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Close Readings: Daily Summaries Delivered
by London Review of Books
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. 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
Latest Episodes
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- 5 days ago52 min
The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and for all, from using the term “interior monologue” to describe the novel’s outbreaks of unassigned first-person narrative. This is not interior monologue: it’s exterior consciousness, embodied (or encorpsed) consciousness that has ruptured the membrane of conventional syntax.’ In this episode, Toms McCarthy and Jones discuss all that and more, including why Ulysses is both a ‘book to be read with relish’ and a ‘monumental event in the development of human consciousness’. 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/closereadingsmbtc For Spotify and other apps: https://lrb.me/applecrmbtc Read more in the LRB: Tom McCarthy: Ulysses and its Wake: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce01 Colm Tóibín on Joyce’s errors: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce02 Anne Enright: At Sandymount Strand: https://lrb.me/mbtcjoyce03 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 1 weeks ago23 min
Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos
Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that mines are dug up to provide raw materials for the energy transition,’ Thea Riofrancos writes in Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, ‘global climate action comes into conflict with local environmental protection.’ Or as Meehan puts it at the start of the episode, there’s a fundamental contradiction between two desirable things. Meehan and Peter discuss Latin America’s long history of resource nationalism and compare the process of lithium extraction through brine evaporation with the far more destructive practices of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The paradoxes inherent in ‘green capitalism’ are brought into sharper focus by Riofrancos’s exploration of these extractive frontiers, but are her solutions – smaller batteries, more recycling, denser cities and fewer cars – a serious proposal or pie in the sky? 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/applecrnature In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature Further reading in the LRB: Laleh Khalili: Who owns the arctic? https://lrb.me/nicep1101 Adam Tooze: What energy transition? https://lrb.me/nicep1102 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 2 weeks ago24 min
Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad
What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity (1994), a middle-aged teacher, Elias Rukla, is teaching Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for perhaps the hundredth time when he has a revelation about an apparently insignificant detail in the play relating to a minor character, Dr Relling. The detail is classically realist in that it appears to have no importance in the plot, yet it acquires a major significance in Rukla’s life, who shortly after the lesson has a breakdown in the school playground and is convinced his career is finished. In this episode, James Wood is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss a novel that avoids the expectations of realism to explore the psychological and cultural impact of the realist tradition. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Adam Mars-Jones on Solstad: https://lrb.me/realism1101 David Edgar on Ibsen: https://lrb.me/realism1103 Michael Hofmann on Thomas Bernhard: https://lrb.me/realism1102 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- 3 weeks ago26 min
London Revisited: The Monster
In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them, but for many of the large number who made their hopeful journey to the capital from all over the country in the 18th century, life was more likely to end up like a scene from a Hogarth print, ruined by gin and despair. London had become a ‘great and monstrous thing’ according to Daniel Defoe. However, if you were lucky enough to survive childhood, and gin, and have a bit of money, it was an increasingly pleasant monster, offering strolls through grand squares and pleasure gardens, and shops displaying a dizzying variety of goods from all over the world alongside cheap copies of a new literary form: the novel. To discuss London’s emergence as a brutal city of consumption and cultural innovation, Rosemary is joined again by Markman Ellis, a professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr Read more in the LRB: Clare Bucknell on Samuel Richardson: https://lrb.me/lrep1001 John Mullan on Pamela: https://lrb.me/lrep1002 Rosemary Hill on Hogarth: https://lrb.me/lrep1003 Tom Paulin on Daniel Defoe: https://lrb.me/lrep1004 Claude Rawson on Henry Fieldings: https://lrb.me/lrep1005 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Sep 30, 202613 min
Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyages’ by Arthur Hugh Clough
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some European travel and the following year found himself in Rome during the short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came Amours de Voyage, an epistolary verse novel written in hexameters, in which a young scholar visits Italy during the uprising and falls in love with a fellow English tourist. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at Clough’s poem as an expression of its author’s rootlessness and the crisis of faith that characterised the age, and the ways in which it undercuts the grand Byronic promise of its title and meter to unfold an Austenian story of subtle social snobbery and young romantic failure. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Fergus McGhee: Mr Mid-Victorian Doubt https://lrb.me/npep1001 Christopher Clark: God Bless Italy https://lrb.me/npep1002 Stefan Collini: Matthew Arnold https://lrb.me/npep101003 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Sep 23, 202615 min
Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilification inflation’, Moore and Roberts make the case for the continuing salience of the word fascism. They argue that a direct line can be traced between early fascist ideology in Italy and Germany and the ‘reharmonising’ green nationalism of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Mystical and dangerous ideas claiming to be environmentalist, once the preserve of fringe online groups, have entered the political mainstream through these successful disrupter parties, and understanding the connection between past and present is the only way to speculate meaningfully about the future of far-right ecological thought and action. Meehan and Peter consider the plausibility of the three future scenarios sketched in the book: ‘Fossilised Reaction’, ‘Batteries, Bombs and Borders’ and ‘Climate Collapse Cultists’. 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/applecrnature In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature Read more in the LRB: Daniel Trilling: Is this fascism? https://lrb.me/nicep1001 Alan Ryan: Fascism in the Plural https://lrb.me/nicep404 Edward Luttwak: Why fascism is the wave of the future: https://lrb.me/c6350c Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Sep 20, 202615 min
Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilification inflation’, Moore and Roberts make the case for the continuing salience of the word fascism. They argue that a direct line can be traced between early fascist ideology in Italy and Germany and the ‘reharmonising’ green nationalism of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France and Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia. Mystical and dangerous ideas claiming to be environmentalist, once the preserve of fringe online groups, have entered the political mainstream through these successful disrupter parties, and understanding the connection between past and present is the only way to speculate meaningfully about the future of far-right ecological thought and action. Meehan and Peter consider the plausibility of the three future scenarios sketched in the book: ‘Fossilised Reaction’, ‘Batteries, Bombs and Borders’ and ‘Climate Collapse Cultists’. 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/applecrnature In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnature Read more in the LRB: Daniel Trilling: Is this fascism? https://lrb.me/nicep1001 Alan Ryan: Fascism in the Plural https://lrb.me/nicep404 Edward Luttwak: Why fascism is the wave of the future: https://lrb.me/c6350c Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
- Sep 15, 202621 min
Who’s afraid of realism?: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark
When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted’. The loss of an arm was hardly wonderful for Mr Lloyd, but for the girls at the centre of the novel it is a rich source of fascination, and Spark’s description exemplifies her use of one of the classic realist tools, free indirect style, to fill her short book with the life and character of adolescent girlhood at an Edinburgh school in the 1930s. In this episode, James Wood considers the ways in which Spark, like Nabokov, gave the grammar of realism a post-modernist treatment to interrogate what it means to tell the story of a life. He considers the influence of Miss Brodie’s tyrannical, charismatic personality on the structure of the book itself, with its use of flash-forwards to suggest a Calvinistic, omniscient narrator, and the effect of Spark’s Dickensian leitmotif that sets the novelistic desire for knowability against the relentless change of youth. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Frank Kermode on Spark's life: https://lrb.me/realismep1001 Colin Burrow on Spark's letters: https://lrb.me/realismep1002 Susan Eilenberg on Spark's poems: https://lrb.me/realismep1003 More Spark in Close Readings: Listen to Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow on Spark's novel A Far Cry from Kensington in their Close Readings series On Satire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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About 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. 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
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