ancient and universal form, but few people seem to have enjoyed them more than English Benedictine monks. The Exeter Book, a tenth century monastic collection of Old English verse, bui…

00:41:58 | Mon 18 Mar 2024

Human Conditions: ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ by Frantz Fanon

Begun as a psychiatric dissertation, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) became a genre-shattering study of antiblack racism and its effect on the psyche. At turns expressionistic, confessi…

00:12:58 | Sun 10 Mar 2024

On Satire: Ben Jonson's 'Volpone'

What did English satirists do after the archbishop of Canterbury banned the printing of satires in June 1599? They turned to the stage. Within months of the crackdown, the same satirical tricks Eliza…

00:11:51 | Mon 04 Mar 2024

Political Poems: W.H. Auden's 'Spain 1937'

In their second episode, Mark and Seamus look at W.H. Auden's ‘Spain’. Auden travelled to Spain in January 1937 to support the Republican efforts in the civil war, and composed the poem shortly after…

00:42:55 | Wed 28 Feb 2024

Among the Ancients II: Aesop

Supposedly an enslaved man from sixth-century Samos, Aesop might not have ever really existed, but the fables attributed to him remain some of the most widely read examples of classical literature. A…

00:10:26 | Sat 24 Feb 2024

Medieval LOLs: The Colloquies of Aelfric Bata

All teachers know that the best way for students to learn a language is through swear words, and nobody knew this better than Aelfric Bata, a monk from Winchester whose Colloquies, compiled in around…

00:35:28 | Sun 18 Feb 2024

Human Conditions: ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex incorporates anthropology, psychology, hist…

00:11:56 | Sat 10 Feb 2024

On Satire: John Donne's Satires

In their second episode, Colin and Clare look at the dense, digressive and often dangerous satires of John Donne and other poets of the 1590s. It’s likely that Donne was the first Elizabethan author …

00:12:49 | Sun 04 Feb 2024

Political Poems: Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'

In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, described by F…

00:35:29 | Wed 31 Jan 2024

Among the Ancients II: Hesiod

Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones kick off their second season of Among the Ancients with a return to the eighth century BCE, exploring the poems of Homer’s near contemporary, Hesiod, the first western w…

00:12:00 | Wed 24 Jan 2024

Medieval LOLs: Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale'

Were the Middle Ages funny? In this bonus Close Readings series running throughout this year, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their quest for the medieval sense of humour with Chaucer’s 'Mi…

00:30:03 | Wed 17 Jan 2024

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