Shows / Close Readings
Close Readings
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. 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…
Episodes
Close ReadingsLove and Death: Elegies for Poets by Auden, Arnold and Schuyler
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter
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…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus
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…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: 'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir
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…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope
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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
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…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre
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…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
'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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
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…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger
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…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot
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’…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg
James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James
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…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
‘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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: ‘In Memoriam’ by Tennyson
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen
‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche
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…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell
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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka
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…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley
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…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray
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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop
The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill
Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë
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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
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 –…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock
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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift
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…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach
In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century…
Close ReadingsNovel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen
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…
Close ReadingsLove and Death: Milton's 'Lycidas'
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…
Close ReadingsFiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Thousand and One Nights’
The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first…
Close ReadingsConversations in Philosophy: 'Fear and Trembling' by Søren Kierkegaard
The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of…
Close ReadingsIntroducing ‘Novel Approaches’
Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll…
Close ReadingsIntroducing ‘Love and Death’
Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why the elegy…
Close ReadingsIntroducing ‘Fiction and the Fantastic’
Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes the…
Close ReadingsIntroducing 'Conversations in Philosophy'
James Wood and Jonathan Rée introduce their new Close Readings series, Conversations in Philosophy, running throughout 2025. They explain the title of the…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: ‘Little Gidding’ by T.S. Eliot
In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Marcus Aurelius
For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the contradictions of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: Gwerful Mechain’s ‘Ode to the Vagina’
For the final episode of their series in search of the medieval sense of humour Irina and Mary look at one of the most remarkable women authors of the Middle…
Close ReadingsComing next year on Close Readings
As our Close Readings series come to an end this year, you’re probably wondering what’s coming in 2025. We’re delighted to announce there’ll be four new series…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘Sister Outsider’ by Audre Lorde
In the final episode of Human Conditions, Brent and Adam turn to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of prose with exceptional relevance to…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: 'A Far Cry from Kensington' by Muriel Spark
In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing was as…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney
As an undergraduate, Seamus Heaney visited Station Island several times, an ancient pilgrimage site traditionally associated with St Patrick and purgatory…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Apuleius
Apuleius’ ‘Metamorphoses’, better known as ‘The Golden Ass’, is the only ancient Roman novel to have survived in its entirety. Following the story of Lucius…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: 'Tales of Count Lucanor' by Juan Manuel
If you’re looking for advice on sustaining a marriage, or robbing a grave, or performing liver surgery, then a series of self-help stories by a 14th-century…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘Black Music’ by Amiri Baraka
In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of the…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: 'A Handful of Dust' by Evelyn Waugh
In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: 'The Prelude' (books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth
Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Juvenal
In this episode, we tackle Juvenal, whose sixteen satires influenced libertines, neoclassicists and early Christian moralists alike. Conservative to a fault…