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Close Readings

London Review of Books

229 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

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: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

Episodes page 2 of 5

  1. 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…

  2. Fiction and the Fantastic: A Taxonomy

    · 16 min · S13 E14

    Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of fantastic literature. This episode, recorded live at…

  3. Conversations in Philosophy: 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

    · 19 min · S12 E14

    In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as…

  4. Novel Approaches: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy

    · 14 min · S15 E13

    After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected…

  5. Next Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London

    · 17 min

    We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests ‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith…

  6. Love and Death: Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon

    · 18 min · S14 E13

    Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despite loosening his early formalism after absorbing the work of the New…

  7. Fiction and the Fantastic: Two Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin

    · 14 min · S13 E13

    When the polymorphous writer Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018, she left behind novels, short stories, poetry, essays, manifestos and French and Chinese translations. The huge and loyal readership among children and older…

  8. Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Sovereignty of Good' by Iris Murdoch

    · 14 min · S12 E13

    Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clearly and justly she comes to accept and even…

  9. Novel Approaches: ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson

    · 17 min · S15 E12

    Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising,…

  10. Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Auden, Arnold and Schuyler

    · 15 min · S14 E12

    When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold commented on his elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1865), that…

  11. Fiction and the Fantastic: J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter

    · 15 min · S13 E12

    J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of…

  12. Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus

    · 16 min · S12 E12

    Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of…

  13. Novel Approaches: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James

    · 58 min · S15 E11

    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…

  14. Love and Death: 'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller

    · 16 min · S14 E11

    Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the…

  15. Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington

    · 17 min · S13 E11

    Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her writing has helped cement her cult status, not least The Hearing…

  16. Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir

    · 16 min · S12 E11

    At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either state. In her 1947…

  17. Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope

    · 17 min · S15 E10

    Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They…

  18. Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy

    · 14 min · S14 E10

    Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his…

  19. Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

    · 14 min · S13 E10

    Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he…

  20. Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre

    · 16 min · S12 E10

    What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on…

  21. Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens

    · 18 min · S15 E9

    'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of…

  22. Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson

    · 15 min · S14 E9

    Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William…

  23. Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley

    · 33 min · S13 E9

    Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horror and…

  24. Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger

    · 16 min · S12 E9

    What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting…

  25. Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot

    · 18 min · S15 E8

    The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a…

  26. Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more

    · 13 min · S14 E8

    As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard…

  27. Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg

    · 33 min · S13 E8

    James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the…

  28. Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James

    · 18 min · S12 E8

    Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally delivered as a lecture…

  29. Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

    · 19 min · S15 E7

    ‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in…

  30. Love and Death: ‘In Memoriam’ by Tennyson

    · 13 min · S14 E7

    Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading…

  31. Fiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen

    · 16 min · S13 E7

    ‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a…

  32. Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche

    · 30 min · S12 E7

    For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to…

  33. Novel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell

    · 26 min · S15 E6

    In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the…

  34. Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more

    · 15 min · S14 E6

    Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of…

  35. Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka

    · 17 min · S13 E6

    In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the…

  36. Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley

    · 15 min · S12 E6

    T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career…

  37. Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray

    · 34 min · S15 E5

    Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least…

  38. Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop

    · 13 min · S14 E5

    The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John…

  39. Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll

    · 16 min · S13 E5

    Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms…

  40. Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill

    · 15 min · S12 E5

    Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man…

  41. Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

    · 27 min · S15 E4

    When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’,…

  42. Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray

    · 16 min · S14 E4

    Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the…

  43. Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino

    · 1 h 04 min · S13 E4

    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…

  44. Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

    · 16 min · S12 E4

    Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode,…

  45. Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock

    · 37 min · S15 E3

    Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority…

  46. Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop

    · 14 min · S14 E3

    This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by…

  47. Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift

    · 16 min · S13 E3

    Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the…

  48. Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach

    · 11 min · S12 E3

    In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of…

  49. Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen

    · 33 min · S15 E2

    On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a…

  50. Love and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas'

    · 13 min · S14 E2

    Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal…

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