Close Readings

Oct 28 2024 113 ep. 21 mins 314

Close Readings Podcast artwork

Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription 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.

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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 2024:

On Satire with Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow

Human Conditions with Adam Shatz, Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards

Among the Ancients II with Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones

Political Poems with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford

Medieval LOLs with Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley

PLUS: More series starting in 2025...

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Political Poems: 'The Prelude' (books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth

Oct 28 2024 11 mins

Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the way

Among the Ancients II: Juvenal

Oct 24 2024 14 mins

In this episode, we tackle Juvenal, whose sixteen satires influenced libertines, neoclassicists and early Christian moralists alike. Conservative to a fault, Juvenal’s Satires rails against the rapid expansion and transformation of Roman society in the early principate. But where his contemporary Tacitus handled the same material with restraint, Juvenal’s work explode

Medieval LOLs: Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, Part Two

Oct 17 2024 14 mins

Mary and Irina resume their discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on three stories of female agency, deception and desire. Alibech, an aspiring hermitess, is tricked into indulging her powerful sexual urges; Petronella combines business and pleasure at the expense of her husband and lover; while Lydia demonstrates her devotion by killing hawks and pulling teeth. As M

Human Conditions: ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire

Oct 09 2024 13 mins

Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thought and a precursor to the writings of Césaire's protégé, Frantz Fanon. Césaire was Martinique’s most influential poet and one of its most prominent politicians as a deputy in the French National Assembly, and his Discourse is a

On Satire: 'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde

Oct 04 2024 14 mins

By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying

Political Poems: 'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice

Sep 28 2024 12 mins

In 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 has described, on t

Among the Ancients II: Tacitus

Sep 23 2024 12 mins

The Annals, Tacitus’ study of the emperors from Tiberius to Nero, covers some of the most vivid and ruthless episodes in Roman history. A masterclass in political intrigue (and how not to do it), the Annals features mutiny, senatorial backstabbing, wars on the imperial frontiers, political purges and enormous egos. Emily and Tom explore the many ambiguities that make the Ann

Medieval LOLs: Boccaccio's 'Decameron', Part One

Sep 18 2024 45 mins

In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been hurt by love, a love ‘more fervent than any other love’, and intends his work as a guide to life and love for young women in particular. In the first of two episodes on B

Human Conditions: ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Du Bois

Sep 09 2024 13 mins

Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiography, history, biography, fiction, music criticism and political science, its fourteen essays set the tone for Black literature, political debate and scholarly production for the course of the 20th century. Souls was an i

On Satire: Byron's 'Don Juan'

Sep 04 2024 17 mins

Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refus