The LRB Podcast

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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‘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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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.

Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with code 'AUTUMN25' at checkout (discount automatically applied):

https://lrb.me/crautumn26

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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

Subscribe to the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/subslrbpod

Close Readings podcast: ⁠https://lrb.me/crlrbpod⁠

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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

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: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices