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]

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

Education Books Arts Courses

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

Share to:

Medieval Beginnings: Beowulf

Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu start their Medieval Beginnings series with Beowulf, a tale of monsters and heroes that is also a complex collection of interwoven stories about war and the conduc…

00:11:16 | Wed 04 Jan 2023

Modern-ish Poets Live! T. S. Eliot

On the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in book form, Mark and Seamus finish the second series of Modern-ish Poets by considering how revolutionary the poem was, the numerous …

01:08:50 | Sat 10 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic, hedonistic poe…

01:00:57 | Fri 09 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Charlotte Mew

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Charlotte Mew, who brought the Victorian art of dramatic monologue into the 20th century, and whose difficult experiences are often refracted t…

00:47:54 | Thu 08 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: W. B. Yeats

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford continue their series with a look at the life and work of W.B. Yeats, from his early quest for a mythological Irish culture, to his shift towards the Modernist experiment, …

01:02:17 | Wed 07 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Emily Dickinson

Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O’Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson—her dashes, death instinct and obliquity. To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close R…

01:03:22 | Tue 06 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Derek Walcott

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the island poet and playwright surrounded by an oceanic consciousness, whose writing recognises …

00:56:50 | Mon 05 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Louis MacNeice

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness, in the fourth episode of series two of Modern-ish Poets. To …

00:56:59 | Sun 04 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Adrienne Rich

In the third episode of their second series of Modern-ish Poets, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of Adrienne Rich, in whose poems the personal becomes not only political, but epi…

00:55:37 | Sat 03 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Robert Frost

Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods. They discuss Frost’s difficult early life as an occasional poultry farmer and t…

00:57:18 | Fri 02 Dec 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 2: Gerard Manley Hopkins

In the first episode of their second series of Modern-ish Poets, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesu…

01:02:34 | Thu 01 Dec 2022

Encounters with Medieval Women: Margery Kempe

In the fourth and final episode in their miniseries, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the life and work of pilgrim, entrepreneur and visionary mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated what is th…

00:57:10 | Fri 04 Nov 2022

Encounters with Medieval Women: The Wife of Bath

In the third episode in their series, Irina and Mary discuss Chaucer’s sexually voracious professional widow, stealth preacher, vivid storyteller and teacher of love, the Wife of Bath. To listen to M…

00:55:03 | Thu 03 Nov 2022

Encounters with Medieval Women: Julian of Norwich

In the second episode in their series, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the work of mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the first book in English that we can be sure was auth…

00:45:45 | Wed 02 Nov 2022

Encounters with Medieval Women: Mary of Egypt

In the first episode of their miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime betw…

00:58:08 | Tue 01 Nov 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 1: Robert Lowell

In the final episode of series one of Modern-ish Poets, Mark and Seamus confront Robert Lowell: the Boston Brahmin for whom poetry trumped every other consideration, and whose Cold War ‘confessionali…

00:12:11 | Mon 10 Oct 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 1: Seamus Heaney

For the ninth episode of their series, Seamus and Mark discuss the life and work of Seamus Heaney, whose first collection, Death of Naturalist, established him immediately as a leading poetic voice i…

00:11:54 | Sun 09 Oct 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 1: Sylvia Plath

Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry, for the eighth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1. They consider the balance of biograph…

00:10:42 | Sat 08 Oct 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 1: Wallace Stevens

In episode seven of their first series of Modern-ish Poets Mark and Seamus look to that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, considering his anecdote-proof life, the capitalist economy of …

00:11:30 | Fri 07 Oct 2022

Modern-ish Poets Series 1: A.E. Housman

In the sixth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Worcestershire lad A. E. Housman, whose imaginative poetic landscape of a vanishing England in A Shrops…

00:11:45 | Thu 06 Oct 2022

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are the property of London Review of Books. This content is not affiliated with or endorsed by eachpod.com.

EachPod