The LRB Podcast
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The LRB Podcast
The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Hosted by Thomas Jones and Malin Hay, with guest episodes from the LRB's US editor Adam Shatz, Meehan Crist, Rosemary Hill and more. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod...
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409 episodi
On Politics: The Online Right (and Left)
For the best part of a decade, a new type of anti-systemic, nationalistic politics has been emerging from different corners of the online world. In Br...
Lessons from the Peace Process
Adam is joined by Robert Malley to discuss the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and the long history of the peace process, in which Malley has been...
Why should we listen to Amanda Knox?
It's nearly eighteen years since Amanda Knox was arrested on suspicion of murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, and more than ten since...
On Politics: The Death of the Conservative Party?
In its nearly two hundred years of existence the Conservative Party has survived through a combination of protean adaptability and ruthlessness, not l...
How to Write Like Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard ‘did more with less than any crime writer I can think of’ J. Robert Lennon wrote in the latest issue of the LRB. Leonard was born in Ne...
On Politics: Labour's Problems
When Keir Starmer brought Labour back to government last year with a majority of 174, many talked about two or even three terms in power. But over fou...
Selling the Manosphere
The manosphere, Emily Witt writes in a recent piece for the LRB, is the ‘online network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels...
The Debt to David Graeber
When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile b...
What’s so great about Formula One?
Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the LRB, has been following Formula One since she was a child. Thomas Jones wrote recently in the LRB about the life and...
Close Readings: '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...
The Psychology of Tennis
As well as raw talent and incredible athleticism, professional tennis ‘requires extraordinary psychological capacities’, Edmund Gordon wrote recently...
Why you should care about golf
With the world's most famous amateur golfer now in charge of the 'free world', the sport has never been more important in the lives of non-golfers. Wh...
Close Readings: ‘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....
Rat Universes
The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun plac...
Pinochet and the Nazis
Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in the...
Israel's War of Opportunity
Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the...
Close Readings: 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...
The Best-Paid Woman in NYC
As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, entrusted with building his collection, Belle da Costa Greene could ‘spend more money in an afternoon than any ot...
Silicon Valley Warriors
Donald Trump recently announced a defence budget of more than one trillion dollars, much of which will be funnelled to private companies – and increas...
The Best French Novel of the 20th Century
Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earl...
Is this fascism?
‘How useful is it,’ Daniel Trilling asked recently in the LRB, ‘to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism?’ In thi...
Close Readings: Nietzsche's 'Schopenhauer as Educator'
In this extended extract from their series 'Conversations in Philosophy', part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast, Jonathan Rée and James Wood look a...
Old Pope, New Pope
‘The Church needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,’ Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Tom...
In the Soviet Archives: a conversation with Sheila Fitzpatrick
When Sheila Fitzpatrick first went to Moscow in the 1960s as a young academic, the prevailing understanding of the Soviet Union in the West was govern...
How They Built the Pyramids
In 2013, a group of French and Egyptian archaeologists discovered of cache of papyri as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza. Some of the texts were writt...
Cold War Pen-Pals
The Soviet Women’s Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in 1941 to foster connections with Allied countries and encourage British and US women to ‘invest...
Close Readings: '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. Thackera...
Conceiving Pregnancy
It's now possible to take a home pregnancy test eight days after ovulation, yet in the 16th century, women sometimes turned to astrologers for confirm...
Trump’s War by Executive Order
Judith Butler and Aziz Rana join Adam Shatz to discuss Donald Trump’s use of executive orders to target birthright citizenship, protest, support of Pa...
On Mavis Gallant
Mavis Gallant is best known for her short stories, 116 of which were first published in the New Yorker. Extraordinarily varied and prolific, she arran...
Close Readings: ‘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 depra...
The Grimms’ Weird Tales
The folk tales collected and rewritten by the Brothers Grimm may ‘seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone’, Colin Burrow wrote recently in...
Weaponising Antisemitism
Two recent books, by Peter Beinart and Rachel Shabi, discuss the response of Jewish communities in the West to the Hamas attacks of 7 October and Isra...
Who is Paul Marshall?
A decade ago, the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall was known as a Lib Dem donor and founder of the Ark academy chain. Now, as the owner of UnHerd, GB...
Close Readings: '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...
Deaths in Custody
Since 1995, at least 51 young people have died in Scottish prisons. These include Katie Allan and William Lindsay, who shared strong support networks...
Have we surrendered to climate breakdown?
In 2015, a vigorous response to climate change seemed possible: even fossil fuel companies talked about transitioning to cleaner energy. But explorati...
On Vigdis Hjorth
The Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth is a master of the collapsing relationship. In her twenty books, five of which have been translated into English,...
Close Readings: ‘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,...
Ronald Reagan’s Make-Believe
Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s racism’. Hi...