The LRB Podcast
- Episodes
- 492
- Released
- several times a week
- Latest episode
- Nov 14, 2026
About the podcast
The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas, hosted by Thomas Jones and Malin Hay, and featuring our fortnightly 'On Politics' podcast hosted by James Butler. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: [email protected]
Episodes 492
Next Year on Close Readings
We’re delighted to announce five new Close Readings series starting in January 2027. Listen to the hosts talk about what to expect from each one. Here’s the line-up: ‘Conversations in Philosophy II’ with …
Show notes
We’re delighted to announce five new Close Readings series starting in January 2027. Listen to the hosts talk about what to expect from each one.
Here’s the line-up:
- ‘Conversations in Philosophy II’ with Jonathan Rée and James Wood
- ‘The Everyday’ with David Trotter and Rachel Bowlby
- ‘Poetry and Place’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford
- ‘Mediterranean Worlds’ with Josephine Quinn and guests
- ‘Medieval-ish Novels’ with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley
If you’re not already a subscriber to Close Readings, get 25 per cent off a 12-month subscription with the code ‘AUTUMN25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/cr
Get ahead on the reading and buy the books from the London Review Bookshop: https://lrb.me/crbooks
Works covered in each series:
Conversations in Philosophy II
Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Pedantry’; John Locke, ‘Of Identity and Diversity’, from Essay concerning Human Understanding; George Berkeley, First dialogue, from Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher; David Hume, The Natural History of Religion; Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew; Immanuel Kant, ‘A renewed attempt to answer the question, Is the Human Race continually improving’; G.W.F. Hegel, ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit; William Hazlitt, ‘On the pleasure of painting’; Henri Bergson, Laughter: an essay of the meaning of the comic; Simone Weil, ‘On the Abolition of All Political Parties’; Alain Locke, ‘Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy’; Hannah Arendt, ‘Introduction into politics’; Jacques Derrida, ‘White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy’ ; Franz Kafka, ‘Report for an academy’.
The Everyday
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Man of the Crowd’; Gustave Flaubert, ‘A Simple Heart’; George and Weedon Grossmith, Diary of a Nobody; Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome; James Joyce, Dubliners; Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own; Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ; Nell Dunn, Up the Junction (+ Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen); Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (+ Lydia Davis, ‘The Seals’ in Can’t and Won’t); Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia; David Szalay, London and the South East.
Poetry and Place
Poems will be decided through the year.
Mediterranean Worlds
This is a historical series about the Mediterranean Sea from its formation to the end of the Roman Empire. It's not focused on particular texts but a recommended reading list will be provided.
Medieval-ish Novels
Sarah Moss, Ghost Wall; Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner that Held Them; Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto; Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund; Daphne du Maurier, The House on the Strand; Emma Donoghue, Haven; Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose; Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant; Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe; Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court; J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country; Benjamin Myers, Cuddy; Robert Glück, Margery Kempe.
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Ways of Listening
‘Music is both too difficult and too easy to access,’ Nicholas Spice wrote recently in the LRB, ‘and it seems that we have opted to stick with ease over difficulty.’ On this episode he joins Thomas Jones to …
Show notes
‘Music is both too difficult and too easy to access,’ Nicholas Spice wrote recently in the LRB, ‘and it seems that we have opted to stick with ease over difficulty.’ On this episode he joins Thomas Jones to discuss some of the difficulties: of listening, of understanding, of maintaining the distance necessary for aesthetic contemplation, of playing and how that differs from performing. But engaging with the difficulty of music – learning to attend to it – doesn’t mean rejecting more immediate kinds of response. Keeping music alive, Nicholas also argues, requires an active involvement, an openness of engagement, that’s as likely to be found in a group of schoolchildren singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ as it is in a professional classical performance at a concert hall.
Read Nicholas Spice's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/spicelrbpod
From the LRB
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'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice
In Autumn Journal, his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a …
Show notes
In Autumn Journal, his long 1938 poem, Louis MacNeice took many of the ideals shared by other young writers of his time – a desire for relevance, responsiveness and, above all, honesty – and applied them in a way that has few equivalents in English poetry. This diary-style work, written from August to December 1938, reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton wrote in 1985, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months.
In this episode from their Close Readings series ‘Political Poems’, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the poem’s lively depiction of the anecdotal abundance of London life and the ways in which its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter.
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Gaza and the Forever War
It’s been more than three years since Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel, and Israel responded with a war of annihilation in Gaza that human rights organisations and experts widely describe as …
Show notes
It’s been more than three years since Hamas launched its attack on southern Israel, and Israel responded with a war of annihilation in Gaza that human rights organisations and experts widely describe as genocide. A ceasefire of sorts is in place, though it has allowed the killing and destruction to continue. The people of Gaza are confined to less than a third of their land, reduced to bare life, and under a blockade that cuts them off from the outside world.In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Jaser Abu Mousa and Bashir Abu-Manneh to discuss life in Gaza and how Israel’s war of ‘politicide’ turned genocidal. They also consider the implications of the recent elections in Israel and the United States, and the history of Palestinian resistance, both armed and unarmed.
From the LRB
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On Politics: Can the UK economy ever change?
Despite Andy Burnham’s declared ambition to end forty years of neoliberalism, the first budget under his leadership was limited to cautious measures focused on cost-of-living pressures. What lies behind this …
Show notes
Despite Andy Burnham’s declared ambition to end forty years of neoliberalism, the first budget under his leadership was limited to cautious measures focused on cost-of-living pressures. What lies behind this inertia, and the apparent resistance of the British state to any transformative policies? James Butler is joined by Aditya Chakrabortty, the Guardian’s senior economics commentator, and Daniela Gabor, a professor of economics at SOAS, to examine the systemic and political obstacles successive governments have faced in delivering the radical reform they keep promising.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
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How Prediction Markets Work
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with …
Show notes
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many losers’. On this episode, he joins Thomas Jones to discuss how prediction markets work, who profits from them, who regulates them (or doesn’t), why they’re often a very bad tool for predicting the future, and what they may tell us about the state of the world.Read Geoff's piece: https://lrb.me/mannlrbpod
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Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being …
Show notes
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet …
Show notes
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson also called Jameson a ‘great writer’. As Toril Moi wrote recently in the LRB, he was a great reader, too. Moi, who was recruited by Jameson to Duke University in the mid-1980s and remained his colleague there until his death in 2024, joins Thomas Jones on this episode to look back at Jameson’s earlier work, from Sartre: The Origins of a Style (1961) to The Political Unconscious (1981), and to retrace the intellectual path he took to arrive at that milestone.
Read Toril Moi on Fredric Jameson:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n19/toril-moi/fredric-jameson-as-reader
From the LRB
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Who were the English?
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a …
Show notes
For decades after the Roman legions left Britain in the early fifth century, people expected them sooner or later to return. ‘During this bizarre interregnum,’ Pablo Scheffer wrote recently in the LRB, ‘a veneer of romanitas was everywhere.’ But unlike in other parts of the former Roman Empire, it didn’t endure, as Angles, Saxons and other Germanic peoples arrived in Britain – perhaps invited at first, later as invaders – bringing their new customs, religion and language with them, and displacing, killing or subjugating the people who were already here. On this episode, Pablo joins Tom to explore the transition from Roman to British to Anglo-Saxon England between the sixth and eighth centuries. They discuss why none of the changes that took place was inevitable and why so few British words survive in modern English, even if the man said to be the first English poet was a cowherd with a British name.
Read Pablo's piece: https://lrb.me/pschefferlrbpod
From the LRB
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On Politics: What is political writing?
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency …
Show notes
In What is literature? (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre argued that writers and artists have a responsibility to engage with political and social realities. But is it still possible for writers to have political agency in a culture that instantly commodifies ideas? Lea Ypi, a professor of politics at the LSE, has called for a return to the questions behind ‘committed literature’ that emerged in the middle of the last century. She joins James to talk about the ways in which the public sphere has changed since Sartre’s book and how Big Tech has assumed an authority like the medieval church, demanding a new form of enlightened resistance.
Lea Ypi is the author of 'Free' (2021) and 'Indignity: A Life Reimagined' (2025)
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
From the LRB
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Fascism in a time of AI
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist …
Show notes
Since Trump first took office in 2016 there has been a debate on the left as to whether he and other authoritarian right-wing leaders, such as Viktor Orbán and Narendra Modi, should be described as fascist. Some have dismissed the label as rhetorical excess, while others have chosen to describe this new formation of right-wing politics as ‘post-fascist’. But, as Primo Levi wrote, ‘every age has its own fascism’, and in their recent book Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have identified ‘end-times fascism’ as a feature of our time, offering a portrait of arsonists and accelerationists who are knowingly pushing the world towards new and greater catastrophes.
On this episode Klein and Taylor join Adam Shatz to discuss what fascism looks like in the age of AI, drone warfare and influencers, and why we have reached a point where tech billionaires declare they are ‘unapologetically on Team Humanity’.
Further listening:
Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith on ecofascism:
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An Alternative History of the Microphone
The first microphones were invented in the 1870s as components for telephones. By the 1930s, politicians as unalike as FDR and Hitler were using microphones as both audio devices and visual props for projecting …
Show notes
The first microphones were invented in the 1870s as components for telephones. By the 1930s, politicians as unalike as FDR and Hitler were using microphones as both audio devices and visual props for projecting power. The history of the microphone often focuses on its function as a technology of transmission, but as David Trotter wrote recently in the LRB, microphones ‘both receive and transmit’, and there is another tradition more concerned with listening than transmitting. In this episode, David joins Tom at the mic to discuss these alternative histories, as well as the role of microphones in the history of eavesdropping, Francis Ford Coppola’s movie The Conversation and the strange cry that Ted Hughes picked up on his RAF radio while doing his National Service.
Read David's piece in the LRB: https://lrb.me/trotterpod
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On Politics: What happened to the intellectual?
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask …
Show notes
William Davies joins James to consider what distinguishes intellectuals from the technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus and utopians who compete for our attention, and to ask whether there’s still a role for them in the public realm. They look back to Weber's and Gramsci’s ideas about the autonomy and responsibility of the intellectual and discuss the ways in which Hayek’s anti-intellectualism has shaped discourse up to the present day. Where do politicians look for ideas and does the modern marketplace of algorithmic video platforms pose a challenge to independent thought?
From the LRB
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What’s the point of literary criticism?
As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several …
Show notes
As universities are cutting English degree programmes and ever fewer people are taking English A-level, Colin Burrow isn't the only one asking ‘what’s the point of literary criticism?’ But he has several answers, and in this episode he joins Tom to discuss them, along with the work of the late Helen Vendler, one of the great critics of the second half of the 20th century, who dedicated a lifetime to the close reading of lyric poetry and ‘believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others’.
Read Colin's piece: https://lrb.me/burrowvendlerpod
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On Politics: Germany's Far-Right Future?
On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest share for any far-right party in post-1945 Germany. Among the …
Show notes
On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the highest share for any far-right party in post-1945 Germany. Among the many surprising aspects of the result was the broad, multigenerational support the AfD attracted, on an unusually high turnout of 77 per cent. In this episode, Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, talks to James Butler about the reasons behind the AfD’s success, from the background of economic malaise in the region to Ulrich Siegmund’s successful mix of TikTok and in-person campaigning. They also discuss the legacy of Angela Merkel’s migration policies and whether the ‘firewall’ against far-right coalitions can survive when mainstream parties keep copying the AfD’s rhetoric.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
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The Romantic History of the Bayeux Tapestry
The story of why, and how, an arrow ended up in Harold's eye in the Bayeux Tapestry is tied to the politics of the early 19th century, to Napoleon's ambitions and Britain's national pride, and the work of two …
Show notes
The story of why, and how, an arrow ended up in Harold's eye in the Bayeux Tapestry is tied to the politics of the early 19th century, to Napoleon's ambitions and Britain's national pride, and the work of two antiquaries, Anne and Charles Stothard, who travelled to northern France several times to make drawings of the great embroidery.
In this episode from our series on Romantic History, originally released in 2022, Rosemary Hill talks to Roey Sweet about the emergence of the Bayeux Tapestry as an artefact of political importance in the early 1800s and the new breed of multi-disciplinary investigators, who, in the years after the French Revolution, studied everything from woollen threads to tombstones in their efforts to imagine the past.
Listen to other episodes in this series:
From Waterloo to the British Museum, with Neil MacGregor:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep4
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep4s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep4lrb
Salisbury Cathedral, with Tom Stammers:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep1
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep1s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep1lrb
Balmoral, with Colin Kidd:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/rhep2
Spotify: https://lrb.me/rhep2s
LRB website: https://lrb.me/rhep2lrb
Or find them in all in this Spotify playlist: https://lrb.me/rhspotify
From the LRB
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Roman Scandinavia
In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now Denmark. After Marcus’ death in 180, his German campaigns were …
Show notes
In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now Denmark. After Marcus’ death in 180, his German campaigns were abandoned and the Romans withdrew to the Danube. Some of the demobilised troops returned north and ‘revolutionised their cultural world’, as Michael Kulikowski wrote recently in the LRB, ‘by adapting the lessons they had learned in Roman service’. On this episode, Michael joins Tom to discuss his review of an ‘extraordinary book’ by Dagfinn Skre, ‘which gives Scandinavia an ancient history for the very first time’. There is no written record of the period, ‘no text to impose its tyranny of words’, but the proxy evidence – coins, arms, stones, seeds – ‘converges on the existence of a late second-century watershed that produced a complete transformation in Scandinavian society in response to interaction with Rome’. Whether or not a pair of polar bears made it to the Colosseum, however, remains an open question.
Read Michael's piece: https://lrb.me/kulikowskipod
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Travel with Close Readings: ‘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, overwhelmed …
Show notes
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, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city.
In this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino’s love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.
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Seamus Perry: Pluralism and the Modern Poet
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more …
Show notes
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase. How do the virtues of plurality and difference fit with the more traditional virtues of poetic unity and imaginative order? Seamus Perry considers the ways in which modern poets have responded to the demands of pluralism, and whether Auden was right in thinking that a poem that exemplified the pluralist values of liberal democracy would be ‘formless, windy, banal and utterly boring’.
From the LRB
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Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his …
Show notes
In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (and American) way.
Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss the novel that established Henry James as ‘the Master’. They dissect James’s and his characters’ complicated motivations, the significance of his 1905-6 revisions, and the ways in which a ‘primitive plot’ irrupts in a painstakingly subtle and stylish novel.
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Adam Shatz: Visions of America
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even …
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‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Donald Trump’s vision of Fortress America, at war with immigrants, shadowy globalists and itself, is a violent attempt to resolve what Baldwin called the ‘rich confusion’ of American identity. But there are other possible Americas, some, like Baldwin's, described from voluntary exile. What can they offer at the present moment?
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Travel with Close Readings: 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, his …
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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, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza.
But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’?
In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is, in this free episode from their Close Readings series ‘On Satire'. They see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.
Introduced by Clare and Colin with Thomas Jones.
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Amia Srinivasan: The Impossible Patient
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present …
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Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and death drive, disavowal and displacement – to understand the present conjuncture: a conjuncture of authoritarian strongmen, anti-democratic populism, regressive sexual morality and genocidal war. What form of knowledge does psychoanalysis give us of politics, and to what practical purpose can this knowledge be put? Does psychoanalysis merely describe the world, or could it also change it?
This lecture was delivered as part of the LRB's Winter Lecture series in December 2025.
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Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Prelude’ (Books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth
Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert …
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Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism. Mark and Seamus discuss why, despite Wordsworth’s claim of being innately republican, discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution is strangely absent from the poem, which is more often preoccupied with romance and the imagination, particularly in their power to soften zealotry.
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Adam Tooze: Electrostates, Petrostates and the New Cold War
China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel machismo. An alignment between the three major petrostates – the US, Saudi Arabia and …
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China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel machismo. An alignment between the three major petrostates – the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia – no longer looks implausible. The outlines of a new Cold War are becoming visible, one which will be determined by a novel mixture of ideology, critical technologies, supply chains and control of energy flows. How will these geopolitical dynamics play out – and what will it mean for global warming?
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History and director of the European Institute at Columbia University. A columnist at Foreign Policy and a regular contributor to the LRB, he also writes Chartbook, a newsletter on economics, geopolitics and history. His books include ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World’ and ‘Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy’.
Adam Tooze's LRB Autumn Lecture was delivered at the New School, NYC on 27 October 2025
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Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Travels of Sir John Mandeville’
To continue our summer of travel with Close Readings, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the medieval bestseller The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fictional traveller’s fantastical descriptions …
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To continue our summer of travel with Close Readings, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the medieval bestseller The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fictional traveller’s fantastical descriptions of different places, peoples and animals across the Holy Land and Asia are almost certainly drawn mainly from other textual sources, rather than direct experience by the unknown author, and yet the work was often used as a source of reference as well as entertainment or prurient interest. Many of the writer’s observations of different political and religious practices could be taken as radical critiques of his homeland. Yet while it often urges appreciation of other cultures, the book is undoubtedly xenophobic and racist in places, foreshadowing the European quest for colonisation: indeed, Christopher Columbus had a copy with him when the Santa Cruz sighted land on 12th October 1492.
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The long history of Black voter suppression in the US
In April this year, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's voting map on the grounds that state lawmakers had violated the constitution by creating a second district with a majority of Black voters. This …
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In April this year, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's voting map on the grounds that state lawmakers had violated the constitution by creating a second district with a majority of Black voters. This was followed by a similar decision by the court in June, giving Alabama the green light to eliminate a Black majority district. At the same time, President Trump has called for more restrictive voting laws and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the upcoming midterms.
To discuss what the decision in Louisiana v. Callais means for future US elections and the long erosion of voting rights protections, from the limitations of the 15th amendment to the evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Adam Shatz is joined by Mara Gay, a staff writer at the New York Times, and Randall Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard.
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On Politics: Burnham’s First Week
Andy Burnham’s early promises to end rough sleeping and sort out social care won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his political career, but his apparent interest in the structures of Whitehall was less …
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Andy Burnham’s early promises to end rough sleeping and sort out social care won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his political career, but his apparent interest in the structures of Whitehall was less expected. To discuss what we know so far about the direction of Britain’s new government, James is joined by Stephen Bush of the Financial Times and Sienna Rodgers of the House magazine. They talk through what the exclusions from Burnham’s cabinet reveal about his political intentions, and why the tax and spending plans inherited from the last government might push him to call a general election next year.
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Nolan v. Homer
It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the themes of his earlier movies, as once again a male protagonist embarks on a …
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It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the themes of his earlier movies, as once again a male protagonist embarks on a desperate quest to recover a female love object. But, as Emily Wilson argues, while Homer’s Odyssey might seem the perfect source material for Nolan, the ancient Greek poem also excels at many things the director isn't so good at, not least dialogue and characterisation.
Wilson, who has translated both the Odyssey and the Iliad, joins Thomas Jones to talk through the new adaptation, discussing its echoes of Nolan’s earlier films and his use of the Trojan Horse as a parable about wars built on lies. They also look at the compositional history of Homer’s poem and consider why this archetypal journey narrative is also a story about stasis and the desire to resist time.
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Palantir and the NHS
The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government’, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin wrote recently in the LRB …
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The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government’, Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin wrote recently in the LRB. The newsletter where they work, Democracy for Sale, ‘has been looking into Palantir’s business in the UK, and particularly its contracts with the NHS’. On this episode, Peter joins Thomas Jones to discuss the company's origins, rapid rise and expansion – with the help of Peter Mandelson – into the British state. They talk about the risks of handing our most personal data over to a company whose billionaire founders have poured millions into right-wing political campaigns in the US, and ask whether the software’s actually any good at doing what it promises.
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