Close Readings
- Episodios
- 227
- Se publica
- cada semana
- Último episodio
- 21 Oct 2026
Sobre el podcast
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast 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 2026 'Who's afraid of realism?' with James Wood and guests 'Nature in Crisis' with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith 'Narrative Poems' with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford 'London Revisited' with Rosemary Hill and guests Bonus Series: 'The Man Behind the Curtain' with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones ALSO INCLUDED IN THE CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION: '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 '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]
Episodios 227
Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos
Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that …
Notas del episodio
Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition,’ Thea Riofrancos writes in Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, ‘global climate action comes into conflict with local environmental protection.’ Or as Meehan puts it at the start of the episode, there’s a fundamental contradiction between two desirable things.
Meehan and Peter discuss Latin America’s long history of resource nationalism and compare the process of lithium extraction through brine evaporation with the far more destructive practices of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The paradoxes inherent in ‘green capitalism’ are brought into sharper focus by Riofrancos’s exploration of these extractive frontiers, but are her solutions – smaller batteries, more recycling, denser cities and fewer cars – a serious proposal or pie in the sky?
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrnature
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature
Further reading in the LRB:
Laleh Khalili: Who owns the arctic? https://lrb.me/nicep1101
Adam Tooze: What energy transition? https://lrb.me/nicep1102
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Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad
What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and …
Notas del episodio
What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity (1994), a middle-aged teacher, Elias Rukla, is teaching Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for perhaps the hundredth time when he has a revelation about an apparently insignificant detail in the play relating to a minor character, Dr Relling. The detail is classically realist in that it appears to have no importance in the plot, yet it acquires a major significance in Rukla’s life, who shortly after the lesson has a breakdown in the school playground and is convinced his career is finished.
In this episode, James Wood is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss a novel that avoids the expectations of realism to explore the psychological and cultural impact of the realist tradition.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor
Read more in the LRB:
Adam Mars-Jones on Solstad: https://lrb.me/realism1101
David Edgar on Ibsen: https://lrb.me/realism1103
Michael Hofmann on Thomas Bernhard: https://lrb.me/realism1102
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London Revisited: The Monster
In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them, but for many of the large number who made their …
Notas del episodio
In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them, but for many of the large number who made their hopeful journey to the capital from all over the country in the 18th century, life was more likely to end up like a scene from a Hogarth print, ruined by gin and despair.
London had become a ‘great and monstrous thing’ according to Daniel Defoe. However, if you were lucky enough to survive childhood, and gin, and have a bit of money, it was an increasingly pleasant monster, offering strolls through grand squares and pleasure gardens, and shops displaying a dizzying variety of goods from all over the world alongside cheap copies of a new literary form: the novel. To discuss London’s emergence as a brutal city of consumption and cultural innovation, Rosemary is joined again by Markman Ellis, a professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr
Read more in the LRB:
Clare Bucknell on Samuel Richardson: https://lrb.me/lrep1001
John Mullan on Pamela: https://lrb.me/lrep1002
Rosemary Hill on Hogarth: https://lrb.me/lrep1003
Tom Paulin on Daniel Defoe: https://lrb.me/lrep1004
Claude Rawson on Henry Fieldings: https://lrb.me/lrep1005
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Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyage’ by Arthur Hugh Clough
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked …
Notas del episodio
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some European travel and the following year found himself in Rome during the short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came Amours de Voyage, an epistolary verse novel written in hexameters, in which a young scholar visits Italy during the uprising and falls in love with a fellow English tourist.
In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at Clough’s poem as an expression of its author’s rootlessness and the crisis of faith that characterised the age, and the ways in which it undercuts the grand Byronic promise of its title and meter to unfold an Austenian story of subtle social snobbery and young romantic failure.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp
Read more in the LRB:
Fergus McGhee: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt https://lrb.me/npep1001
Christopher Clark: God Bless Italy https://lrb.me/npep1002
Stefan Collini: Matthew Arnold https://lrb.me/npep101003
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Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to …
Notas del episodio
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilification inflation’, Moore and Roberts make the case for the continuing salience of the word fascism.
They argue that a direct line can be traced between early fascist ideology in Italy and Germany and the ‘reharmonising’ green nationalism of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Mystical and dangerous ideas claiming to be environmentalist, once the preserve of fringe online groups, have entered the political mainstream through these successful disrupter parties, and understanding the connection between past and present is the only way to speculate meaningfully about the future of far-right ecological thought and action. Meehan and Peter consider the plausibility of the three future scenarios sketched in the book: ‘Fossilised Reaction’, ‘Batteries, Bombs and Borders’ and ‘Climate Collapse Cultists’.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrnature
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature
Read more in the LRB:
Daniel Trilling: Is this fascism? https://lrb.me/nicep1001
Alan Ryan: Fascism in the Plural https://lrb.me/nicep404
Edward Luttwak: Why fascism is the wave of the future: https://lrb.me/c6350c
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Who’s afraid of realism?: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark
When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted’. The loss of an arm was …
Notas del episodio
When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted’. The loss of an arm was hardly wonderful for Mr Lloyd, but for the girls at the centre of the novel it is a rich source of fascination, and Spark’s description exemplifies her use of one of the classic realist tools, free indirect style, to fill her short book with the life and character of adolescent girlhood at an Edinburgh school in the 1930s.
In this episode, James Wood considers the ways in which Spark, like Nabokov, gave the grammar of realism a post-modernist treatment to interrogate what it means to tell the story of a life. He considers the influence of Miss Brodie’s tyrannical, charismatic personality on the structure of the book itself, with its use of flash-forwards to suggest a Calvinistic, omniscient narrator, and the effect of Spark’s Dickensian leitmotif that sets the novelistic desire for knowability against the relentless change of youth.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor
Read more in the LRB:
Frank Kermode on Spark's life: https://lrb.me/realismep1001
Colin Burrow on Spark's letters: https://lrb.me/realismep1002
Susan Eilenberg on Spark's poems: https://lrb.me/realismep1003
More Spark in Close Readings:
Listen to Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow on Spark's novel A Far Cry from Kensington in their Close Readings series On Satire.
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London Revisited: Coffee, Satire and Bubbles
The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular, not least for the energy and locations it provided …
Notas del episodio
The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular, not least for the energy and locations it provided for two great booms in London life: financial speculation and a genuinely public print culture. For this episode, Rosemary is joined by Markman Ellis, professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London, to look at the architecture, literature and culture of ‘politeness’ that emerged after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the stories spun out of it by Daniel Defoe and John Gay. They discuss the coffee houses where London’s stock exchange and marine insurance market were created, the front rooms where women enjoyed the new ‘visiting system’ and the increasingly hazardous streets where Moll Flanders and others sought their fortune.
Reading by Fiona Sheehan
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr
Read more in the LRB:
Steven Shapin on coffee: https://lrb.me/lrep901
Tom Paulin on Defoe: https://lrb.me/lrep902
Michael Ledger-Lomas on the South Sea Company: https://lrb.me/lrep903
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Narrative Poems: ‘Childe Roland’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ by Robert Browning
‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a kind of dream’, Browning recalled …
Notas del episodio
‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a kind of dream’, Browning recalled. ‘I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day.’ The result, inspired by a line spoken by Edgar (as Poor Tom) in Act III of King Lear, is a grim, hallucinatory quest poem that exemplifies Browning’s talent for what G.K. Chesterton called ‘the poetry of mean landscapes’.
In this episode, Seamus and Mark read Browning’s mysterious poem as a rejection of the resources and consolations established by the Romantics. They then turn to an earlier narrative poem, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (1843), in which Browning uses a comical, Byronic tone to tell the story of another prophetic figure.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp
Read more in the LRB:
Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep901
Matthew Reynolds: https://lrb.me/npep902
Donald Davie: https://lrb.me/npep903
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Nature in Crisis: ‘Lessons for Survival’ by Emily Raboteau
Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the species depicted by the artist John James …
Notas del episodio
Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the species depicted by the artist John James Audubon, who lived in the area. Emily Raboteau’s ‘Lessons for Survival’ (2024) takes these murals, along with Raboteau’s own photographs of local birds, as a way into exploring the challenges faced by a mother of two Black sons in New York City living through Hurricane Sandy, the first Trump presidency, Covid and mounting climate breakdown.
In this episode, Meehan and Peter talk through the different aspects of Raboteau’s project of survival, from experiences of gentrification and medical racism to the models it offers for dealing with existential threat and ‘justifiable rage’, and Raboteau’s stylistic achievement of bringing together the urban and natural environment.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrnature
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature
Further reading in the LRB:
Meehan Crist: When the ice melts: https://lrb.me/nicep901
Liam Shaw: Great Auks: https://lrb.me/nicep902
Richard Fortey: Sea Slugs, Wombats, Microbes: https://lrb.me/nicep903
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Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov
If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of …
Notas del episodio
If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of postmodernism. Yet for all its playfulness, the book maintains, in its powers of noticing and subtle emotional intelligence, a strong commitment to the real. To examine the debts to realism in Nabokov’s story of a Russian-born academic in the United States, James Wood is joined by Patricia Lockwood, who wrote about Nabokov for the LRB in 2020. They discuss why, despite the cruelty of the narrator, Pnin offers one of Nabokov’s most affectionate portraits, and whether it’s possible to define the style of a writer often referred to as a ‘master stylist’.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor
Read more on (and by) Nabokov in the LRB:
Patricia Lockwood: https://lrb.me/realismep901
Vladimir Nabokov: ‘The University Poem’ (read by Ralph Fiennes): https://lrb.me/realismep902
Michael Wood: https://lrb.me/realismep903
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London Revisited: Pepys, Plague and Fire
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founded and the West End, with its squares …
Notas del episodio
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founded and the West End, with its squares, parks and fashionable ‘season’, was born. But the social whirl stopped abruptly in 1665 with the arrival of plague, which was followed in 1666 by the catastrophic Great Fire of London. To talk about these events and the new city that emerged from the ashes, Rosemary is again joined by Vanessa Harding, emerita professor of London history at Birkbeck. They look at the invaluable observations of Samuel Pepys, the continental ambitions of Christopher Wren and the emergence of political parties from the succession crisis of the 1680s.
Reading by Duncan Wilkins
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr
Further reading in the LRB:
Margaret Anne Doody on Aphra Behn: https://lrb.me/lrep801
Deborah Friedell on Samuel Pepys: https://lrb.me/lrep802
Simon Schaffer on Christopher Wren: https://lrb.me/lrep803
James Shapiro on plague writing: https://lrb.me/lrep804
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Narrative Poems: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by John Keats
According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in …
Notas del episodio
According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he was inspired to write his own account.
In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss Keats’s talent for sublime banality, the competing readings of the lover, Porphyro, and the poem's repurposing of Spenserian allegory for a contemporary love story.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp
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Read more on Keats in the LRB:
John Bayley: https://lrb.me/npep801
Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep802
Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/npep803
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The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot
In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this …
Notas del episodio
In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical masterpiece, which marks a revolution in English fiction as significant in its way as the political, scientific and industrial revolutions that it's set against. They look at the novel’s philosophical underpinnings, its treatment of knowledge and desire, money and debt, sex and marriage, and whether or not Casaubon was onto something with his ‘Key to All Mythologies’.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/closereadingsmbtc
For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc
Read more on Eliot in the LRB:
Rosemary Ashton:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n14/rosemary-ashton/homage-to-mrs-brater
Terry Eagleton:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n18/terry-eagleton/biogspeak
Rachel Bowlby
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n07/rachel-bowlby/waiting-for-the-dawn-to-come
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Nature in Crisis: ‘Impasse’ by Roy Scranton
At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may …
Notas del episodio
At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped to push the settlement to collapse. ‘How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?’ Roy Scranton asks near the start of ‘Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress’ (2025).
For Scranton, the fate of the civilisation at Chaco Canyon is a microcosm for the crisis now confronting humanity. The challenges we face, from climate change to political instability, are so intractable in part because of their complexity. In this episode, Meehan and Peter discuss Scranton’s analysis of our predicament and his proposal for ‘ethical pessimism’, based on resistance to our bias for optimism, as a way of coping with an uncertain future.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrnature
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature
Further reading:
Adam Tooze: Trouble Transitioning: https://lrb.me/nicep8tooze
Further listening:
Meehan Crist's series on 'Climate, Politics and Procreation' on the LRB Podcast: https://lrb.me/meehanpod
Get in touch: [email protected]
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Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow
‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the …
Notas del episodio
‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wilhelm also bears the intervening influence of modernism, not least in its opening section in which, for twenty pages, our hero simply stands on the street thinking about his life.
In this episode, James Wood discusses the Bellovian prose style with its Melvillian love of words and biblical undertones, and explores the book’s evocation of a postwar Manhattan imbued with masculinist conventionality.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor
Read more in the LRB:
Saul Bellow talks to Melvyn Bragg:
Andrew O’Hagan on Saul Bellow’s letters:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n01/andrew-o-hagan/they-don-t-say-that-about-idi-amin
James Wolcott on Bellow’s later life:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n02/james-wolcott/the-unstoppable-upward
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London Revisited: The Road to Civil War
When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half …
Notas del episodio
When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half of Westminster up in 1605. But the plot failed, and with James’s reign came a new, lavish court life, the emergence of the first newspapers amid the booming print industry around St Paul’s, and, with the guidance of Inigo Jones, the arrival of the renaissance in London’s architecture with the development of Covent Garden and the first of the city’s squares.
To continue her story of London, Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to see why James’s Stuart settlement eventually failed under the personal rule of Charles I, leading to a civil war in which London became the financial and military headquarters for the victorious Parliamentarians and James’s grand new banqueting house at Whitehall was used as the backdrop for his son’s execution.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr
Read more in the LRB:
Perry Anderson on the Civil War:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n21/perry-anderson/maurice-thomson-s-war
Blair Worden on the Civil War:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n16/blair-worden/conrad-russell-s-civil-war
Maggie Kilgour on Milton and London:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/maggie-kilgour/pens-and-heads
John Gallagher on Early Modern news:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n03/john-gallagher/quickly-quickly-quickly
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Narrative Poems: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the …
Notas del episodio
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s interest in rural poverty as much as the natural world. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the two poems as part of the literary revolution brought about by the Lyrical Ballads, in which everyday language is used to depict marginal lives without sentiment, guided by Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.’
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp
Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp
Read more in the LRB:
Marilyn Butler on The Lyrical Ballads: https://lrb.me/npep702
Jonathan Wordsworth: Wordsworth in Love: https://lrb.me/npep701
Seamus Perry on 'The Prelude': https://lrb.me/npep703
Colin Burrow on Wordsworth: https://lrb.me/npep704
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Nature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between …
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Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. Braiding Sweetgrass was an enormous success for a small press publication, becoming a bestseller and a touchstone for readers searching for alternatives to extractivist realpolitik.
In this episode, Meehan and Peter look at the most compelling features of Kimmerer’s technique – reminiscent of Darwin at his best – and where her book risks scientific overreach.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrnature
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Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Jean Rhys
In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her …
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In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her contemporary Jean Rhys, but if she had read ‘A Voyage in the Dark’ (1934), she might well have marvelled at, and even envied, its radical realism. Rhys’ story of a young woman who moves from the Caribbean to England and enters a world of financial and sexual exploitation was drawn from experiences unavailable to Woolf.
In this episode, James is joined by the biographer Miranda Seymour to discuss Rhys’s virtuosity of technique and detachment, her extraordinary ear for dialogue and the places where her mastery of realist method gave way to modernism.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Mary-Kay Wilmers on Jean Rhys: https://lrb.me/waorep701
Carole Angier on Rhys's letters: https://lrb.me/waorep702
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London Revisited: Shakespeare’s City
When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention but the ready availability of refreshments and the …
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When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention but the ready availability of refreshments and the high quality of the players’ clothes. The revolution in playmaking that he witnessed on the south bank of the Thames reflected widespread innovations in London’s cultural life in the reign of Elizabeth I. For the first time, we can see the city clearly, in the panoramas and maps inspired by Dutch artists. New ideas about history are emerging in the works of Stow and Holinshed. And the growth of trade through piracy, with a new centre of commerce in Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, marks the beginning of England's imperial expansion.
In this episode, Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to discuss this extraordinary moment in London’s history and some of the reasons behind it, from Elizabeth’s genius for survival to the city’s lack of a university.
Reading by Duncan Wilkins
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Charles Nicholl on Elizabethan true crime: https://lrb.me/lrep601
Michael Dobson on Shakespeare's life: https://lrb.me/lrep603
Colin Burrow on Walter Raleigh: https://lrb.me/lrep02
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Narrative Poems: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in the dark,’ she wrote, ‘William and …
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In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in the dark,’ she wrote, ‘William and Coleridge employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad.’ This was the origin of the opening poem of the ’Lyrical Ballads’, published the following year – the book often seen as marking the beginning of Romanticism.
In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the strange hallucinatory power of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Coleridge’s search for a meter that could capture the force of his imagination. They also consider some of the poem’s many interpretations, from the influence of abolitionist writing to William Empson’s reading of the shooting of the albatross, and consider whether it’s best understood as a terrible encounter at a wedding reception.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Barbara Everett on Coleridge the modernist: https://lrb.me/npep601
Susan Eilenberg on the life of Coleridge: https://lrb.me/npep602
Marilyn Butler on the Lyrical Ballads: https://lrb.me/npep603
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Nature in Crisis: ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane
The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words, ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’. In ‘Is a …
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The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words, ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’. In ‘Is a River Alive?’ (2025), Robert Macfarlane travels with the lawyers, Indigenous people, scientists and others who are working to protect rivers in Ecuador, India and Quebec, and challenges himself to see rivers in a way that widens the category of life.
In this episode, Meehan and Peter assess Macfarlane's quest and look at the different kinds of writing he deploys along the way, including adventure story, biography and philosophy. They also look back to the origins of the rights of nature movement at the University of Southern California in the 1970s and consider whether the choice between seeing a river as either a resource or a fellow being is a false one.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrnature
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Read more in the LRB:
Rebecca Solnit on water: https://lrb.me/nicep601
Kathleen Jamie of Robert Macfarlane: https://lrb.me/nicep602
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Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf
In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes …
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In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depiction a group of circulating consciousnesses in London over the course of one day. But underlying these innovations are the techniques of 19th-century realism, and in this episode James Wood explores what Woolf owes to Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down these certainties to arrive at the ultimate unknowability of character.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more the LRB:
Jacqueline Rose on Woolf: https://lrb.me/realismep601
Gillian Beer on Woolf‘s essays: https://lrb.me/realismep602
David Trotter on ‘Mrs Dalloway’: https://lrb.me/realismep603
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London Revisited: The Protestant Capital
At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to Catholic Europe. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign …
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At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to Catholic Europe. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, much of that world had vanished. The Reformation not only changed the religious practices of its inhabitants, it brought a widespread transfer of property that reshaped the character and activity of the city and turned it into a theatre of power, punishment and debate.
Rosemary is joined by Vanessa Harding, emerita professor of London history at Birkbeck, University of London, to look at the events that transformed London into a commercially expanding and ideologically contested Protestant capital under the Tudors, from the arrival of Caxton’s printing press in Westminster and the beginnings of an aristocratic West End to Mary I’s brutal attempt to restore Catholic England.
Reading by Duncan Wilkins
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Hilary Mantel on England under Mary I: https://lrb.me/lrep504
Lucy Wooding on Henry VIII and the merchants: https://lrb.me/lrep502
Patrick Collinson on Henry VIII's Reformation: https://lrb.me/lrep503
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What do you think of Close Readings?
Have you got four minutes to share your feedback on Close Readings? It will help shape how we develop the podcast over the coming year. We’ve set up a short survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XCR7LQ7 …
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Have you got four minutes to share your feedback on Close Readings? It will help shape how we develop the podcast over the coming year.
We’ve set up a short survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XCR7LQ7
Thanks for your time, and for listening to our podcasts.
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Narrative Poems: ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns and ‘Peter Grimes’ by George Crabbe
‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural …
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‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and chastisement of Scottish masculinity ever since its publication, but the attitude of its narrator remains elusive throughout. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s moral and stylistic turns, its influence on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and what it owes to the Augustan perfectionism of Pope.
They then turn to a much darker example of Romantic narrative poetry, George Crabbe’s ‘Peter Grimes’ (published in his collection The Borough in 1810), and explore the bracing realism and psychological insight in the story of a Suffolk fisherman who destroys the apprentices placed in his care.
This episode also features a bonus conversation with Andrew O’Hagan, who reads extracts from 'Tam o’ Shanter' and explains why the poem’s reliably contradictory narrative voice is so useful for anyone learning to write stories.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Karl Miller: Peeping Tam: https://lrb.me/npep501
Neal Ascherson on Burns's life: https://lrb.me/npep502
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Nature in Crisis: 'Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth' by James Lovelock
In ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’ (1979), James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is something like a single living organism, capable of manipulating its circumstances and the environment to suit its needs …
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In ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’ (1979), James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is something like a single living organism, capable of manipulating its circumstances and the environment to suit its needs. While many scientists reject the fullest formulation of this idea, it has nonetheless had a profound influence on our understanding of the ways in which animal and plant life interact with the non-living parts of the environment, to the extent that observations in biological and earth systems science are often assessed for which version of Gaia they might support.
In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith look at the origins of the Gaia hypothesis in the radical work of Lynn Margulis and the contributions of Lovelock’s academic collaborator Dian Hitchcock, and in the science of cybernetics. They then consider the degree to which any formulation of Gaia can explain certain processes, from the impact of the ecological competition between daisies on the reflection of solar radiation to the carbon-silicate cycle and its control of carbon dioxide levels, and consider some of Lovelock’s wilder theories, including his suggestion that humans should merge their minds with those of whales.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrnature
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Read more in the LRB:
Meehan Crist on ‘Novocene’: https://lrb.me/natureep501
Peter Godfrey-Smith on Lovelock: https://lrb.me/natureep502
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Who’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy
In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he …
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In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886).
To discuss The Death of Ivan Ilyich and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman. They consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening, and why the unique authority of his style has proved so resistant to the critiques of realism in the 20th century.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Michael Wood on War and Peace: https://lrb.me/realismep501
James Meek on the death of Tolstoy: https://lrb.me/realismep502
John Bayley on Tolstoy's diaries: https://lrb.me/realismep503
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The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones …
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Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life. As well as its origins and afterlives, they consider the many systems that the novel draws on, challenges, reproduces and mutates – the laws of nature, philosophy, science, the human body, the traditional family – and ask whether the real horror at the heart of Frankenstein is not the creature so much as incest.
The Man Behind the Curtain is a bonus Close Readings series running this year. The next episode will be on ‘Middlemarch’, released in a couple of months.
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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Read more in the LRB:
Anne Barton on Mary Shelley: https://lrb.me/frankensteincr01
Caroline Gonda on the original Frankenstein: https://lrb.me/frankensteincr02
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London Revisited: Plague, Rebellion and Guilds
If historians of medieval London had a patron saint, it might well be Edward I. While many English monarchs chose to leave London to its own devices, Edward decided from the start of his reign in 1272 to put …
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If historians of medieval London had a patron saint, it might well be Edward I. While many English monarchs chose to leave London to its own devices, Edward decided from the start of his reign in 1272 to put pressure on the city to justify its liberties. The result was a profusion of bureaucracy, most notably in the Letter Books, that describe the life of London and its people in vivid detail, from disputes, petitions and regulations to the names of all the city’s apprentices. This record-keeping was good for the city too, reinforcing a powerful system of guilds supporting hundreds of trades and a flourishing merchant and consumer culture.
But when the Black Death arrived in England in 1348, London’s population was devastated, and its social and economic life transformed. In this episode, Rosemary is joined again by Matthew Davies, professor of urban history at Birkbeck, to continue the story of England’s capital through its rapid rise in the first half of the 14th century and a long period turmoil thereafter, including the Hundred Years’ War, the revolts of Wat Tyler and Jack Cade, and the Wars of the Roses.
Reading by Duncan Wilkins
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Tom Johnson: No More Baubles: https://lrb.me/lrep401
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