The LRB Podcast
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The LRB Podcast
The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas, hosted by Thomas Jones and Malin Hay, and featuring our fortnightly 'On Politics' podcast hosted by James Butler. From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podc...
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On Politics: Why you can’t change someone’s mind
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does d...
Ordinary Abuse
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in the LRB, An...
On Politics: Keir Starmer’s Mess
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Gr...
What Next in Iran?
On 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Later that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC...
Caravaggio’s Bodies
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made h...
On Politics: The Rearmament Consensus
‘We must build our hard power because that is the currency of the age,’ Keir Starmer declared to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. It...
Early Modern News
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse an...
On Politics: Mandelson and the Private Life of Power
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of...
Jessica Mitford’s Handbag
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to...
On Politics: A New Age of Protest in Iran
The protests that began in Iran last month have been suppressed with a level of state violence not seen since the 1980s, when the Islamic Republic exe...
Buckley, MAGA’s Patron Saint
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White Hous...
On Politics: Venezuela and the Trump Doctrine
In early January, the US military seized Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in a display of force that echoed its numerous past interventions in L...
Will the AI bubble burst?
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient...
What Don Quixote Knew
In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and ...
What Dickens taught Mariah Carey
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when i...
Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ amoral?
Emily Brontë died on 19 December 1848. As Patricia Lockwood said in an episode of Close Readings, there is evidence that Brontë was writing a second n...
Who owns Judy Garland?
For a century, Judy Garland’s joyous and vulnerable singing voice has captivated audiences at the theatre, over the airwaves and in the cinema. Camill...
On Politics: Inside Britain’s Asylum System
The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general ele...
The Life and Death of a Photographer in Gaza
Fatma Hassona was a Palestinian photographer from Gaza City who was killed with her family by an Israeli airstrike in April 2025. A year earlier, the...
Next Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London
We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year:
‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood an...
On Politics: The Bust-up at the BBC
The BBC is in crisis, again. A leaked dossier alleging a lack of impartiality in its reporting on Trump, Israel, race and gender has felled its direct...
Aftershock: The War on Terror – Episode 1: With Us or Against Us
In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush declared a state of emergency and initiated what would become an unprecedented expansion of US power. Public de...
Where does our waste go?
Since the 1980s, Brett Christophers wrote recently in the LRB, ‘firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global...
Introducing ‘Aftershock: The War on Terror’
After 9/11, George W. Bush launched a global War on Terror. What followed was an unprecedented expansion of American power, from Guantánamo Bay to dro...
On Politics: Latin America’s Right-Wing Shift
At the end of the 20th century and across the first decade of the 21st, a swathe of countries across Latin America elected left-wing governments in wh...
Pollution and Other Serial Killers
Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, an astonishingly large number of serial killers grew up or operated in America’s Pacific Northwest. Car...
On Politics: Do bond markets and the Bank of England run Britain?
Andy Burnham recently said that the government is ‘in hock to the bond markets’, and the political turbulence of the past few years, not least the dow...
Extinction, Fast and Slow
One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge...
On Politics: The Online Right (and Left)
For the best part of a decade, a new type of anti-systemic, nationalist politics has been emerging from different corners of the online world. In Brit...
Lessons from the Peace Process
Adam is joined by Robert Malley to discuss the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and the long history of the peace process, in which Malley has been...
Why should we listen to Amanda Knox?
It's nearly eighteen years since Amanda Knox was arrested on suspicion of murdering her housemate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, and more than ten since...
On Politics: The Death of the Conservative Party?
In its nearly two hundred years of existence the Conservative Party has survived through a combination of protean adaptability and ruthlessness, not l...
How to Write Like Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard ‘did more with less than any crime writer I can think of’ J. Robert Lennon wrote in the latest issue of the LRB. Leonard was born in Ne...
On Politics: Labour's Problems
When Keir Starmer brought Labour back to government last year with a majority of 174, many talked about two or even three terms in power. But over fou...
Selling the Manosphere
The manosphere, Emily Witt writes in a recent piece for the LRB, is the ‘online network of male supremacist websites, influencers and YouTube channels...
The Debt to David Graeber
When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile b...
What’s so great about Formula One?
Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the LRB, has been following Formula One since she was a child. Thomas Jones wrote recently in the LRB about the life and...
Close Readings: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens
'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze...
The Psychology of Tennis
As well as raw talent and incredible athleticism, professional tennis ‘requires extraordinary psychological capacities’, Edmund Gordon wrote recently...
Why you should care about golf
With the world's most famous amateur golfer now in charge of the 'free world', the sport has never been more important in the lives of non-golfers. Wh...