Épisodes

  • Conversations in Philosophy: 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf
    Dec 8 2025
    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 philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’. In the final episode of their series, Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Read more in the LRB: Jacqueline Rose: Where's Woolf? https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf1 Virgina Woolf: The Symbol https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf2 John Bayley: Superchild https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf3
    Voir plus Voir moins
    19 min
  • Novel Approaches: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy
    Dec 1 2025
    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 disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel. Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England. 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/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ Further reading and listening from the LRB: Mary and Mark discuss Hardy’s medievalism on the LRB Podcast: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind⁠⁠ Mark discusses Poems of 1912-13 with Seamus Perry in Love and Death: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/love-and-death-poems-of-1912-13-by-thomas-hardy⁠⁠ James Wood on Hardy’s life:⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures⁠⁠ Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts⁠⁠ Next episode: New Grub Street by George Gissing.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    14 min
  • Next Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London
    Nov 29 2025
    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 ‘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 Episodes will appear on Monday every week, with a new episode from each series appearing every four weeks. Episodes from our bonus series, ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’, will come out every couple of months, either as extra episodes or live events: look out for announcements! If you're not already subscribed to Close Readings, sign up for just £4.99/month or £49.99/year to listen to these series plus all our past series in full: Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/crintro2026apple⁠ Spotify and other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/crintro2026sc⁠ Here are the works covered in each series: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests Flaubert, ‘Madame Bovary’ Dostoevsky, ‘Notes from Underground’ Stories by Anton Chekhov Tolstoy, ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ Kafka, ‘Metamorphosis’ Woolf, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ Rhys, ‘Voyage in the Dark’ Bellow, ‘Seize The Day’ Nabokov, ‘Pnin’ Spark, ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ Sharma, ‘Family Life’ Stories by Lydia Davis Riley, ‘My Phantoms’ ‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith Carson, ‘Silent Spring’ Schlanger, ‘The Light Eaters’ Czerski, ‘The Blue Machine’ Lovelock, ‘Gaia’ MacFarlane, ‘Is a River Alive?’ Kimmerer, ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ Raboteau, ‘Lessons for Survival’ Moore and Roberts, ‘The Rise of Ecofascism’ Riofrancos, ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ And more TBD ‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford Marlowe, ‘Hero and Leander’ Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ Milton, Book 9 of ‘Paradise Lost’ Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ Coleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ Byron, ‘Childe Roland’ Clough, ‘Amours de Voyage’ Tennyson, ‘Enoch Arden’ H.D., ‘Helen in Egypt’ Set, ‘The Golden Gate’ Carson, ‘Autobiography of Red and ‘Red Doc>’ ‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill Each episode will cover a period of London’s history and begin with a piece of writing. The first episode, on Roman London, will start with an extract from Dio Cassius’s account of the Roman conquest from his Roman History. ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’ with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones Cervantes, ‘Don Quixote’ Shelley, ‘Frankenstein’ Eliot, ‘Middlemarch’ Wells, ‘The Invisible Man’ Joyce, ‘Ulysses’ Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow’
    Voir plus Voir moins
    17 min
  • Love and Death: Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon
    Nov 24 2025
    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 American Poets, Gunn’s vision of the poet was not as a confessional diarist but rather a careful stylist of well-wrought verse drawing on the traditions of Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at elegies including ‘Talbot Road’, ‘The Gas-poker’ and others from his celebrated collection The Man with Night Sweats, where Gunn combined this allusive, rhetorical style with a poignant realism to recreate his subjects. They then turn to the more self-reflexive, oblique elegies of Paul Muldoon, who has reinvented the form in richly-patterned, playful poems such as ‘The Soap Pig’ and ‘Incantata’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld⁠⁠⁠ More in the LRB: Thom Gunn's 'Lament': ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn1⁠ Colm Tóibín on Gunn: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn2⁠ Michael Nott: Thom Gunn in New York: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn3⁠ Markl Ford on Muldoon: ⁠https://lrb.me/ldep12muldoon1 Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
    Voir plus Voir moins
    18 min
  • Fiction and the Fantastic: Two Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin
    Nov 17 2025
    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 readers that she built during her lifetime has only grown since her death, as has recognition of her work as ‘serious’ literature. Chafing against her confinement in genre fiction, she liberated sci-fi, fantasy and YA literature from the condescension to which they had long been subjected. In 2016, she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetime by the Library of America. For the final regular episode of Fiction and the Fantastic (though there will be one more special episode) Marina and Chloe read ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’ and ‘The Dispossessed’: works of exceptional imaginative power and intellectual range, passionate idealism and keen-eyed observation. Is Le Guin’s status in both literary and ‘genre’ canons a testament to the force and clear-sightedness of her radical – even prophetic – political vision? And what does it mean for the fantastic if we accept her self-characterisation as a ‘realist of a larger reality’? Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠⁠ Further reading and listening from the LRB: Colin Burrow on Ursula K. Le Guin: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n02/colin-burrow/it-s-not-jung-s-it-s-mine A collection of writing on science fiction from the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/collections/in-hyperspace Amia Srinivasan on Le Guin’s experiments with pronouns: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n13/amia-srinivasan/he-she-one-they-ho-hus-hum-ita Colin Burrow discusses Le Guin with Thomas Jones on the LRB Podcast: https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/magical-authority Next episode: A taxonomy of fantastic literature with Marina, Adam Thirlwell and Edwin Frank.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    14 min
  • Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Sovereignty of Good' by Iris Murdoch
    Nov 10 2025
    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 appreciate the younger woman. For Iris Murdoch this is an example of moral labour, the struggle to achieve virtue that is understood intuitively by all of us. In her 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good, a collection of three lectures, Murdoch rejects the unambitious, ‘milk and water’ ethics of her fellow English moralists at Oxford in favour of a Platonic system in which morality has the same objectivity as mathematics. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Murdoch’s lifelong philosophical project to establish what the rational unity of morality might be like without God. They consider her ideas of ‘unselfing’ and of goodness as a replacement for God, and what she got wrong about Sartre’s distinction between authenticity and sincerity. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Alexander Nehamas: John Bayley's 'Iris': https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch1 James Wood: Existentialists and Mystics: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch2 Rosemary Hill on Iris Murdoch: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch3 Audiobooks from the LRB Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip
    Voir plus Voir moins
    14 min
  • Novel Approaches: ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson
    Nov 3 2025
    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, Kidnapped follows young lowlander David Balfour’s flight across the Highlands with the rebel Alan Breck Stewart. In Stevenson’s hands, a straightforward adventure story becomes a vivid exploration of friendship, the body, and social and political division. In this episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell is joined by Stevenson fans Andrew O’Hagan and Tom Crewe. They explore Stevenson’s startlingly modern handling of perspective and pacing, his approach to the art of fiction, and the value of being ‘betwixt and between’. 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/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna Further reading in the LRB: Andrew O’Hagan on Stevenson’s life:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/andrew-o-hagan/in-his-hot-head⁠ ...his circle:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/andrew-o-hagan/bournemouth⁠ ...and his home in Edinburgh:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/andrew-o-hagan/diary⁠ P.N. Furbank on R.L.S.’s letters:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n16/p.n.-furbank/what-sort-of-man⁠ Matthew Bevis on Treasure Island:⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n20/matthew-bevis/kids-gone-rotten⁠ Next episode: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    17 min
  • Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Auden, Arnold and Schuyler
    Oct 27 2025
    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 ‘one has the feeling that not enough is said about Clough in it.’ In his elegy for W.B. Yeats (1939), Auden insists that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Both poems resist idealisation of their subject and use the elegy’s pastoral tradition as a way of distancing themselves from the poetic sensibility of their subject. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the ways in which Arnold and Auden’s visions of what a poet should be aren’t so far apart, and finish with a look at James Schuyler’s similarly unromantic elegy for Auden, in which he finds ‘so little to say’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld⁠⁠ Arnold's 'Thyrsis': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11thyrsis⁠⁠⁠⁠ Auden's 'In Memory of W.B. Yeats': ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11yeats⁠⁠⁠⁠ More in the LRB: Seamus Perry on Auden: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11auden⁠⁠⁠⁠ Stefan Collini on Arnold: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/ldep11arnold⁠
    Voir plus Voir moins
    15 min