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Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription 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 2025:
’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
ALSO INCLUDED IN THE CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION:
’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]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The podcast Close Readings is created by London Review of Books. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
Milton wrote ‘Lycidas’ in 1637, at the age of 29, to commemorate the drowning of the poet Edward King. As well as a great pastoral elegy, it is a denunciation of the ecclesiastical condition of England and a rehearsal for Milton’s later role as a writer of national epic. In the first episode of their new series, Seamus and Mark discuss the political backdrop to the poem, Milton’s virtuosic mix of poetic tradition and innovation, and why such a fervent puritan would choose an unfashionable, pre-Christian form to honour his friend.
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/applecrld
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld
Read more in the LRB:
Colin Burrow (on the 'two-handed engine'):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n05/colin-burrow/shall-i-go-on
Freya Johnston (on Samuel Johnson's criticism):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/freya-johnston/own-your-ignorance
Maggie Kilgour (on the young Milton):
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/maggie-kilgour/pens-and-heads
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The Thousand and One Nights is an ‘infinite text’: it has no fixed shape or length, no known author and is transformed with each new translation. In this first episode of Fiction and the Fantastic, Marina Warner and Anna Della Subin explore two particularly mysterious stories in the context of the wider mysteries and pleasures of the Nights. ‘The Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad’ highlights the pleasures of dreaming, the power of language and the imagination’s essential role in eroticism, while ‘Abdullah of the Sea and Abdullah of the Land’ demonstrates how the fantastic can help us imagine new ways of living.
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
Further reading in the LRB:
Marina Warner: Travelling Text
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/marina-warner/travelling-text
Steven Connor: One’s Thousand One Nightiness
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n06/steven-connor/one-s-thousand-one-nightinesses
William Gass: A Book at Bedtime
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n21/william-gass/a-book-at-bedtime
Marina Warner: ‘The Restless One’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/june/the-restless-one
NEXT EPISODE: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift, out on Monday 10 February.
Get the book: https://lrb.me/sealenightsff
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The series begins with Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1843), an exploration of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac. Like most of Kierkegaard’s published work, Fear and Trembling appeared under a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, and its playful relationship to the reader doesn’t stop there. Described as a ‘dialectical lyric’ on the title page, the book works through a variety of formats in its attempt to understand the nature of faith and the apparently unsolvable paradox that the father of the Abrahamic religions was prepared to murder his own son. James and Jonathan consider whether Kierkegaard thinks we can understand anything, and what Fear and Trembling has in common with the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka.
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/applecrcip
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscip
Further reading in the LRB:
Jonathan Rée: Dancing in the Service of Thought https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard1
James Butler: Reading Genesis https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard2
Roger Poole: A Walk with Kierkegaard https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard3
Terry Eagleton: A Long Way from Galilee https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard4
James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a contributor to the London Review of Books. His books include How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self.
Jonathan Rée is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and a freelance writer and philosopher. His most recent book on philosophy is Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English.
NEXT EPISODE: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach, out on Monday 3 February.
LRB AUDIOBOOKS
Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:
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Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones introduce their new Close Readings series, Novel Approaches. Joined by a variety of contemporary novelists and critics, they'll be exploring a dozen 19th-century British novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, paying particular (though not exclusive) attention to the themes of money and property.
The first episode will come out on Monday 27 January, on Austen’s Mansfield Park.
Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and hosted the Close Readings series On Satire with Colin Burrow. The Treasuries, her social history of poetry anthologies, was published in 2023.
Thomas Jones is a senior editor at the LRB and host of the LRB Podcast. With Emily Wilson, he hosted the Close Readings series Among the Ancients.
The full list of texts for the series:
Mansfield Park (1814) by Jane Austen
Crotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love Peacock
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
Vanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace Thackeray
North and South (1854) by Elizabeth Gaskell
Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Anthony Trollope (TBD)
Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot
Our Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles Dickens
Washington Square (1880)/Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James
Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas Hardy
New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing
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Mark Ford and Seamus Perry introduce Love and Death, a new Close Readings series on elegy from the Renaissance to the present day. They discuss why the elegy can be a particularly energising form for poets engaging with their craft and the poetic tradition, and how elegy serves an important role in public grieving, remembering and healing.
The first episode will come out on Monday 20 January, on Milton's ‘Lycidas’.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Marina Warner is joined by Anna Della Subin to introduce Fiction and the Fantastic, a new Close Readings series running through 2025. Marina describes the scope of the series, in which she will also be joined by Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis. Together, Anna Della and Marina discuss the ways the fiction of wonder and astonishment can challenge social conventions and open up new ways of living.
The first episode will come out on Monday 13 January, on The Thousand and One Nights.
Marina Warner is a writer of history, fiction and criticism whose many books include Stranger Magic, Forms of Enchantment and Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale. She was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2015 and is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Anna Della Subin’s study of men who unwittingly became deities, Accidental Gods, was published in 2022. She has been writing for the LRB since 2014.
Texts for the first four episodes:
The Thousand and One Nights (Yasmine Seale’s translation)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
The Travels of Marco Polo (no particular translation) and Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (William Weaver translation)
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
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James Wood and Jonathan Rée introduce their new Close Readings series, Conversations in Philosophy, running throughout 2025. They explain the title of the series and why they'll be challenging a hundred years of academic convention by reuniting the worlds of literature and philosophy.
The first episode will come out on Monday 6 January, on Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.
James Wood teaches literature at Harvard University and is a staff writer for The New Yorker as well as a contributor to the London Review of Books. His books include How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self.
Jonathan Rée is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and a freelance writer and philosopher. His most recent book on philosophy is Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English.
The full list of texts for the series:
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, translated by George Eliot
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Circles’ and other essays
John Stuart Mill, An Autobiography
F.H. Bradley, ‘My station and its duties’
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’
William James ‘The Will to Believe’
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’
Jean-Paul Sartre, Theory of the Emotions
Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity
Albert Camus, The Fall
Iris Murdoch, Sovereignty of Good
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
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In the final episode of Political Poems, Mark and Seamus discuss ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth poem of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Emerging out of Eliot’s experiences of the Blitz, ‘Little Gidding’ presents us with an apocalyptic vision of purifying fire. Suggesting that humanity can survive warfare only through renewed spiritual unity, Eliot finds a model in Little Gidding, a small village that for a time in the 17th century served as an Anglican commune before its closure under Puritan scrutiny. Mark and Seamus explore how Eliot’s poetics heighten our sense of the liminal and mystical, and how, by ‘scrambling our brains’, Eliot’s brilliant rhetoric subsumes his bizarre politics.
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Frank Kermode: Disintegration
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n02/frank-kermode/disintegration
Helen Thaventhiran: Things Ill Done and Undone
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n17/helen-thaventhiran/things-ill-done-and-undone
Tobias Gregory: By All Possible Art
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n24/tobias-gregory/by-all-possible-art
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For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the contradictions of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Said by Machiavelli to be the last of the ‘five good emperors’ who ruled Rome for most of the second century CE, Marcus oversaw devastating wars on the frontiers, a deadly plague and economic turmoil. The writings known in English as The Meditations, and in Latin as ‘to himself’, were composed in Greek in the last decade of Marcus’ life. They reveal the emperor’s preoccupations with illness, growing old, death and posthumous reputation, as he urges himself not to be troubled by such transient things.
Non-subscribers can hear the full version of this episode with ads. To listen ad-free and in full to other episodes of Among the Ancients II, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Or purchase a gift subscription: https://lrb.me/audiogifts
Further reading in the LRB:
Mary Beard: Was he quite ordinary?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n14/mary-beard/was-he-quite-ordinary
Emily Wilson: I have gorgeous hair
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n11/emily-wilson/i-have-gorgeous-hair
Shadi Bartsch: Dying to Make a Point
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n22/shadi-bartsch/dying-to-make-a-point
M.F. Burnyeat: Excuses for Madness
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n20/m.f.-burnyeat/excuses-for-madness
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For the final episode of their series in search of the medieval sense of humour Irina and Mary look at one of the most remarkable women authors of the Middle Ages, Gwerful Mechain, who lived in Powys in the 15th century. Mechain was part of a lively literary coterie in northeast Wales and in her poem Cywydd y Cedor (‘Ode to the Vagina’) she challenged the conventional approach of her fellow male poets to praise every part of a woman’s body apart from her genitalia. Her witty, combative verses, intended for public performance, deployed a brilliant mastery of the complex metrical tradition of medieval Welsh poetry to discuss the most intimate physical experiences.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
As our Close Readings series come to an end this year, you’re probably wondering what’s coming in 2025. We’re delighted to announce there’ll be four new series starting in January:
‘Conversations in Philosophy’ with Jonathan Rée and James Wood
Jonathan and James challenge a hundred years of academic convention by reuniting the worlds of philosophy and literature, as they consider how style, narrative, and the expression of ideas play through philosophical writers including Kierkegaard, Mill, Nietzsche, Woolf, Beauvoir and Camus.
Reading list here:
https://lrb.supportingcast.fm/posts/conversations-in-philosophy
‘Fiction and the Fantastic’ with Marina Warner, Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis.
Marina and guests will traverse the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, dread and hope, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin.
Reading list here:
https://lrb.supportingcast.fm/posts/fiction-and-the-fantastic
‘Love and Death’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford
Mark and Seamus explore the oscillating power of outrage and grief, bitterness and consolation, in poetry in English from the Renaissance to the present day. Their series will consider the elegies of Milton, Hardy, Bishop, Plath and others at their most intimate and expressive.
Reading list here:
https://lrb.supportingcast.fm/posts/love-and-death
‘Novel Approaches’ with Clare Bucknell, Thomas Jones and other guests
Clare, Tom and guests discuss a selection of 19th-century (mostly) English novels from Mansfield Park to New Grub Street, looking in particular at the roles played in the books by money and property.
Reading list here:
https://lrb.supportingcast.fm/posts/novel-approaches
And the subscription will continue to include access to all our past Close Readings series.
If you're not already a subscriber, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
GIFTS
If you enjoy Close Readings, why not give it to another book lover in your life?
Find our audio gifts here: https://lrb.supportingcast.fm/gifts
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In the final episode of Human Conditions, Brent and Adam turn to Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, a collection of prose with exceptional relevance to contemporary grassroots politics. Like Du Bois, Césaire and Baraka, Lorde’s work defies genre: as she argues in this collection, ‘poetry is not a luxury’ but an essential tool for liberation. Throughout her work, Lorde sought to find and articulate new ways of living that encompassed her whole self – as a Black woman, poet, essayist, novelist, mother and lesbian. Brent and Adam discuss Lorde’s radical poetics and politics, and the case for poetry, anger, vulnerability, love and desire as the arsenal of revolution.
This podcast was recorded on 21 August 2024.
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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Further reading and listening in the LRB:
Reni Eddo-Lodge & Sarah Shin: On Audre Lorde
Jesse McCarthy & Adam Shatz: Blind Spots
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/blind-spots
Sean Jacobs: Chop-Chop Spirit
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n09/sean-jacobs/chop-chop-spirit
Ange Mlinko: Waiting for the Poetry
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/ange-mlinko/waiting-for-the-poetry
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In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing was as bitingly satirical as any 20th-century novelist's. A Far Cry from Kensington has a deceptively simple plot: Agnes Hawkins, working for a publisher in London in the 1950s, insults Hector Bartlett, a would-be author, by calling him a ‘pisseur de copie’. Bartlett seeks revenge with the help of Hawkins’s fellow lodger, Wanda, with tragic results. Yet the true plot of any Spark novel is difficult to pin down, not least when the word ‘plot’ is deployed so frequently by her characters to imply conspiracy and misinformation. Colin and Clare discuss Spark’s kaleidoscopic view of reality and the ways in which both Catholicism and Calvinism play through her work.
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Read more in the LRB:
Jenny Turner:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n15/jenny-turner/she-who-can-do-no-wrong
Frank Kermode:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n17/frank-kermode/mistress-of-disappearances
Susan Eilenberg:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n24/susan-eilenberg/complacent-bounty
James Wood:
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As an undergraduate, Seamus Heaney visited Station Island several times, an ancient pilgrimage site traditionally associated with St Patrick and purgatory. Decades later, Heaney worked through competing calls for political engagement and his long-lapsed Catholicism in ‘Station Island’, a poem he described as an ‘exorcism’.
A dreamlike reworking of Dante’s Purgatorio, ‘Station Island’ describes Heaney’s encounters with the ghosts of childhood acquaintances, literary heroes and victims of the Troubles. Seamus and Mark explore Heaney’s unusually autobiographical poem, which wrestles with the inescapability of politics.
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Paul Muldoon: Sweaney Peregraine
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n20/paul-muldoon/sweaney-peregraine
Seamus Perry: We Did and We Didn’t
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/seamus-perry/we-did-and-we-didn-t
John Kerrigan: Hand and Foot
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n11/john-kerrigan/hand-and-foot
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Apuleius’ ‘Metamorphoses’, better known as ‘The Golden Ass’, is the only ancient Roman novel to have survived in its entirety. Following the story of Lucius, forced to suffer as a donkey until the goddess Isis intervenes, the novel includes frenetic wordplay, filthy humour and the earliest known version of the Psyche and Cupid myth. In this episode, Tom and Emily discuss Apuleius’ anarchic mix of the high and low brow, and his incisive depiction of the lives of impoverished and enslaved people.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Peter Parsons: Ancient Greek Romances
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n15/peter-parsons/ancient-greek-romances
Leofranc Holford-Strevens: God’s Will
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n10/leofranc-holford-strevens/god-s-will
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If you’re looking for advice on sustaining a marriage, or robbing a grave, or performing liver surgery, then a series of self-help stories by a 14th-century Spanish prince is a good place to start. Tales of Count Lucanor, written between 1328 and 1335 by Prince Juan Manuel of Villena, is one of the earliest works of Castilian prose. The tales follow the familiar shape of many medieval stories, presented as a kind of medicine to improve the lives of its readers by example. Yet in his preface Manuel makes an unusual assertion about the individuality of all people, a philosophy that, as Mary and Irina discuss in this episode, leads to bizarre and opaque moral messages intended more to make the reader think for themselves than reach a universal conclusion.
Find a translation of the Tales here: https://elfinspell.com/CountLucanor1.html
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of the avant-garde jazz scene. Published while he still went by LeRoi Jones, it provides a composite picture of Baraka’s evolving thought, aesthetic values and literary experimentation. In this episode, Brent and Adam discuss the ways in which Baraka tackled the challenge of writing about music and his intimate connections to the major players in jazz. Whether you’re familiar with the music or totally new to the New Thing, 'Black Music' is an essential guide to a period of political and artistic upheaval.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
Subscribe to Close Readings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Further reading in the LRB:
Adam Shatz: The Freedom Principle
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/may/the-freedom-principle
Adam Shatz: On Ornette Coleman
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n14/adam-shatz/diary
Philip Clark: On Cecil Taylor
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/april/cecil-taylor-1929-2018
Ian Penman: Birditis
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n02/ian-penman/birditis
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In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit. In this episode, Colin and Clare look at A Handful of Dust (1934), a disturbingly modernist satire divorced from modernist ideas. They discuss the ways in which Waugh was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, with his belief in the artist as an agent of cultural change, and why he’s at his best when describing the fevered dream of a dying civilisation.
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Perry:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n16/seamus-perry/isn-t-london-hell
John Bayley:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n20/john-bayley/mr-toad
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Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism. Mark and Seamus discuss why, despite Wordsworth’s claim of being innately republican, discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution is strangely absent from the poem, which is more often preoccupied with romance and the imagination, particularly in their power to soften zealotry.
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://apple.co/4dbjbjG
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Perry:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/seamus-perry/regrets-vexations-lassitudes
E.P. Thompson
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n22/e.p.-thompson/wordsworth-s-crisis
Colin Burrow:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/colin-burrow/a-solemn-and-unsexual-man
Marilyn Butler
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n12/marilyn-butler/three-feet-on-the-ground
Thomas Keymer
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/thomas-keymer/after-meditation
Get in touch: [email protected]
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In this episode, we tackle Juvenal, whose sixteen satires influenced libertines, neoclassicists and early Christian moralists alike. Conservative to a fault, Juvenal’s Satires rails against the rapid expansion and transformation of Roman society in the early principate. But where his contemporary Tacitus handled the same material with restraint, Juvenal’s work explodes with vivid and vicious depictions of urban life, including immigration, sexual mores and eating habits. Emily and Tom explore the idiosyncrasies of Juvenal’s verse and its handling in Peter Green’s translation, and how best to parse his over-the-top hostility to everyone and everything.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Remembering Peter Green
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/september/peter-green-1924-2024
Claude Rawson: Blistering Attacks
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n21/claude-rawson/blistering-attacks
Clare Bucknell & Colin Burrow: What is satire?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/on-satire-what-is-satire
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Mary and Irina resume their discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on three stories of female agency, deception and desire. Alibech, an aspiring hermitess, is tricked into indulging her powerful sexual urges; Petronella combines business and pleasure at the expense of her husband and lover; while Lydia demonstrates her devotion by killing hawks and pulling teeth. As Mary and Irina discuss, these stories exemplify the ambiguous depiction of women in the Decameron, where the world is powered by rapacious female lusts, sex has no consequences and conventional morality is suspended.
Read more on the Decameron in the LRB: https://lrb.me/decameronpod
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
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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 precursor to the writings of Césaire's protégé, Frantz Fanon. Césaire was Martinique’s most influential poet and one of its most prominent politicians as a deputy in the French National Assembly, and his Discourse is addressed directly at his country’s colonisers. Adam and Brent consider Césaire’s poetry alongside his political arguments and the particular characteristics of his version of négritude, the far-reaching movement of black consciousness he founded with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas.
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Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future. The ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ Wilde observed in the letters of his lover, Alfred Douglas, could equally be applied to Earnest, and the satire of Jane Austen before it, but is it right to think of Wilde’s play as satirical? His characters are presented in an ethical vacuum, stripped of any good or bad qualities, but ultimately seem to demonstrate the impossibility of living a purely aesthetic life free from conventional morality.
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Read more in the LRB:
Colm Tóibín on Wilde's letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n08/colm-toibin/love-in-a-dark-time
Colm Tóibín the Wilde family: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading-gaol
Frank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n19/frank-kermode/a-little-of-this-honey
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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 all, honesty – and applied them in a way that has few equivalents in English poetry. This diary-style work, written from August to December 1938, reflects with ‘documentary vividness’, as Ian Hamilton has described, on the international and personal crises swirling around MacNeice in those months. Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s lively depiction of the anecdotal abundance of London life and the ways in which its innovative rhyming structure helps to capture the autumnal moment when England was slipping into an unknowable winter.
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Read more in the LRB:
Samuel Hynes: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v11/n05/samuel-hynes/like-the-trees-on-primrose-hill
Ian Hamilton: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n05/ian-hamilton/smartened-up
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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 political intrigue (and how not to do it), the Annals features mutiny, senatorial backstabbing, wars on the imperial frontiers, political purges and enormous egos. Emily and Tom explore the many ambiguities that make the Annals rewarding, as well as difficult, reading and discuss Tacitus’ knotty style and approach to history.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Mary Beard: Four-Day Caesar
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n02/mary-beard/four-day-caesar
Anthony Grafton: Those Limbs We Admire
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n14/anthony-grafton/those-limbs-we-admire
Shadi Bartsch: Fratricide, Matricide and the Philosopher
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n12/shadi-bartsch/fratricide-matricide-and-the-philosopher
Mark Ford: The Death of Petronius
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/mark-ford/the-death-of-petronius
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 a confession for the reader: he has been hurt by love, a love ‘more fervent than any other love’, and intends his work as a guide to life and love for young women in particular. In the first of two episodes on Boccaccio’s hundred novelle of sex, dishonesty and foolishness, Mary and Irina consider why both the preface and first story – about the disreputable merchant Cepparello – start with a confession, before looking at the later tale of the gardener Masetto and his noble efforts tending to the needs of every nun in a convent in Lamporecchio.
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Read more on Boccaccio the LRB: https://lrb.me/decameronpod
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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, biography, fiction, music criticism and political science, its fourteen essays set the tone for Black literature, political debate and scholarly production for the course of the 20th century. Souls was an immediate bestseller, the subject of furious debate and a foundational work in the new field of sociology.
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Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and refuses to take anything seriously for longer than a stanza. But is there more to Don Juan than an attention-seeking poet sustaining a deliberately difficult verse form for longer than Paradise Lost in order ‘to laugh at all things’? In this episode Clare and Colin argue that there is: they see in Don Juan a satire whose radical openness challenges the plague of ‘cant’ in Regency society but drags itself into its own line of fire in the process, leaving the poet caught in a struggle against the sinfulness of his own poetic power, haunted by its own wrongness.
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Read more in the LRB:
Clare Bucknell: Rescuing Lord Byron
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/clare-bucknell/his-own-dark-mind
Marilyn Butler: Success
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/marilyn-butler/success
John Mullan: Hidden Consequences
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n21/john-mullan/hidden-consequences
Thomas Jones: On Top of Everything
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n18/thomas-jones/on-top-of-everything
Get in touch: [email protected]
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‘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 readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was working at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for sex workers and women who had had non-marital sex. Anxieties around ‘fallen women’ were explored by many writers of the day, but Rossetti's treatment is striking both for the rich intensity of its physical descriptions and the unusual vision of redemption it offers, in which the standard Christian imperatives are rethought in sisterly terms. Seamus and Mark discuss how post-Freudian readers might read those descriptions and what the poem says about the place of the ‘market’ in Victorian society.
Read the poem here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
This episode features a full reading of 'Goblin Market' by Shirley Henderson and Felicity Jones at the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour. Watch the reading here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMnHW9MevJk
Find more about the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation here: https://www.thepoetryhour.com/foundation
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Read more in the LRB:
Penelope Fitzgerald: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n05/penelope-fitzgerald/christina-and-the-sid
Jacqueline Rose: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n20/jacqueline-rose/undone-defiled-defaced
John Bayley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n06/john-bayley/missingness
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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 surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Age’, Tom and Emily dive into this brutal and unforgiving epic poem. They explore Lucan’s slippery relationship to power, his rhetorical virtuosity and the influence of Stoicism on his worldview.
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Further reading in the LRB:
John Henderson: Dead Eyes and Blank Faces
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n07/john-henderson/dead-eyes-and-blank-faces
Nora Goldschmidt: Pompeian Group Therapy
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n18/nora-goldschmidt/pompeian-group-therapy
Thomas Jones: See you in hell, punk
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. In 'Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight', his most well-known incarnation, Gawain faces a series of peculiar tests and apparently fails them all. 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle', a later poem, takes many elements from 'The Greene Knight' and exaggerates them to the extreme: the cups the knights drink from are so large they’re impossible to drink from, and Gawain faces an even more peculiar sequence of tests, but meets them all perfectly. Irina and Mary discuss the degree to which this exaggeration can be taken as a satire on chivalric expectations, and whether by this point the character of Gawain should be considered more monastic than knightly.
Read the text here:
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-sir-gawain-and-the-carle-of-carlisle
Read some Arthurian background in the LRB here:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n24/tom-shippey/so-much-smoke
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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 dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope.
Hope against Hope is a testimony of life under Stalin, and of the ways in which ordinary people challenge and capitulate to power. It’s also a compendium of gossip, an account of psychological torture, a description of the poet’s craft and a love story.
Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to discuss his final selection for Human Conditions. They explore the qualities that make Hope against Hope so compelling: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s uncompromising honesty, perceptiveness and irrepressible humour.
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Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to depict a complex social satire in which characters are constantly pulled in different directions by romantic and economic forces. In this episode Clare and Colin focus on Emma as the high point of Austen’s satire of character as revealed through conversational style, and consider how the world Austen was born into, of revolutionary thought and new money, shaped the moral and material universe of all her novels.
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Read more in the LRB:
Barbara Everett
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n03/barbara-everett/hard-romance
John Bayley
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n03/john-bayley/yawning-and-screaming
Marilyn Butler
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n12/marilyn-butler/jane-austen-s-word-process
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and reconfigure the assassination as a symbolic birth of the new America. Seamus and Mark discuss Whitman’s cosmic vision, with its grand democratic vistas populated by small observations of rural and urban life, and his use of a thrush as a redemptive poetic voice.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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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. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting the conventions they simultaneously established. Plautus’ ‘Menaechmi’ is full of coinages, punning and madcap doubling. Terence’s troubling ‘Hecyra’ tells a much darker story of Roman sexual mores while destabilizing misogynistic stereotypes. Emily and Tom discuss how best to navigate these very early and enormously influential plays, and what they lend to Shakespeare, Sondheim and the modern sitcom.
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Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
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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 from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in this dialogue with Solomon, printed in Antwerp in 1492, that we find him at his irreverent and scatological best as they engage in a battle of proverbial wisdom. Mary and Irina consider some of the more startling and perplexing of the riddles and discuss how the development of Marcolf’s earthy rejoinders tells a story about justice and political power.
Read the text here:
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/bradbury-solomon-and-marcolf
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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 women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, politically engaged – Lessing wrestles with the breakdown of Stalinism, settler colonialism and traditional gender roles. Pankaj and Adam explore the lived experiences that shaped the novel, its feminist reception and why Pankaj considers it to be one of the best representations of ‘the strange uncapturable sensation of living from day to day.’
Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Further reading:
Anita Brookner: Women Against Men
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n16/anita-brookner/women-against-men
Frank Kermode: The Daughter Who Hated Her
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n14/frank-kermode/the-daughter-who-hated-her
Jenny Diski: Why can‘t people just be sensible?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n15/jenny-diski/why-can-t-people-just-be-sensible
Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: [email protected]
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
'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 much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and irreducible depiction of idiosyncratic country-dwellers that makes a point of never making its point. Yet many of the familiar satirical tricks are there – from radical shifts in scale to the liberal use of innuendo – and in this episode Clare and Colin look at the ways in which the novel stays true to the traditions of satire while drawing on Cervantes, Rabelais, Locke and the fashionable notion of ‘sentiment’ to advance a new kind of nuanced social comedy.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
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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 had met the stridently anti-war Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon's poetry of caustic realism quickly found its way into Owen’s work, where it merged with the high romantic sublime of his other great influences, Keats and Shelley. Mark and Seamus discuss the unstable mixture of these forces and the innovative use of rhyme in a poem where the politics is less about ideology or argument than an intuitive response to the horror of war.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Seamus Heaney on Auden (and Wilfred Owen): https://lrb.me/pp6heaney
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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 highly cultured Syrian subject of the Roman Empire in the second century CE, Lucian wrote in the classical Greek of fifth-century Athens. His razor-sharp satire was a model for Erasmus, Voltaire and Swift. Emily and Tom share some of their favourite excerpts from ‘A True History’ and other works – with trips to the moon, boundary-pushing religious scepticism and wildly improbable but not technically untrue readings of Homer – and discuss why they still read as fresh and funny today.
Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Tim Whitmarsh: Target Practice
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n04/tim-whitmarsh/target-practice
James Davidson: Stomach-Churning
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n02/james-davidson/stomach-churning
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 comedy that’s less about the birth of Jesus and more about sheep rustling, taxes, the weather and the frustrations of daily life. The pageant was part of a mystery cycle, a collection of plays that revealed religious mysteries through performances of the Christian story and were a central part of community life. Mary and Irina discuss the porous relationship between player and audience in medieval theatre, and the expert stage management of this knockabout semi-biblical farce.
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
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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 masculinity and adulthood served as tools of conquest. Using figures as disparate as Gandhi, Oscar Wilde and Aurobindo Ghosh, Nandy suggests ways in which alternative models of age and gender can provide compelling challenges to colonial authority. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam to unpack Nandy’s subtle and unexpected lines of thought and to explain why The Intimate Enemy remains as innovative today as it did in 1983.
Non-subscriber 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://apple.co/3pJoFPq
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Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mock-epic tells the story of the Empire of Dullness and its lineage of terrible writers, the Dunces. Unlike other satires featured in this series so far, it makes no effort to hide the identities of its targets. Clare and Colin provide an ABC for understanding this vast and knotty fulmination, and explore the feverish, backstabbing and politically turbulent world in which it was created.
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
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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 parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members of the government, before eventually unfolding into a vision of England freed from the tyranny and anarchy of its institutions. As Mark and Seamus discuss in this episode, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, with its incoherence and inconsistencies, amounts to perhaps the purest expression in verse both of Shelley’s political indignation and his belief that, with the right way of thinking, such chains of oppression can be shaken off ‘like dew’.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Read more in the LRB:
Seamus Perry: Wielded by a Wizard https://lrb.me/perrypp
Thomas Jones: Hard Eggs and Radishes https://lrb.me/jonespp
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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 Athens and Sparta in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. A symposium was a drinking party, though Socrates and his friends, having had a heavy evening the night before, decide to go easy on the wine and instead take turns making speeches in praise of love – at least until Alcibiades turns up, very late and very drunk. In this episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom discuss the dialogue’s philosophical ideas, historical context and narrative form, and why Aristophanes gets the hiccups.
Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Further reading:
Donald Davidson: Plato’s Philosopher
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n14/donald-davidson/plato-s-philosopher
Anne Carson: Oh What a Night (Alkibiades)
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n22/anne-carson/oh-what-a-night-alkibiades
M.F. Burnyeat: Art and Mimesis in Plato’s Republic
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n10/m.f.-burnyeat/art-and-mimesis-in-plato-s-republic
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 in Middle English. Dame Syrith, a story of lust, deception and a mustard-eating dog, is medieval humour at its silliest and most troubling. Mary and Irina explore the surprising representations of old women, magic and consent in fabliaux, the poem’s possible role as a pedagogical tool, and medieval audiences’ love for the procuress trope.
Read Dame Syrith here: https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/salisbury-trials-and-joys-dame-sirth
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Further reading in the LRB:
Irina Dumitrescu: Making My Moan
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/irina-dumitrescu/making-my-moan
Tom Shippey: Women Beware Midwives
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n09/tom-shippey/women-beware-midwives
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naipaul’s fraught relationship to modernity, and the tensions between his attachment to individual freedom and his insistence on the constraints imposed by history.
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Read more in the LRB:
D.A.N. Jones: The Enchantment of Vidia Naipaul
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n08/d.a.n.-jones/the-enchantment-of-vidia-naipaul
Frank Kermode: What Naipaul Knows
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/frank-kermode/what-naipaul-knows
Paul Theroux: Out of Sir Vidia’s Shadow
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n04/paul-theroux/diary
Sanjay Subramahnyam: Where does he come from?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n21/sanjay-subrahmanyam/where-does-he-come-from
Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 of everyone. The only force that can subvert this state of affairs is romantic love – an affection, we discover, that satire finds hard to cope with. John Gay’s 1727 smash hit ‘opera’, which ran for 62 performances in its first run, put the highwaymen, criminal gangs and politicians of the day up on stage, and offered audiences a tuneful but unnerving reflection of their own corruption and mortality. Clare and Colin discuss how this satire on the age of Walpole came about, what it did for its struggling author, and why it’s an infinitely elusive, strangely modernist work.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 readership to the abolitionist cause. Browning was the direct descendant of slave owners in Jamaica and a fervent anti-slavery campaigner, and her dramatic monologue presents a searing attack on the hypocrisy of ‘liberty’ as enshrined in the United States constitution. Mark and Seamus look at the origins of the poem and its story, and its place among other abolitionist narratives of the time.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Read more in the LRB
Matthew Bevis: Foiled by Pleasure: https://lrb.me/bevispp
Alethea Hayter: Reader, I married you: https://lrb.me/hayterpp
John Bayley: A Question of Breathing: https://lrb.me/bayleypp
Colin Grant: Leave them weeping: https://lrb.me/grantpp
Fara Dabhoiwala: My Runaway Slave, Reward Two Guineas: https://lrb.me/dabhoiwalapp
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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 antiquity, and the vivid, narrative-driven dithyrambs of Bacchylides. Through close reading, Emily and Tom tease out allusions, lexical flourishes and formal experimentation, and explain the highly contextual nature of these tightly choreographed, public-facing poems. They illustrate how precarious work could be for a praise poet in a world driven by competition – striking the right note to please your patron, guarantee the next gig, and stay on good terms with the gods.
Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Leofranc Holford-Strevens: Dithyrambs for Athens
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/leofranc-holford-strevens/dithyrambs-for-athens
Barbara Graziosi: Flower or Fungus?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n04/leofranc-holford-strevens/dithyrambs-for-athens
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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Fabliaux were short, witty tales originating in northern France between the 12th and 14th centuries, often featuring crafty characters in rustic settings and overwhelmingly concerned with money and sex. In this episode Irina and Mary look at two of these comic verses, both containing surprisingly explicit sexual language, and consider the ways in which they influenced Boccaccio, Chaucer and others.
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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 action as the highest form of human activity: distinct from work and labour, action includes collaborative expression, collective decision-making and, crucially, initiating change. Focusing on the chapter on action, Judith joins Adam to explain why they consider this approach so innovative and incisive. Together, they discuss Arendt’s continued relevance and shortcomings, The Human Condition’s many surprising and baffling turns, and the transformative power of forgiveness.
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Read more in the LRB:
Jenny Turner: We must think!
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n21/jenny-turner/we-must-think
Judith Butler: 'I merely belong to them'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n09/judith-butler/i-merely-belong-to-them
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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, which, upon any sort of provocation, came almost naturally from him.’ It’s certainly hard to miss Rochester's enthusiastic use of obscenities, though their precise meanings can sometimes be obscure. As a courtier to Charles II, his poetic subject was most often the licentiousness and intricate political manoeuvring of the court’s various factions, and he was far from a passive observer. In this episode Clare and Colin consider why Restoration England was such a satirical hotbed, and describe the ways in which Rochester, with a poetry rich in bravado but shot through with anxiety, transformed the persona of the satirist.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts the transfiguration of the movement’s leaders – executed by the British shortly after the event – from ‘motley’ acquaintances to heroic martyrs, and interrogates his own attitude to nationalist violence. Mark and Seamus discuss Yeats’s reflections on the value of political commitment, his embrace of the role of national bard and the origin of the poem’s most famous line.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Terry Eagleton: https://lrb.me/eagletonpp
Colm Tóibín: https://lrb.me/toibinpp
Frank Kermode: https://lrb.me/kermode2pp
Tom Paulin: https://lrb.me/paulinpp
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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 and Tom chart a course through Herodotus‘ history-as-epic, discussing how best to understand his approach to history, ethnography and myth. Exploring a work full of surprising, dramatic and frequently funny digressions, this episode illustrates the artfulness and deep structure underpinning the Histories, and, despite his obvious Greek bias, Herodotus‘ genuine interest in and respect for cultural difference.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Peter Green: On Liking Herodotus
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n07/peter-green/on-liking-herodotus
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 monastic collection of Old English verse, builds on the riddle tradition in two striking ways: first, the riddles don’t come with answers; second, they are sexually suggestive. Were they intended to test the moral purity of the reader? Are they simply mischievous rhetorical exercises? Mary and Irina read some of them and consider why Anglo-Saxon culture was so obsessed with the enigmatic.
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
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Read more in the LRB:
Mary Wellesley: Marking Parchment
Barbara Everett: Poetry and Soda
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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 psyche. At turns expressionistic, confessional, clinical, sharply satirical and politically charged, the book is dazzlingly multivocal, sometimes self-contradictory but always compelling. Judith Butler and Adam Shatz, whose biography of Fanon was released in January, chart a course through some of the most explosive and elusive chapters of the book, and show why Fanon is still essential reading.
Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Adam Shatz: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n02/adam-shatz/where-life-is-seized
Megan Vaughan: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n20/megan-vaughan/i-am-my-own-foundation
T.J. Clark: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n18/t.j.-clark/knife-at-the-throat
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 crackdown, the same satirical tricks Elizabethans had read in verse could be enjoyed in theatres. At the heart of the scene was Ben Jonson, who for many centuries has maintained a reputation as the refined, classical alternative to Shakespeare, with his diligent observance of the rules extracted from Roman comedy. In this episode, Colin and Clare argue that this reputation is almost entirely false, that Jonson was as embroiled in the volatile and unruly energies of late Elizabethan London as any other dramatist, and nowhere is this more on display than in his finest play, Volpone.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 war, and composed the poem shortly after his return a few months later to raise money for Medical Aid for Spain. It became a rallying cry in the fight against fascism, but was also heavily criticised, not least by George Orwell, for the phrase (in its first version) of ‘necessary murder’. Mark and Seamus discuss the poem’s Marxist presentation of history, its distinctly non-Marxist language, and why Auden ultimately condemned it as ‘a lie’.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Read more in the LRB:
Seamus Perry: That's what Wystan says
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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 read examples of classical literature. A fascinating window into the ‘low’ culture of ancient Greece, the Fables and the figure of Aesop appear in the work of authors as diverse as Aristophanes, Plato and Phaedrus, serving new purposes in new contexts. Emily and Tom discuss how Aesop’s fables as we know them came to be, make sense of their moral contradictions and unpack some of the fables that are most opaque to modern readers.
Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Tim Whitmarsh: Crashing the Delphic Party
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n12/tim-whitmarsh/crashing-the-delphic-party
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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 Winchester whose Colloquies, compiled in around the year 1000, instructed pupils to swear in Latin with elaborate and vivid fluency. Mary and Irina work through some of Aelfric’s fruitier dialogues, and ask whether his examples can be taken purely in good humour.
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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 incorporates anthropology, psychology, historiography, mythology and biology to ask an ‘impossible’ question: what is a woman? Focusing on three key chapters, Adam and Judith navigate this dense and dizzying book, exploring the nuances of Beauvoir’s original French phrasing and drawing on Judith’s own experiences teaching and writing about the text. They discuss the book’s startling relevance as well as its stark limitations for contemporary feminism, Beauvoir’s refusal to call herself a philosopher, and the radical possibilities released by her claim that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.
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Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 Donne was the first Elizabethan author to attempt formal verse satires in the vein of the Roman satirists, and they mark not only the chronological start of his poetic career, but a foundation of his whole way of writing. Colin and Clare place the satires within Donne’s life and times, and explain why the secret to understanding their language lies in the poet's use of the ‘profoundly unruly parenthesis’.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, described by Frank Kermode as ‘braced against folly by the power and intelligence that make it possible to think it the greatest political poem in the language’.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Blair Worden: Double Tongued: https://lrb.me/wordenpp
Frank Kermode: Hard Labour: https://lrb.me/kermodepp
David Norbrook: Political Verse: https://lrb.me/norbrookpp
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 contemporary, Hesiod, the first western writer to craft a poetic persona. In Works and Days, brilliantly translated by A.E. Stallings, Hesiod weaves his personality into a narrative that encompasses everything from brotherly bickering to cosmic warfare. Emily and Tom unpack this wildly entertaining window into Ancient Greek life, and discuss how Stallings’s translation highlights the humour and linguistic flavour of the original text.
Non-subscriber will only hear extracts from the rest of this series. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Barbara Graziosi
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n16/barbara-graziosi/where-s-the-gravy
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 medieval sense of humour with Chaucer’s 'Miller’s Tale', a story that is surely still (almost) as funny as when it was written six hundred years ago. But who is the real butt of the joke? Mary and Irina look in detail at the mechanics of the plot and its needless but pleasurable complexity, and consider the social significance of clothes and pubic hair in the tale.
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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 French as Réflexions Sur La Question Juive. Sartre’s ‘portraits’ of the ‘anti-Semite’ and the ‘Jew’, as he saw them, caused controversy at the time for directly confronting anti-Jewish bigotry in France and how Jewish people had been treated under the Vichy government and before the war.
Judith and Adam discuss Sartre’s attempt to develop a philosophical understanding of this kind of hatred and the apparent moral satisfaction it brings, and his contentious suggestion that not only does the antisemite owe his identity to the Jew, but that 'the Jew' is a creation of the antisemitic gaze. They also consider some of the criticisms levelled at the book, such as its focus on the bourgeois personality, and Sartre’s definition of Jews in entirely negative terms.
NOTE: This episode was recorded on 5 October 2023.
Subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Read more in the LRB:
Adam Shatz: Sartre in Cairo
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n22/adam-shatz/one-day-i-ll-tell-you-what-i-think
Jonathan Rée: Being and Nothingness
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n08/jonathan-ree/peas-in-a-matchbox
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, and Adam Shatz is the the LRB's US editor and author of, most recently, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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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 an attitude? They then plunge into their first text, The Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus, a prose satire from 1511 that lampoons pretty much the whole of sixteenth century life in the voice of Folly herself.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: [email protected]
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For the final introduction to next year’s full Close Readings programme, Emily Wilson, celebrated classicist and translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, returns for a second season of Among the Ancients, to take on another twelve vital works of Greek and Roman literature with the LRB’s Thomas Jones, loosely themed around ‘truth and lies’ – from Aesop’s Fables to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.
Authors covered: Hesiod, Aesop, Herodotus, Pindar, Plato, Lucian, Plautus, Terence, Lucan, Tacitus, Juvenal, Apuleius, Marcus Aurelius.
First episode released on 24 January 2024, then on the 24th of each month for the rest of the year.
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Close Readings Plus
In addition to the episodes, receive all the books under discussion; access to webinars with Emily, Tom and special guests including Amia Srinivasan; and shownotes and further reading from the LRB archive.
On sale here from 22 November: lrb.me/plus
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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 Satire. Over twelve episodes, Colin and Clare will attempt to chart a stable course through some of the most unruly, vulgar, incoherent, savage and outright hilarious works in English literature, as they ask what satire is, what it’s for and why we seem to like it so much.
Authors covered: Erasmus, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Earl of Rochester, John Gay, Alexander Pope, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark.
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, and regular contributors to the LRB.
First episode released on 4 January 2024, then on the fourth of each month for the rest of the year.
How to Listen
Close Readings subscription
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Close Readings Plus
In addition to the episodes, receive all the books under discussion; access to webinars with Colin, Clare and special guests including Lucy Prebble and Katherine Rundell; and shownotes and further reading from the LRB archive.
On sale here from 22 November: lrb.me/plus
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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 separately to three guests – Judith Butler, Pankaj Mishra and Brent Hayes Edwards – about some of the most revolutionary thought of the 20th century.
Judith, Pankaj and Brent will each discuss four texts over four episodes, as they uncover the inner life of the 20th century through works that have sought to find freedom in different ways and remake the world around them. They explore, among other things, the development of arguments against racism and colonialism, the experience of artistic expression in oppressive conditions and how language has been used in politically substantive ways.
Authors covered: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, V. S. Naipaul, Ashis Nandy, Doris Lessing, Nadezhda Mandelstam, W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka and Audre Lorde.
Episodes released once a month throughout 2024, on the 4th of each month.
How to Listen
Close Readings subscription
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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 ‘the Bowen effect’ and her singularly haunting style: subtle social commentary cut through with humour, and occasionally outright romanticism. A culmination of the short fiction explored in this series, Bowen’s work proves that life ‘with the lid on’ can be just as exhilarating, moving and funny as any sensationalist story.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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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, born around the same time as Jesus, Seneca had turbulent relationships with the emperors of his time: exiled by Caligula, he returned to tutor the young Nero, but was eventually forced to commit suicide after being accused of a treasonous plot. For a long time, Seneca the Philosopher was often assumed to be a different person from Seneca the Tragedian, as they seemed such different writers. As a philosopher, he is the main source of what we know about Roman Stoicism, which prioritises virtue and the dispelling of false beliefs. Seneca's dramas, however, are full of extreme emotions and violence. Emily and Tom focus on two of these tragedies, Thyestes and Trojan Women, and consider how the two sides of Seneca fit together.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
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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 Travels of Sir John Mandeville. The fictional traveller’s fantastical descriptions of different places, peoples and animals across the Holy Land and Asia are almost certainly drawn mainly from other textual sources, rather than direct experience by the unknown author, and yet the work was often used as a source of reference as well as entertainment or prurient interest. Many of the writer’s observations of different political and religious practices could be taken as radical critiques of his homeland. Yet while it often urges appreciation of other cultures, the book is undoubtedly xenophobic and racist in places, foreshadowing the European quest for colonisation: indeed, Christopher Columbus had a copy with him when the Santa Cruz sighted land on 12th October 1492.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
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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. The dazzlingly polyphonic Dart (2002) celebrates the voices of the river Dart, and the people, animals and supernatural forces entwined with it. Memorial (2011) translates and transfigures the Iliad, stripping back the narrative to reveal the epic’s ‘bright unbearable reality’. Mark and Seamus explore the thematic throughlines in Oswald’s work, unpicking allusions and influences at play in these poems.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
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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 on his 15-book epic, the Metamorphoses, a patchwork of hundreds of stories of transformation, including numerous retellings of famous myths from Apollo and Daphne to the Trojan War.
In this episode from Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom consider the poem’s depictions of trauma, redemption and the transformation of gender roles, and the formal practices which shape the poetry, such as declamatio and suasoria. They also ask how Ovid’s writing in the time of Emperor Augustus affected his work, and the circumstances around his later exile from Rome.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
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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 locations, scaffolds and pyrotechnics, including an ascent into heaven, this wildly ambitious piece of late Medieval theatre mixes traditional hagiographic drama with magical adventure, romance and broad comedy. For audiences of the time this was not just entertainment, but a profound social and religious experience which, despite its fantastical elements and radical departure from the gospel stories, reflected important moments in their daily lives. Irina and Mary try to make sense of the outlandish plot, how it might have been staged, and the complex, composite figure of Mary Magdalene.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
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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 take on the Jamesian short story, redolent with ironies and ambiguities, and feels just as relevant today. Widely considered his masterwork, Langston Hughes’s ‘Montage of a Dream Deferred’ draws on the modernist tradition, a documentarian sensibility and the freedoms of bebop to capture the multiplicity of Harlem voices.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
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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 had an enormous influence on subsequent European lyric verse. They consider the original meanings of some of Horace’s famous phrases – carpe diem, in medias res, nunc est bibendum – and look at the ways his often complex poetics interrogate the art and value of poetry itself.
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Nicholas Horsfall:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n12/nicholas-horsfall/ach-so-herr-major
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
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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 survived down the centuries, often scribbled in the margins of more ‘serious’ texts, offer a vivid snapshot of everyday medieval life. In the tenth episode of Medieval Beginings, Irina and Mary analyse several of these short, fleeting verses, probably set to music, and consider their possible origins and purpose, their delicious ambiguity, and their equivocal relationship to the sacred manuscripts in which they've been found.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Further reading in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n10/barbara-newman/i-was-such-a-lovely-girl
Listen to 'Sumer is icumen in' sung by The Hilliard Ensemble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMCA9nYnLWo
Some of the lyrics discussed in this episode can be found online:
Sumer is icumen in:
https://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medlyric/cuckou.php
I Have a Yong Suster
https://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medlyric/suster.php
Maiden in the mor
https://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medlyric/maideninthemoor.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_in_the_mor_lay
I have a gentil cock
https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/i-have-gentil-cook
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
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Originally conceived as a film script, 'Gaudete' is Ted Hughes’s apocalyptic vision of an English village in the throes of pagan forces. While it may be ‘the weirdest poem by a very weird poet’, as Mark puts it in this episode, 'Gaudete' shines a light on many Hughesian preoccupations and paved the way for his best-selling collection, Birthday Letters. A strange fusion of Twin Peaks and Midsomer Murders, 'Gaudete' is the former Poet Laureate at his most uninhibited and brilliant.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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In the ninth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom arrive at Virgil, focusing on his 12-book epic the Aeneid, which describes the wanderings of the Trojan prince Aeneas after the fall of Troy. They discuss the political background to Virgil’s life, which saw the fall of the Roman Republic, and the complex, ambiguous space his poetry inhabits, blending the mythical and historical, the geographical and imaginary, while interrogating the costs of empire and triumph in his own time.
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Denis Feeney:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/denis-feeney/simile-world
Rebecca Armstrong
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n05/rebecca-armstrong/all-kinds-of-unlucky
Colin Burrow:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n05/colin-burrow/imperiumsinefinism
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n08/colin-burrow/you-ve-listened-long-enough
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
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Chaucer’s 14th century tale of ‘double sorrow’, Troilus and Criseyde, set during the siege of Troy, is the subject of Irina and Mary’s ninth episode of Medieval Beginnings. Based largely on Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, Chaucer’s novelistic long poem displays a psychological realism that would make Henry James envious, and, with the matchmaker-uncle Pandarus, introduces a character of startling and often perplexing opacity.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Barbara Newman: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n22/barbara-newman/kek-kek!-kokkow!-quek-quek!
Irina Dumitrescu: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n17/irina-dumitrescu/how-to-read-aloud
Mary Wellesley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n11/mary-wellesley/on-the-nightingale
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
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James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection, Dubliners, when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In their eighth episode, Mark and Seamus discuss the astonishing confidence of Joyce’s early work, which not only launched his literary career, but also initiated the grand project of his writing life. In Dubliners, the reader experiences already the vastness of Joyce’s literary imagination, his harsh criticism of the Catholic Church, his shameless plundering of the lives of his contemporaries, and a writer’s self-conscious vocation to ‘forge the uncreated conscience of his race’.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
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In their eighth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom look at a contemporary of Catullus, Lucretius, and the only poem we have from him, De rerum natura (The Nature of Things), which sets out ideas about how to live one’s life based on the Epicurean philosophical tradition, embracing friends, gardens, materialism and moderation.
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Richard Jenkyns: Coaxing and Seducing
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n17/richard-jenkyns/coaxing-and-seducing
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
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In this episode of Medieval Beginnings, Irina and Mary jump to the 14th century for an introspective Arthurian romance about a knight trying to live up to his perfect reputation. The mysterious and intricate Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is perhaps best understood as a series of games within games, in which our hero, a recurring character throughout medieval literature, is never sure what adventure he’s playing.
Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Read more in the LRB:
Mary Wellesley: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n08/mary-wellesley/diary
Frank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n05/frank-kermode/who-has-the-gall
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
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Seamus and Mark step into the counterculture with two long poems, ‘Howl’ and ‘Kaddish’, by Allen Ginsberg, a Beat poet-celebrity with a utopian vision for an America rescued from its corrupted institutions and vested interests. Seamus and Mark discuss some of Ginsberg’s influences – including Whitman, Carlos Williams, O’Hara and Blake – and the far-reaching impact of his work, as well as Mark’s own experiences meeting the poet.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
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For the second half of their Among the Ancients series, Emily and Tom move to Ancient Rome, starting with the late Republican poet Catullus. Described by Tennyson, somewhat misleadingly, as ‘the tenderest of Roman poets’, Catullus combined a self-conscious technical virtuosity with a broad emotional range and a taste for paradox, often using obscene diction to skirt across the boundaries of gender and aesthetics.
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Further Reading in the LRB:
Elspeth Barker:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n19/elspeth-barker/o-filth-o-beastliness
William Fitzgerald:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n04/william-fitzgerald/badmouthing-city
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and translator of the 'Odysse'y and the 'Iliad'. Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books and host of the LRB Podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In their seventh episode of Medieval Beginnings, Irina and Mary continue their run of Romances with the Middle English Havelok the Dane, a double Cinderella story of sex, fishing and surprisingly graphic violence, written at the end of the 13th century and set in a pre-Conquest, legendary English past.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Controversial, compulsive, and overwhelmingly charismatic, D.H. Lawrence continues to exert an undeniable magnetism through his novels and poetry. But, as Mark argues in this episode, the quintessential Lawrence lies in his shorter fiction. Focusing on five stories that span Lawrence’s career, Mark and Seamus discuss the strange mix of uninhibitedness and meticulous detail that make Lawrence’s work essential reading.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
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In their sixth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom discuss the comedies of Aristophanes, in particular Clouds and Lysistrata. How did an Aristophanes comedy differ from a satyr play? Was he a conservative or a radical? And what happened to comedy after Aristophanes?
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Emily Wilson:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/emily-wilson/punishment-by-radish
Thomas Jones:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n19/thomas-jones/short-cuts
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and translator of the 'Odysse'y and the 'Iliad'. Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books and host of the LRB Podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For the sixth episode in their Medieval Beginnings series, Mary and Irina go full Romance with one of the most elaborate and surprising narrative poems in medieval literature, Le Roman de Silence, a complex, 13th-century Old French tale about gender, power and transformation.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In their fifth episode, Mark and Seamus reach their first 20th century poet of the series, the Ohio-born, New York-loving ad man Hart Crane, and his epic 1930 work The Bridge. Directly inspired by The Waste Land, The Bridge sought to address modernity, as Eliot had done, with all its conflicts, contradictions and difficulties, but infuse it with a Whitman-esque expression of American greatness.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
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Euripides was the youngest of the fifth-century Athenian tragedians, and is often described as the most radical. But how daring was he? How far did he push the boundaries of dramatic form? Focusing on Medea and Hippolytus, Emily and Tom discuss the ways Euripides sought to shock his audiences, make them laugh, and explore their anxieties in a time of cultural change.
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Further reading in the LRB:
Robert Cioffi: Euripides Unbound
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n18/robert-cioffi/euripides-unbound
Anne Carson: Euripides to the Audience
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n17/anne-carson/euripides-to-the-audience
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and translator of the 'Odysse'y and the 'Iliad'. Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books and host of the LRB Podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
If a Middle Ages full of castles, jousts, hawking, illicit love affairs and playful singing in the meadows is what you’re looking for, then look no further than the Lais of Marie de France. These 12th century love stories, written in Anglo-Norman by a writer who was unusually keen to make her name known, describe noble stories of passion, devotion, betrayal, self-sacrifice and magical transformations played out in enchanted woodlands and richly-draped chambers.
Irina and Mary discuss Marie’s various portrayals of love, her luscious powers of description, and the frequent deployment of animals in her stories to expose and resolve human problems.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In episode four of The Long and Short, Mark and Seamus turn to the squarely modernist Katherine Mansfield, whose writing famously attracted the envy of Virginia Woolf. They discuss how in Mansfield's work the modernist story makes a decisive break from its 19th century predecessors. At turns lyrical, ruthless, moving and darkly comic, these stories demonstrate her knack for close observation and mimicry – no wonder one of them is Mark’s ‘desert island’ story.
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
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In the fourth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom ask: what was it like to go to the theatre in Athens in 468 BC? And how far do modern ideas about tragedy, derived from Aristotle, apply to Sophocles’ plays? They then look in more detail at Oedipus Tyrannos and Antigone and what the plays have to say about agency and knowledge, and consider issues particular to Sophocles’ time, including civic responsibility and the role of immigrants in Athenian society.
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Further reading in the LRB:
High Lloyd Jones:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n24/hugh-lloyd-jones/gods-and-heroes
James Davidson:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n19/james-davidson/an-easy-lay
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and translator of the 'Odysse'y and the 'Iliad'. Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books and host of the LRB Podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the fourth episode of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina climb inside a tiny cell to explore the Ancrene Wisse, a guidebook written in the early 13th century, originally intended for three anchoresses, but which enjoyed a much wider audience (there was even a copy in Henry VIII’s library).
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The third episode of The Long and Short turns to the short stories of Henry James. Mark and Seamus look in particular at ‘The Aspern Papers’, which, like Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, offers a diagnosis of obsession, in this case through a sensuous, excruciating and often comedic Venetian psychodrama. Mark and Seamus discuss the emergence of the short story at the end of the 19th century, and how certain features of the form – its attachment to unresolved endings, its debt to the dramatic monologue – can be found in James’s own stories, along with his other major themes, such as the tortured relationship between the public and private, and the experience of Americans in Europe.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the third episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom move from epic to lyric, with the poems of Sappho, or what remains of them. They consider what we know, and don’t know, about her life, and how her poetry challenges the heroic tradition, both in its subversion of Homeric ideas of war and nostos, and in its playful use of language.
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from most of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Emily Wilson:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n01/emily-wilson/tongue-breaks
Terry Castle:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n19/terry-castle/always-the-bridesmaid
Mary Beard:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n19/mary-beard/sappho-speaks
Peter Green:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n22/peter-green/what-we-know
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and translator of the 'Odysse'y and the 'Iliad'. Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books and host of the LRB Podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the third episode of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina explore the much-chronicled life of St Cuthbert, as told by the most famous writer of the early medieval period, the so-called Venerable Bede. From Cuthbert’s childhood interest in naked handstands, to his later work as a charismatic preacher who could elicit total confession, and as a hermit who enjoyed the assistance of friendly sea otters, it was a life which, as told by Bede, both challenged and conformed to the expected patterns of hagiography.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the second episode of The Long and Short, Mark and Seamus turn to Walt Whitman's ‘Song of Myself’, from Leaves of Grass (1855), for Mark ‘one of the most exciting things literature has to offer’. They discuss the extraordinary physicality and exuberance of this seminal American poem, its relationship with urbanism, capitalism and sexuality, and its Johnny Appleseed-spirit, among many other things.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In episode two of Among the Ancients, Tom and Emily turn to Homer’s Odyssey. They discuss the twisting, turning nature of both the narrative and its hero, the poem’s complex interrogation of the idea of ‘home’, and the violence Odysseus brings with him on his return from the Trojan War.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
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In episode two of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina turn the pages of the Exeter Book, a remarkable 10th century manuscript containing numerous poems and riddles, some of which are written in the voices of women. They consider in particular the enigmatic and beautiful ‘Wife’s Lament’ and ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’, and their numerous interpretations, and compare them to an extraordinary collection of letters written by influential women to St Boniface in the 8th century.
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
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Find reading resources for this episode on the LRB website:
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Mark Ford and Seamus Perry start their series, The Long and Short, with Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, a weird and disturbing poem about obsession that Tennyson himself was obsessed by. He would recite it in full at the drop of a hat, sometimes more than once, to friends and foes alike – even though it received notoriously bad reviews when it was published. This episode considers why the poem meant so much to him, and what it tells us about the Victorian age.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In their first episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom begin with a beginning, Homer's Iliad: its depictions of anger and grief, of capricious gods and warriors’ bodies, and the sheer narrative force of Homer’s epic of the Trojan War.
Non-subscribers can only hear extracts from the rest of the episodes in this series. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:
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Read more in the LRB:
James Davidson: Like a Meteorite
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v19/n15/james-davidson/like-a-meteorite
Edward Luttwak: Homer Inc.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n04/edward-luttwak/homer-inc
Colin Burrow: The Empty Bath
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n12/colin-burrow/the-empty-bath
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and translator of the 'Odysse'y and the 'Iliad'. Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books and host of the LRB Podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu start their Medieval Beginnings series with Beowulf, a tale of monsters and heroes that is also a complex collection of interwoven stories about war and the conduct of a warrior society. They consider the poem’s preoccupations with kingship and a pagan past seen through the eyes of a Christian culture, as well as many of the mysteries which still surround its, not least its authorship and many narrative curiosities.
Irina Dumitrescu is Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn and Mary Wellesley as a historian and author of Hidden Hands: The Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers.
Subscribe to Close Readings:
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On the centenary of the publication of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ in book form, Mark and Seamus finish the second series of Modern-ish Poets by considering how revolutionary the poem was, the numerous meanings that have been drawn out of it, and its lasting influence.
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Further reading on Eliot in the LRB:
Frank Kermode: https://lrb.me/kermodeeliotpod
Dan Jacobson: https://lrb.me/jacobsoneliotpod
Barbara Everett: https://lrb.me/everetteliotpod
Mark Ford: https://lrb.me/fordeliotpod
Terry Eagleton: https://lrb.me/eagletoneliotpod
Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in December 2022.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the lives and works of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, close friends and leading lights of the New York School, who sought to create an anti-academic, hedonistic poetry, freeing themselves from the puritan American tradition.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
Further reading on O'Hara and Ashbery in the LRB:
C.K. Stead: https://lrb.me/steadashberypod
John Bayley: https://lrb.me/bayleyashberypod
Stephanie Burt: https://lrb.me/burtashberypod
John Kerrigan: https://lrb.me/kerriganashberypod
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in June 2022.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Charlotte Mew, who brought the Victorian art of dramatic monologue into the 20th century, and whose difficult experiences are often refracted through her damaged and marginalised characters.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Further reading on Mew in the LRB:
Matthew Bevis: https://lrb.me/bevismewpod
Penelope Fitzgerald: https://lrb.me/fitzgeraldmewpod
Susannah Clapp: https://lrb.me/clappmewpod
Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in March 2021.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford continue their series with a look at the life and work of W.B. Yeats, from his early quest for a mythological Irish culture, to his shift towards the Modernist experiment, and preoccupation with the ‘murderousness of the world’.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
Read more in the LRB:
Seamus Deane: https://lrb.me/deaneyeatspod
Michael Wood: https://lrb.me/woodyeatspod
Colm Tóibín: https://lrb.me/toibinyeatspod
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in December 2021.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Seamus Perry, Mark Ford and Joanne O’Leary discuss the life and work of Emily Dickinson—her dashes, death instinct and obliquity.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in June 2021.
Further reading on Dickinson in the LRB:
Joanne O'Leary: https://lrb.me/olearydickinsonpod
Mark Ford: https://lrb.me/forddickinsonpod
Danny Karlin: https://lrb.me/karlindickinsonpod
Tom Paulin: https://lrb.me/paulindickinsonpod
Susan Eilenberg: https://lrb.me/eilenbergdickinsonpod
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of the Saint Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, the island poet and playwright surrounded by an oceanic consciousness, whose writing recognises at once the terrible gulfs between peoples and our common predicament.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
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Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in March 2021.
Further reading on and by Walcott in the LRB:
'Militia' by Derek Walcott: https://lrb.me/walcottmilitiapod
Ian Sansom: https://lrb.me/sansomwalcottpod
Nicholas Everett: https://lrb.me/everettwalcottpod
Stephen Brook: https://lrb.me/brookwalcottpod
Blake Morrison: https://lrb.me/morrisonwalcottpod
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Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness, in the fourth episode of series two of Modern-ish Poets.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in November 2020.
Further reading on MacNiece in the LRB:
Ian Hamilton: https://lrb.me/hamiltonmacneicepod
John Kerrigan: https://lrb.me/kerriganmacneicepod
Marilyn Butler: https://lrb.me/butlermacneicepod
Nick Laird: https://lrb.me/lairdmacneicepod
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In the third episode of their second series of Modern-ish Poets, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford turn to the life and work of Adrienne Rich, in whose poems the personal becomes not only political, but epic.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in September 2020.
Further reading on Rich in the LRB:
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at the life and work of Robert Frost, the great American poet of fences and dark woods. They discuss Frost’s difficult early life as an occasional poultry farmer and teacher, his arrival in England in 1912 amid the flowering of Georgian poetry, and his emergence as the first 20th-century professional poet, whose version of the American wilderness myth, full of mischief and foreboding, took him to packed concert halls and a presidential inauguration.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2020.
Further reading on Frost in the LRB:
Leo Marx: https://lrb.me/marxfrostpod
Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/vendlerfrostpod
Peter Howarth: https://lrb.me/howarthfrostpod
Matthew Bevis: https://lrb.me/bevisfrostpod
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the first episode of their second series of Modern-ish Poets, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest.
To listen to series one of Modern-ish Poets and to this series ad free, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadings
Series one of Modern-ish Poets looks at Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Thomas Hardy, Stevie Smith, A. E. Housman, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell.
Further reading on Hopkins in the LRB:
Helen Vendler: https://lrb.me/vendlerhopkinspod
Patricia Beer: https://lrb.me/beerhopkinspod
John Bayley: https://lrb.me/bayleyhopkinspod
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in March 2020.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the fourth and final episode in their miniseries, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the life and work of pilgrim, entrepreneur and visionary mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated what is thought to be the first autobiography in English.
To listen to Mary and Irina's series, Medieval Beginnings, and all our other Close Readings series, sign up here:
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Further reading in the LRB:
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in November 2021.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the third episode in their series, Irina and Mary discuss Chaucer’s sexually voracious professional widow, stealth preacher, vivid storyteller and teacher of love, the Wife of Bath.
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Further reading in the LRB:
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in October 2021.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the second episode in their series, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the work of mystic and anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the first book in English that we can be sure was authored by a woman.
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Further reading in the LRB:
Mary Wellesley: This place is pryson
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in October 2021.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the first episode of their miniseries looking at the lives and voices of medieval women, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley encounter Saint Mary of Egypt, who (if she existed) lived sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries. In the stories of Mary’s life she leads a wild and licentious youth before exiling herself to serve penitence in the desert. There she meets Zosimas, an ascetic monk, and teaches him the value of an imperfect life. Several accounts of her life were written in the Middle Ages, including one in Old English that appears in a manuscript with Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints.
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This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in September 2021.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the final episode of series one of Modern-ish Poets, Mark and Seamus confront Robert Lowell: the Boston Brahmin for whom poetry trumped every other consideration, and whose Cold War ‘confessionalism’ came to exemplify a generation of Americans’ collective trauma; the poet who changed everything, but whose star has somehow fallen in recent years.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2017, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For the ninth episode of their series, Seamus and Mark discuss the life and work of Seamus Heaney, whose first collection, Death of Naturalist, established him immediately as a leading poetic voice in world in which modernism seemed to have run its course. They look at how his work draws extensively on his childhood, its use of poetic sounds to bind him to his native ground, its intricate engagement with myth, and his questioning of what sort of poetry is appropriate for someone in his social and historical moment.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in May 2019, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mark and Seamus are joined by Joanna Biggs, an editor at the LRB, to look at Sylvia Plath's life and poetry, for the eighth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1. They consider the balance of biography and mythology in Plath’s work, situating her as a transatlantic, expressionist poet of the Cold War, and drawing on the LRB archive to talk about her funniness, ruthlessness, and uninhibited willingness to go anywhere to win the argument.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in March 2019, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In episode seven of their first series of Modern-ish Poets Mark and Seamus look to that great poet of winter and snow, Wallace Stevens, considering his anecdote-proof life, the capitalist economy of his imagination, and his all-American poetry of precise abstraction.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in December 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the sixth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Worcestershire lad A. E. Housman, whose imaginative poetic landscape of a vanishing England in A Shropshire Lad, with its expression of the agony of thwarted love which can find no resolution, became a runaway bestseller during and after the First World War.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in October 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the fifth episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1 Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Stevie Smith, ‘an eccentric poet with a tenacious reputation,’ and a famous performer of her poetry, considering the despair that underlines her best work, its tonal slipperiness, her exceptional facility with rhyme and off-rhyme, and her use of faux-naif personas and perspectives.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the fourth episode of Modern-ish Poets, Mark and Seamus discuss the life and work of Thomas Hardy, with its blend of bitterness of tenderness, its intense dramatisations of loss and grief, and its inversion of traditional tropes of love poetry to anticipate the attitudes of later 20th century writers.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in June 2018, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For episode three of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus look at the life and work of Elizabeth Bishop, the east-coast American poet who enjoyed a limited audience, and published relatively little, in her lifetime, but whose reputation has grown enormously since her death. They discuss her exploratory approach to form, the way she domesticates what seem like heroic and mythical enterprises, and the dialectic in her work between the emotional disruption inherited from her childhood and her artistic commitment to perfectionism.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in November 2017, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the second episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark and Seamus discuss life and work of W. H. Auden, from the influence of his parents and his political development, to how his poetry emerged from a meeting of English tradition with high modernism, and its formal response to the fractured nature of his times.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and Mark Ford is Professor of English Literature at University College London.
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in August 2017, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For their first episode of Modern-ish Poets Series 1, Mark Ford and Seamus Perry look at the life and work of Philip Larkin, a poet written about extensively in the archive of the London Review of Books.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts here: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps here: lrb.me/closereadings
This episode was first published on the LRB Podcast in May 2017, and is now available in full exclusively for Close Readings subscribers.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.