Close Readings

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…

‘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…

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…

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 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 energy and locations it provided for two great booms in London life: financial speculation and a genuinely public print culture. For this episode, Rosemary is joined by Markman Ellis, professor of 18th-century studies at Queen Mary University of London, to look at the architecture, literature and culture of ‘politeness’ that emerged after the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the stories spun out of it by Daniel Defoe and John Gay. They discuss the coffee houses where London’s stock exchange and marine insurance market were created, the front rooms where women enjoyed the new ‘visiting system’ and the increasingly hazardous streets where Moll Flanders and others sought their fortune. Reading by Fiona Sheehan Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings…

‘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 kind of dream’, Browning recalled. ‘I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day.’ The result, inspired by a line spoken by Edgar (as Poor Tom) in Act III of King Lear, is a grim, hallucinatory quest poem that exemplifies Browning’s talent for what G.K. Chesterton called ‘the poetry of mean landscapes’. In this episode, Seamus and Mark read Browning’s mysterious poem as a rejection of the resources and consolations established by the Romantics. They then turn to an earlier narrative poem, ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ (1843), in which Browning uses a comical, Byronic tone to tell the story of another prophetic figure. 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…

Over 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 depicted by the artist John James Audubon, who lived in the area. Emily Raboteau’s ‘Lessons for Survival’ (2024) takes these murals, along with Raboteau’s own photographs of local birds, as a way into exploring the challenges faced by a mother of two Black sons in New York City living through Hurricane Sandy, the first Trump presidency, Covid and mounting climate breakdown. In this episode, Meehan and Peter talk through the different aspects of Raboteau’s project of survival, from experiences of gentrification and medical racism to the models it offers for dealing with existential threat and ‘justifiable rage’, and Raboteau’s stylistic achievement of bringing together the urban and natural environment. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:…

If 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 narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of postmodernism. Yet for all its playfulness, the book maintains, in its powers of noticing and subtle emotional intelligence, a strong commitment to the real. To examine the debts to realism in Nabokov’s story of a Russian-born academic in the United States, James Wood is joined by Patricia Lockwood, who wrote about Nabokov for the LRB in 2020. They discuss why, despite the cruelty of the narrator, Pnin offers one of Nabokov’s most affectionate portraits, and whether it’s possible to define the style of a writer often referred to as a ‘master stylist’. 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 on (and by)…

The 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 the West End, with its squares, parks and fashionable ‘season’, was born. But the social whirl stopped abruptly in 1665 with the arrival of plague, which was followed in 1666 by the catastrophic Great Fire of London. To talk about these events and the new city that emerged from the ashes, Rosemary is again joined by Vanessa Harding, emerita professor of London history at Birkbeck. They look at the invaluable observations of Samuel Pepys, the continental ambitions of Christopher Wren and the emergence of political parties from the succession crisis of the 1680s. Reading by Duncan Wilkins 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 Further reading in the…

According 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 himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he was inspired to write his own account. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss Keats’s talent for sublime banality, the competing readings of the lover, Porphyro, and the poem's repurposing of Spenserian allegory for a contemporary love story. 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 on Keats in the LRB: John Bayley: https://lrb.me/npep801 Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/npep802 Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/npep803 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In ‘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 vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical masterpiece, which marks a revolution in English fiction as significant in its way as the political, scientific and industrial revolutions that it's set against. They look at the novel’s philosophical underpinnings, its treatment of knowledge and desire, money and debt, sex and marriage, and whether or not Casaubon was onto something with his ‘Key to All Mythologies’. This is an extract from the 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 on Eliot in the LRB: Rosemary Ashton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n14/rosemary-ashton/homage-to-mrs-brater Terry Eagleton:…

At 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 decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped to push the settlement to collapse. ‘How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?’ Roy Scranton asks near the start of ‘Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress’ (2025). For Scranton, the fate of the civilisation at Chaco Canyon is a microcosm for the crisis now confronting humanity. The challenges we face, from climate change to political instability, are so intractable in part because of their complexity. In this episode, Meehan and Peter discuss Scranton’s analysis of our predicament and his proposal for ‘ethical pessimism’, based on resistance to our bias for optimism, as a way of coping with an uncertain future. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series,…

‘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, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wilhelm also bears the intervening influence of modernism, not least in its opening section in which, for twenty pages, our hero simply stands on the street thinking about his life. In this episode, James Wood discusses the Bellovian prose style with its Melvillian love of words and biblical undertones, and explores the book’s evocation of a postwar Manhattan imbued with masculinist conventionality. 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:…

When 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 who tried to blow him and half of Westminster up in 1605. But the plot failed, and with James’s reign came a new, lavish court life, the emergence of the first newspapers amid the booming print industry around St Paul’s, and, with the guidance of Inigo Jones, the arrival of the renaissance in London’s architecture with the development of Covent Garden and the first of the city’s squares. To continue her story of London, Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to see why James’s Stuart settlement eventually failed under the personal rule of Charles I, leading to a civil war in which London became the financial and military headquarters for the victorious Parliamentarians and James’s grand new banqueting house at Whitehall was used as the backdrop for his son’s execution. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode.…

Samuel 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 the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s interest in rural poverty as much as the natural world. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the two poems as part of the literary revolution brought about by the Lyrical Ballads, in which everyday language is used to depict marginal lives without sentiment, guided by Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply.’ 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: Marilyn Butler on The Lyrical Ballads:…

Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. Braiding Sweetgrass was an enormous success for a small press publication, becoming a bestseller and a touchstone for readers searching for alternatives to extractivist realpolitik. In this episode, Meehan and Peter look at the most compelling features of Kimmerer’s technique – reminiscent of Darwin at his best – and where her book risks scientific overreach. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her contemporary Jean Rhys, but if she had read ‘A Voyage in the Dark’ (1934), she might well have marvelled at, and even envied, its radical realism. Rhys’ story of a young woman who moves from the Caribbean to England and enters a world of financial and sexual exploitation was drawn from experiences unavailable to Woolf. In this episode, James is joined by the biographer Miranda Seymour to discuss Rhys’s virtuosity of technique and detachment, her extraordinary ear for dialogue and the places where her mastery of realist method gave way to modernism. 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: Mary-Kay Wilmers on…

When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention but the ready availability of refreshments and the high quality of the players’ clothes. The revolution in playmaking that he witnessed on the south bank of the Thames reflected widespread innovations in London’s cultural life in the reign of Elizabeth I. For the first time, we can see the city clearly, in the panoramas and maps inspired by Dutch artists. New ideas about history are emerging in the works of Stow and Holinshed. And the growth of trade through piracy, with a new centre of commerce in Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, marks the beginning of England's imperial expansion. In this episode, Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to discuss this extraordinary moment in London’s history and some of the reasons behind it, from Elizabeth’s genius for survival to the city’s lack of a university. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Non-subscribers will…

In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in the dark,’ she wrote, ‘William and Coleridge employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad.’ This was the origin of the opening poem of the ’Lyrical Ballads’, published the following year – the book often seen as marking the beginning of Romanticism. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the strange hallucinatory power of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and Coleridge’s search for a meter that could capture the force of his imagination. They also consider some of the poem’s many interpretations, from the influence of abolitionist writing to William Empson’s reading of the shooting of the albatross, and consider whether it’s best understood as a terrible encounter at a wedding reception. 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:…

The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words, ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’. In ‘Is a River Alive?’ (2025), Robert Macfarlane travels with the lawyers, Indigenous people, scientists and others who are working to protect rivers in Ecuador, India and Quebec, and challenges himself to see rivers in a way that widens the category of life. In this episode, Meehan and Peter assess Macfarlane's quest and look at the different kinds of writing he deploys along the way, including adventure story, biography and philosophy. They also look back to the origins of the rights of nature movement at the University of Southern California in the 1970s and consider whether the choice between seeing a river as either a resource or a fellow being is a false one. 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…

In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depiction a group of circulating consciousnesses in London over the course of one day. But underlying these innovations are the techniques of 19th-century realism, and in this episode James Wood explores what Woolf owes to Dickens and Flaubert, and the ways she breaks down these certainties to arrive at the ultimate unknowability of character. 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 the LRB: Jacqueline Rose on Woolf: https://lrb.me/realismep601…

At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to Catholic Europe. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, much of that world had vanished. The Reformation not only changed the religious practices of its inhabitants, it brought a widespread transfer of property that reshaped the character and activity of the city and turned it into a theatre of power, punishment and debate. Rosemary is joined by Vanessa Harding, emerita professor of London history at Birkbeck, University of London, to look at the events that transformed London into a commercially expanding and ideologically contested Protestant capital under the Tudors, from the arrival of Caxton’s printing press in Westminster and the beginnings of an aristocratic West End to Mary I’s brutal attempt to restore Catholic England. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close…

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‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and chastisement of Scottish masculinity ever since its publication, but the attitude of its narrator remains elusive throughout. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s moral and stylistic turns, its influence on Wordsworth and Coleridge, and what it owes to the Augustan perfectionism of Pope. They then turn to a much darker example of Romantic narrative poetry, George Crabbe’s ‘Peter Grimes’ (published in his collection The Borough in 1810), and explore the bracing realism and psychological insight in the story of a Suffolk fisherman who destroys the apprentices placed in his care. This episode also features a bonus conversation with…

In ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’ (1979), James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is something like a single living organism, capable of manipulating its circumstances and the environment to suit its needs. While many scientists reject the fullest formulation of this idea, it has nonetheless had a profound influence on our understanding of the ways in which animal and plant life interact with the non-living parts of the environment, to the extent that observations in biological and earth systems science are often assessed for which version of Gaia they might support. In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith look at the origins of the Gaia hypothesis in the radical work of Lynn Margulis and the contributions of Lovelock’s academic collaborator Dian Hitchcock, and in the science of cybernetics. They then consider the degree to which any formulation of Gaia can explain certain processes, from the impact of the ecological competition between daisies on the reflection of solar radiation to the…

In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). To discuss The Death of Ivan Ilyich and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism, James is joined by the novelist Elif Batuman. They consider the way Tolstoy takes up Flaubert’s contempt for bourgeois life and strips it down to a spare fable of delusion and awakening, and why the unique authority of his style has proved so resistant to the critiques of realism in the 20th century. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series,…

Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life. As well as its origins and afterlives, they consider the many systems that the novel draws on, challenges, reproduces and mutates – the laws of nature, philosophy, science, the human body, the traditional family – and ask whether the real horror at the heart of Frankenstein is not the creature so much as incest. The Man Behind the Curtain is a bonus Close Readings series running this year. The next episode will be on ‘Middlemarch’, released in a couple of months. This is an extract from the 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:…

If historians of medieval London had a patron saint, it might well be Edward I. While many English monarchs chose to leave London to its own devices, Edward decided from the start of his reign in 1272 to put pressure on the city to justify its liberties. The result was a profusion of bureaucracy, most notably in the Letter Books, that describe the life of London and its people in vivid detail, from disputes, petitions and regulations to the names of all the city’s apprentices. This record-keeping was good for the city too, reinforcing a powerful system of guilds supporting hundreds of trades and a flourishing merchant and consumer culture. But when the Black Death arrived in England in 1348, London’s population was devastated, and its social and economic life transformed. In this episode, Rosemary is joined again by Matthew Davies, professor of urban history at Birkbeck, to continue the story of England’s capital through its rapid rise in the first half of the 14th century and a long period turmoil…

Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty. The incident caused an irreconcilable rift between the two families, who were both Catholic. Shortly afterwards, the young poet Alexander Pope, also Catholic, was approached by a friend who suggested he turn the incident into a comic poem. The result was one of the bestselling poems of the age, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712), a mock-epic that fused the grand styles of Homer, Virgil and Milton with an acerbic social satire, in which the gods are reimagined as airy sylphs guarding the honour of the heroine, Belinda. William Hazlitt wrote of the poem that ‘you hardly know whether to laugh or weep’, and in this episode Seamus and Mark discuss why Pope's masterpiece is at once the funniest poem in the English language and an essay on the seriousness of trivial things. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode,…

The ‘great acceleration’ is a term used to describe the dramatic surge in the 1950s of both human and earth systems indicators that marked a shift from a relatively stable planetary state to one that's characterised by increasing environmental instability. Alongside measures of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane levels, this shift can be tracked in numerous other areas of human activity, such as GDP, financialisation, foreign direct investment and the spread of telecommunications. In ‘The Burning Earth’ (2024), Sunil Amrith uses history as a way of understanding why we got to this moment, drawing on multiple strands of human activity over more than 500 years to trace the origins of environmental crisis. In this episode, Meehan and Peter interrogate some of Amrith’s major themes and examples, from the damaging impact of 18th-century ideas of freedom on our relationship to the natural world, to his analysis of postwar environmentalism through the figures of Hannah Arendt, Rachel Carson and Indira…

‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central to Chekhov’s radical realism. Unlike Flaubert and Ibsen, Chekhov sought to avoid imposing authorial meaning or irony, instead handing over perception to his characters. In this episode, James looks at three of Chekhov’s stories, ‘Gusev’ (1890), ‘The Bishop’ (1902) and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ (1899), and the ways in which each seeks to curb the judgment or expectations of the reader to foreground the experiences of his characters, even beyond death. 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:…

When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling across England in the wake of the Roman retreat in the early fifth century, the city they found on the north bank of the Thames was hardly a city at all. Within its walls were the great abandoned ruins of antiquity, ‘the works of giants’ as one Anglo-Saxon poet put it, and little else. For hundreds of years the site was patchily inhabited, but two features indicated its future importance. In 604, the first Bishop of London was appointed, leading to the continuous presence of Christianity and the founding of St Paul’s Cathedral; and down the river, the emergence of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Lundenwic near where Covent Garden is today confirmed the area’s prime position as a trading centre. By the time Alfred repelled the Danes in the ninth century, London’s value had been realised, and the symbolic movement of the royal court from Winchester to Westminster under Edward the Confessor set London’s trajectory. In this episode, Rosemary is joined by Matthew…

When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multiple genres and perspectives to interrogate the moral and emotional significance of ‘man’s first disobedience’, self-consciously drawing on the resources of Renaissance tragedy, pastoral and love poetry to achieve his great innovation, the Christian epic. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Milton’s study of temptation and free will became an unparalleled expression of poetic brilliance, from its thrillingly ambiguous and seductive depiction of Satan to its vivid dramatisation of the reproachful lovers confronting the consequences of their misdeeds, and ultimately its claim to being the finest love poem in English. 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:…

In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible. In this episode, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith reflect on the ways Czerski’s book has altered their thinking about the ocean, and whether new perspectives can ever be enough to change public policy. 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 Get the book: https://lrb.me/czerskicr More from the LRB: Richard Hamblyn on deep-sea exploration: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n21/richard-hamblyn/hurrah-for-the-dredge Katherine Rundell on the greenland shark:…

Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present three humiliating episodes from his earlier life, offers no kind of conclusion. Instead, it is the unbearable moments of psychological truth that make ‘Notes from Underground’ a revolutionary development in the history of realism. In this episode, James Wood is joined by the novelist and critic Adam Thirlwell to consider Dostoevsky’s mastery of the inner life and the experiences that shaped his hostility to rational egoism, from being subjected to a mock execution and four years in a Siberian prison camp to his reading of Hegel and a visit to London’s Crystal Palace. 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:…

After Roman London was hit by a catastrophic fire in about 125 AD, perhaps the result of another local revolt, it entered a new period of sophistication which saw the emergence of elaborate townhouses for its mercantile and administrative elite, richly embellished with mosaics and wall paintings. But the city had stopped growing, and when a devastating plague arrived in about 165 AD, which may well have been Europe’s first encounter with smallpox, it was probably already on a long slow decline caused by its diminishing importance as a trading hub. To continue Roman London’s story to its eventual fate as an abandoned walled garden, Rosemary Hill is joined again by Dominic Perring, author of 'London in the Roman World', to consider what objects such as a Greek spell found on the Thames foreshore, and a small bronze archer found in Cheapside, can tell us about the fortunes of the city, and why the construction of the London Wall in the early third century marked a terminal transformation of its role in the…

Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. 'Venus and Adonis' appeared in quarto that year and become by far the most popular work Shakespeare published in his lifetime, running to ten editions before his death (compared to just four for Romeo and Juliet). In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider the many ways in which Shakespeare’s poem displays its author's remarkable originality, from its peculiar reshaping of the Ovidian myth into a tale of comic mismatch, to its surprising diversion into the psychology of grief. They then look at his disturbing follow-up, 'The Rape of Lucrece' (1594), in which a chilling depiction of self-conscious, premeditated evil anticipates characters such as Iago and Macbeth. 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:…

In The Light Eaters (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our ideas of plants as passive life forms. Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith explore Schlanger’s account of new research into plant behaviour. They examine the case for plant agency – and the far more speculative claims for plant consciousness – and attempt to make sense of some astonishing discoveries. 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 Get the book: https://lrb.me/schlangercr Further reading from the LRB: Francis Gooding on mushroom brains: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n10/francis-gooding/from-its-myriad-tips Andrew Sugden on the life of a leaf:…

‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been describing. In the second part of his analysis of 'Madame Bovary', James Wood considers the major episodes leading to Emma’s death and argues that what made Flaubert’s realism dangerous was not its depictions of infidelity, but its use of cliché to expose French bourgeois lives constructed entirely of received ideas and second-hand emotions. 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 Further reading in the LRB: Julian Barnes on translations of Madame Bovary: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep201⁠…

The year London was founded will always be disputed, but the most recent archaeological evidence suggests the Romans had created the first settlement on the north bank of the Thames by 48 AD, five years after their invasion. That early military encampment expanded to become a busy, cosmopolitan supply base until it was burned down in the Boudican revolt of 60 AD. In the first episode of her series tracing the history of London, Rosemary Hill is joined by Dominic Perring, archaeologist and author of London in the Roman World, to examine the development of Londinium over its tumultuous first century, during which it grew to a population of 30,000 and it acquired all the recognisable Roman landmarks – forum, basilica, baths, amphitheatre – before facing its second great destructive event around 125 AD. 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:…

'Hero and Leander' was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a sixth-century version by Musaeus. Seamus and Mark begin their new series by looking at the playful but often troubling treatment of desire in a poem that contains one of the most explicit depictions of sex in English poetry. 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 Further reading in the LRB: Michael Dobson on the life of Marlowe https://lrb.me/np1marlowe1 Hilary Mantel on the murder of Marlowe: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe2 Charles Nicholl on Faustus:…

George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub Street’ (1891), which follows a handful of literary men and women in London in the early 1880s. All of them have different ideas about success, love and personal fulfilment, and all those ideas – even the most brutally pragmatic – are subverted by the pressures of sexuality and the marketplace. In the final episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell and Tom Crewe discuss Gissing’s great portrait of London at its shabbiest. They explore Gissing’s unrelenting realism, his gift for writing nuanced characters, and why, in Tom’s words, if the novel is gloomy, it’s ‘an invigorating gloom’. 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/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠…

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers unnervingly from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control. In this bonus episode from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings…

After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that proliferated after the Second World War, which were assiduously defended by overconfident policymakers, industrial chemists and agribusiness. The book quickly became a bestseller and kickstarted the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. In the first episode of Nature in Crisis, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith discuss one of the truly great success stories in science writing. Carson was a masterful stylist and gifted scientist who could make abstruse developments in organic chemistry compelling, accessible and alarmingly intimate. Meehan and Peter show how Carson wrote at the edge of science, anticipating the study of epigenetics and endocrine disruption. They illustrate why, though some of her proposed solutions fell short, Silent Spring remains ‘both an exhilarating and…

Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition of Flaubert’s ‘realism’ to cut to the bone of its characters and society at large. Karl Marx, on the other hand, praised realist writers who ‘issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together’. In the first episode of his new series, James Wood considers the fears and criticisms that have dogged realism from its emergence in the 19th century through its long history of transformations up to the present day. He examines the ways in which Flaubert used detail (both significant and significantly insignificant), impersonal narration, lifelike dialogue and free indirect style to create realism’s essential grammar. This is part one of Wood’s analysis of 'Madame Bovary', going up to the moment that…

In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha, is thought to be mad by everyone he meets because he believes he’s living in a book. But from a certain point of view that makes the hero of Cervantes’ novel the only character who has any idea what’s really going on. Tom and Tom discuss the machinery – narrative, theoretical, economic, psychological and literal (those windmills) – which underpins Cervantes’ masterpiece. This is a bonus episode from the Close Readings series. To listen to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Karl Miller on ‘Don Quixote’:…

Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this eccentric man deserved a poetic tribute for demonstrating ‘the power of the art without show’, a phrase that could as much describe the poem itself. In this episode, Seamus and Mark close their series by looking at the ways in which Johnson’s elegy, 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levet', rejects the pastoral heroism of the poem they started with, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, and compare it to two poems that offer their own kinds of unsentimental, eccentric portrait: 'Felix Randal' by Gerard Manley Hopkins and 'Stephen Boyd, 1957-99' by Mick Imlah. Seamus and Mark will be back in January to start their new series, 'Narrative Poems'. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts:…

Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of fantastic literature. This episode, recorded live at Swedenborg House, is an attempt to fill the gaps, or fail heroically. Marina and Adam Thirlwell are joined by Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review Books and author of ‘Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel’. Together they assess existing canons and definitions, redefine and rediscover categories and exceptions, and consider the pleasures and uses of the fantastic. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠⁠ Read more in the LRB: Colin Burrow: Fiction and the Age of Lies…

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’. In the final episode of their series, Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps:…

After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel. Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England. 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/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ Further reading and listening from the LRB: Mary and Mark…