About this podcast
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
'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
Get in touch: [email protected]
Episodes
The newest 20 of 229 episodes
- Narrative Poems: ‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson · 20 min · Season 19 Episode 11In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first…
- The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce · 52 min · Season 16 Episode 4Tom 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…
- Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos · 24 min · Season 18 Episode 11Lithium-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…
- Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad · 24 min · Season 17 Episode 11What 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…
- London Revisited: The Monster · 26 min · Season 20 Episode 10In 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…
- Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyage’ by Arthur Hugh Clough · 14 min · Season 19 Episode 10In 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…
- Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore · 16 min · Season 18 Episode 10‘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…
- Who’s afraid of realism?: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark · 22 min · Season 17 Episode 10When 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…
- London Revisited: Coffee, Satire and Bubbles · 24 min · Season 20 Episode 9The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular, not least for the…
- Narrative Poems: ‘Childe Roland’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ by Robert Browning · 18 min · Season 19 Episode 9‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a…
- Nature in Crisis: ‘Lessons for Survival’ by Emily Raboteau · 12 min · Season 18 Episode 9Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the species…
- Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov · 24 min · Season 17 Episode 9If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable…
- London Revisited: Pepys, Plague and Fire · 25 min · Season 20 Episode 8The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founded and…
- Narrative Poems: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by John Keats · 17 min · Season 19 Episode 8According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found…
- The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot · 36 min · Season 16 Episode 3In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the…
- Nature in Crisis: ‘Impasse’ by Roy Scranton · 16 min · Season 18 Episode 8At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into…
- Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow · 17 min · Season 17 Episode 8‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details…
- London Revisited: The Road to Civil War · 27 min · Season 20 Episode 7When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics…
- Narrative Poems: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth · 17 min · Season 19 Episode 7Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of…
- Nature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer · 15 min · Season 18 Episode 7Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to…
