Podcasts · Arts · Education

Close Readings

London Review of Books

228 episodes

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.

More about the show

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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: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Episodes page 1 of 5

  1. The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce

    · 52 min · S16 E4

    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…

  2. Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos

    · 24 min · S18 E11

    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…

  3. Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad

    · 24 min · S17 E11

    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…

  4. London Revisited: The Monster

    · 26 min · S20 E10

    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…

  5. Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyage’ by Arthur Hugh Clough

    · 14 min · S19 E10

    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…

  6. Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore

    · 16 min · S18 E10

    ‘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.…

  7. Who’s afraid of realism?: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark

    · 22 min · S17 E10

    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…

  8. London Revisited: Coffee, Satire and Bubbles

    · 24 min · S20 E9

    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…

  9. Narrative Poems: ‘Childe Roland’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ by Robert Browning

    · 18 min · S19 E9

    ‘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…

  10. Nature in Crisis: ‘Lessons for Survival’ by Emily Raboteau

    · 12 min · S18 E9

    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,…

  11. Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov

    · 24 min · S17 E9

    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…

  12. London Revisited: Pepys, Plague and Fire

    · 25 min · S20 E8

    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…

  13. Narrative Poems: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by John Keats

    · 17 min · S19 E8

    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,…

  14. The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot

    · 36 min · S16 E3

    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…

  15. Nature in Crisis: ‘Impasse’ by Roy Scranton

    · 16 min · S18 E8

    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…

  16. Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow

    · 17 min · S17 E8

    ‘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…

  17. London Revisited: The Road to Civil War

    · 27 min · S20 E7

    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…

  18. Narrative Poems: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth

    · 17 min · S19 E7

    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’.…

  19. Nature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer

    · 15 min · S18 E7

    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…

  20. Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Jean Rhys

    · 20 min · S17 E7

    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…

  21. London Revisited: Shakespeare’s City

    · 17 min · S20 E6

    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…

  22. Narrative Poems: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

    · 14 min · S19 E6

    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…

  23. Nature in Crisis: ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane

    · 15 min · S18 E6

    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…

  24. Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf

    · 21 min · S17 E6

    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…

  25. London Revisited: The Protestant Capital

    · 22 min · S20 E5

    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…

  26. What do you think of Close Readings?

    · 0:27

    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…

  27. Narrative Poems: ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns and ‘Peter Grimes’ by George Crabbe

    · 22 min · S19 E5

    ‘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…

  28. Nature in Crisis: 'Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth' by James Lovelock

    · 29 min · S18 E5

    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…

  29. Who’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

    · 23 min · S17 E5

    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…

  30. The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley

    · 35 min · S16 E2

    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…

  31. London Revisited: Plague, Rebellion and Guilds

    · 28 min · S20 E4

    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…

  32. Narrative Poems: ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope

    · 15 min · S19 E4

    Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty. The incident caused an irreconcilable rift between the two…

  33. Nature in Crisis: ‘The Burning Earth’ by Sunil Amrith

    · 13 min · S18 E4

    The ‘great acceleration’ is a term used to describe the dramatic surge in the 1950s of both human and earth systems indicators that marked a shift from a relatively stable planetary state to one that's characterised by…

  34. Who’s afraid of realism? Three stories by Anton Chekhov

    · 24 min · S17 E4

    ‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an…

  35. London Revisited: The Medieval Capital

    · 24 min · S20 E3

    When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling across England in the wake of the Roman retreat in the early fifth century, the city they found on the north bank of the Thames was hardly a city at all. Within its…

  36. Narrative Poems: ‘Paradise Lost’ (Book 9) by John Milton

    · 16 min · S19 E3

    When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multiple genres and perspectives to interrogate the moral and emotional…

  37. Nature in Crisis: ‘Blue Machine’ by Helen Czerski

    · 15 min · S18 E3

    In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of…

  38. Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Notes from Underground’ by Fyodor Dostoevsky

    · 20 min · S17 E3

    Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a…

  39. London Revisited: Mosaics, Archers and a Walled Garden

    · 19 min · S20 E2

    After Roman London was hit by a catastrophic fire in about 125 AD, perhaps the result of another local revolt, it entered a new period of sophistication which saw the emergence of elaborate townhouses for its…

  40. Narrative Poems: 'Venus and Adonis' and 'The Rape of Lucrece' by William Shakespeare

    · 19 min · S19 E2

    Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. 'Venus and Adonis' appeared in quarto that year and become by far the most popular work…

  41. Nature in Crisis: ‘The Light Eaters’ by Zoë Schlanger

    · 16 min · S18 E2

    In The Light Eaters (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our ideas of plants as passive life forms.…

  42. Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert (part two)

    · 10 min · S17 E2

    ‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s…

  43. London Revisited: Roman Beginnings

    · 23 min · S20 E1

    The year London was founded will always be disputed, but the most recent archaeological evidence suggests the Romans had created the first settlement on the north bank of the Thames by 48 AD, five years after their…

  44. Narrative Poems: 'Hero and Leander' by Christopher Marlowe

    · 17 min · S19 E1

    'Hero and Leander' was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher…

  45. Nature in Crisis: ‘Silent Spring’ by Rachel Carson

    · 16 min · S18 E1

    After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that…

  46. Who's afraid of realism? 'Madame Bovary' by Gustave Flaubert (part one)

    · 21 min · S17 E1

    Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition…

  47. The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes

    · 1 h 04 min · S16 E1

    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 infrastructures at work in them. For their first episode, they turn…

  48. Novel Approaches: ‘New Grub Street’ by George Gissing

    · 17 min · S15 E15

    George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub Street’ (1891), which follows a handful of literary men and…

  49. Novel Approaches: ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens

    · 34 min · S15 E14

    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 it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write…

  50. Love and Death: Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mick Imlah

    · 17 min · S14 E14

    Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this…

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