The LRB Podcast
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The LRB 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 podc...
Recent Episodes
459 episodes
Poetry and the Turning World: Food
The most popular modern food poem is probably William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’, in which the speaker confesses to eating the plums his...
On Politics: The Andy Burnham Show
Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not l...
Poetry and the Turning World: Weather
In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordswo...
World Cup Cupidity
‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems m...
Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce
Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal proces...
On Politics: What went wrong with HS2 (and almost everything else)
HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two st...
Poetry and the Turning World: Technology
When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episo...
Poetry and the Turning World: Work
Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sa...
On Politics: Myths of Populism
The transformations of European politics over the past twenty years, including Britain’s vote to leave the EU and the rise of post-Soviet strongmen, a...
Jane Austen's ‘Emma’ and the art of misreading
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of ‘Tristram Shandy’ in their deployment of heightened sen...
Gaza after the Ceasefire
Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza six months ago, 904 Palestinians have been killed and more than 2700 wounded by the Israeli army. Last w...
A Rough Guide to Money Laundering
More than 90 per cent of transactions in the UK are now cashless, yet there is more cash in circulation than ever before. In the UK, there’s about £13...
When will AI replace us?
Is AI taking us into a world where computer programmers, and perhaps the rest of us too, are obsolete? And if so, how quickly is it taking us there? P...
A New Era for UK Politics
In the wake of last week’s devolved and local elections, Keir Starmer is once again fighting for his political future. Labour has almost completely va...
On Politics: The Fall of Orbán, the Rise of Magyar
For more than a decade, Viktor Orbán has stood alongside Trump and Modi as a global figurehead for authoritarian nationalism, and an inspiration to po...
James Lasdun's road trip to America's courts
‘Courtroom encounters present you with only a fragment of a person’s story, from which you may or may not be inclined to infer the rest,’ James Lasdun...
On Politics: The Pope and the President
When commenting on the power and influence of the Catholic Church, Stalin is supposed to have asked: ‘how many divisions has the pope?’ Donald Trump h...
The War in Lebanon
Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. On 15 April, with talks underway, the IDF’s chi...
Men Looking at Men
In a recent issue of the LRB, Tom Crewe asked if the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte’s fixation with male figures and the male gaze is evide...
The philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’
In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1...
On Politics: Iran and the Oil Crisis
Trump’s war on Iran has highlighted recent dramatic changes in the politics of oil. While the United States still guarantees maritime security in the...
Insulin Wars
Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But...
On Politics: Why you can’t change someone’s mind
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does d...
Ordinary Abuse
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in the LRB, An...
On Politics: Keir Starmer’s Mess
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Gr...
What Next in Iran?
On 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Later that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC...
Caravaggio’s Bodies
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made h...
On Politics: The Rearmament Consensus
‘We must build our hard power because that is the currency of the age,’ Keir Starmer declared to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. It...
Early Modern News
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse an...
On Politics: Mandelson and the Private Life of Power
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of...
Jessica Mitford’s Handbag
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to...
On Politics: A New Age of Protest in Iran
The protests that began in Iran last month have been suppressed with a level of state violence not seen since the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic exe...
Buckley, MAGA’s Patron Saint
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White Hous...
On Politics: Venezuela and the Trump Doctrine
In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions in L...
Will the AI bubble burst?
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient...
What Don Quixote Knew
In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and ...
What Dickens taught Mariah Carey
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when i...
Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ amoral?
Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848. As Patricia Lockwood said in an episode of Close Readings, there is evidence that Brontë was writing a second n...
Who owns Judy Garland?
For a century, Judy Garland’s joyous and vulnerable singing voice has captivated audiences at the theatre, over the airwaves and in the cinema. Camill...
On Politics: Inside Britain’s Asylum System
The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general ele...