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 ReadingsMedieval LOLs: Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’, Part Two
Mary and Irina resume their discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on three stories of female agency, deception and desire. Alibech, an aspiring…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ by Aimé Césaire
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…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: 'The Importance of Being Earnest' by Oscar Wilde
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…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: 'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice
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…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Tacitus
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…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: Boccaccio's 'Decameron', Part One
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…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ by W.E.B. Du Bois
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…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: Byron's 'Don Juan'
Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: 'Goblin Market' by Christina Rossetti, feat. Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones
‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Lucan
In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle'
The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘Hope against Hope’ by Nadezhda Mandelstam
After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: Jane Austen's 'Emma'
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' by Walt Whitman
Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Plautus and Terence
In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: Solomon and Marcolf
The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing
Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' by Laurence Sterne
'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: 'Strange Meeting' by Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Strange Meeting’ in the early months of 1918, shortly after being treated for shell shock at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh, where he…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Lucian
The broad theme of this series, truth and lies, was a favourite subject of Lucian of Samosata, the last of our Greek-language authors. A cosmopolitan and…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: The Second Shepherds' Pageant
In their quest for the medieval sense of humour Mary and Irina come to The Second Shepherds’ Pageant, a 15th-century reimagining of the nativity as domestic…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘The Intimate Enemy’ by Ashis Nandy
Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy is a study of the psychological toll of colonialism on both the coloniser and colonised, showing how Western conceptions of…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: 'The Dunciad' by Alexander Pope
Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: 'The Masque of Anarchy' by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Plato
Plato’s Symposium, his philosophical dialogue on love, or eros, was probably written around 380 BCE, but it’s set in 416, during the uneasy truce between…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: Dame Syrith
As Mary and Irina discussed in the previous episode of Medieval LOLs, fabliaux had an enormous influence on Chaucer, but outside of his work, only one survives…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘A House for Mr Biswas’ by V.S. Naipaul
In A House for Mr Biswas, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: John Gay's 'The Beggar's Opera'
In The Beggar’s Opera we enter a society turned upside down, where private vices are seen as public virtues, and the best way to survive is to assume the worst…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: 'The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s deeply disturbing 1847 poem about a woman escaping slavery and killing her child was written to shock its intended white female…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Pindar and Bacchylides
In the fifth episode of Among the Ancients II we turn to Greek lyric, focusing on Pindar’s victory odes, considered a benchmark for the sublime since…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: Fabliaux
Fabliaux were short, witty tales originating in northern France between the 12th and 14th centuries, often featuring crafty characters in rustic settings and…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘The Human Condition’ by Hannah Arendt
In the fourth episode of Human Conditions, the last of the series with Judith Butler, we fittingly turn to The Human Condition (1956). Hannah Arendt defines…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: The Earl of Rochester
According to one contemporary, the Earl of Rochester was a man who, in life as well is in poetry, ‘could not speak with any warmth, without repeated Oaths…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: 'Easter 1916' by W.B. Yeats
Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Herodotus
Some of the most compelling stories of the Classical world come from Herodotus‘ Histories, an account of the Persian Wars and a thousand things besides. Emily…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: Old English Riddles
Riddles are an ancient and universal form, but few people seem to have enjoyed them more than English Benedictine monks. The Exeter Book, a tenth century…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘Black Skin, White Masks’ by Frantz Fanon
Begun as a psychiatric dissertation, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) became a genre-shattering study of antiblack racism and its effect on the…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: Ben Jonson's 'Volpone'
What did English satirists do after the archbishop of Canterbury banned the printing of satires in June 1599? They turned to the stage. Within months of the…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: W.H. Auden's 'Spain 1937'
In their second episode, Mark and Seamus look at W.H. Auden's ‘Spain’. Auden travelled to Spain in January 1937 to support the Republican efforts in the civil…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Aesop
Supposedly an enslaved man from sixth-century Samos, Aesop might not have ever really existed, but the fables attributed to him remain some of the most widely…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: The Colloquies of Aelfric Bata
All teachers know that the best way for students to learn a language is through swear words, and nobody knew this better than Aelfric Bata, a monk from…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone de Beauvoir
Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: John Donne's Satires
In their second episode, Colin and Clare look at the dense, digressive and often dangerous satires of John Donne and other poets of the 1590s. It’s likely that…
Close ReadingsPolitical Poems: Andrew Marvell's 'An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'
In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients II: Hesiod
Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones kick off their second season of Among the Ancients with a return to the eighth century BCE, exploring the poems of Homer’s near…
Close ReadingsMedieval LOLs: Chaucer's 'Miller's Tale'
Were the Middle Ages funny? In this bonus Close Readings series running throughout this year, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their quest for the…
Close ReadingsHuman Conditions: ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ by Jean-Paul Sartre
Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz for the first episode of Human Conditions to look at Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew, originally published in…
Close ReadingsOn Satire: 'The Praise of Folly' by Desiderius Erasmus
Clare and Colin begin their twelve-part series on satire with the big question: what is satire? Where did it come from? Is it a genre, or more of a style, or…
Close ReadingsIntroducing: Among the Ancients II
For the final introduction to next year’s full Close Readings programme, Emily Wilson, celebrated classicist and translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey…
Close ReadingsIntroducing: On Satire
In the first of three introductions to our full 2024 Close Readings programme, starting in January, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell present their series, On…
Close ReadingsIntroducing: Human Conditions
In the second of three introductions to our full Close Readings programme for 2024, Adam Shatz presents his series, Human Conditions, in which he’ll be talking…
Close ReadingsThe Long and Short: Elizabeth Bowen
In the final episode of The Long and Short, we turn to Elizabeth Bowen, widely considered one of the finest writers of the short story. Mark and Seamus unpack…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients: Seneca
For the final episode in Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom look at Seneca, whose life is relatively well known to us. A child of the established Roman Empire…
Close ReadingsMedieval Beginnings: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
For the final episode of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina look at by far the most popular text (in its time) of all that have featured in the series: The…
Close ReadingsThe Long and Short: Alice Oswald's ‘Dart’ and ‘Memorial’
The eleventh episode of the Long and Short brings us to the present day and the distant past, as we turn to two multivocal, monumental poems by Alice Oswald…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients: Ovid
Ovid was perhaps the most prolific poet of Ancient Rome, certainly in the amount of his poetry which has survived (around 30,000 lines). This episode focuses…
Close ReadingsMedieval Beginnings: The Digby Mary Magdalene Play
For sheer scale and spectacle, surely few plays of any period can match The Digby Play of Mary Magdalene. Boasting at least fifty speaking parts, with multiple…
Close ReadingsThe Long and Short: Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and Langston Hughes's 'Montage of a Dream Deferred'
In the tenth episode of the series, Seamus and Mark turn to two figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’ is taut, tense and tartly stylish…
Close ReadingsAmong the Ancients: Horace
Emily and Tom follow Virgil with one of his contemporaries, Horace, whose poetry played an important political role in the early years of Augustan Rome and has…
Close ReadingsMedieval Beginnings: Middle English Lyrics
From the first recorded instance of the word ‘fart’ in English, to nuanced vignettes of sexual power dynamics, the numerous Middle English lyrics that have…