Podcasts about lrb

Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime's secret police in the 1970s and avoiding extradition to West Germany. When General Pinochet was himself arrested in London in 1998 under an international warrant issued by a Spanish judge, the British government returned him to Chile on medical grounds. In this episode, Andy Beckett, the author of Pinochet in Piccadilly, joins Tom to talk about these two cases of impunity, the subjects of a recent book by Philippe Sands. They also consider why the democratic government of Salvador Allende that Pinochet overthrew in 1973 has been a touchstone for the international left in the decades since, and whether something similar to Pinochet's coup could have happened in the UK. Find Andy's article and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/pinochetpod Sponsored link Oculi Mundi: ⁠https://oculi-mundi.com/⁠ LRB Audio Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: ⁠⁠https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod

Iran's supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict apparently over, Adam Shatz talks to Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Robert Malley, a former lead negotiator for the US in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, about why the war came about and what it means for the region. With Bajoghli, Adam looks at the way the war has been seen by the regime's supporters and detractors, and the effects on the Iranian population of Israel's widespread infiltration of the country. With Malley, he considers the events that paved the way for Israel's attack and why America's bombing of the nuclear facility at Fordow will probably not spur Iran to accelerate its nuclear programme. Further reading in the LRB: Tom Stevenson: Trump's Midnight Hammer https://lrb.me/stevensoniran Tareq Baconi: Gaza under Siege https://lrb.me/baconigaza Sponsored link Oculi Mundi: https://oculi-mundi.com/ LRB Audio Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words. 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 Poems discussed in this episode: Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night' ⁠https://⁠⁠w⁠⁠ww.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night⁠ Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility' ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57⁠ Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht' ⁠https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/⁠ W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death' ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death⁠ Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man' ⁠https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/⁠ Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War' ⁠https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas's letters: ⁠http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n03/ian-hamilton/tough-guy⁠ Jonathan Bate on war poetry: ⁠http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n22/jonathan-bate/players-please⁠ Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/michael-longley⁠ Next episode: Family elegies by William Wordsworth, Denise Riley, Anne Carson and Robert Lowell.

James Hogg's ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov's 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 1940, also hinges around a pact with Satan (Woland), who arrives in Moscow to create mayhem among its literary community and helps reunite an outcast writer, the Master, with his lover, Margarita. In this extended extra from ‘Fiction and the Fantastic', Marina Warner and Adam Thirlwell look at the ways in which these two ferocious works of comic horror tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or Bolshevism, and consider why both writers used the fantastical to test reality. ‘Fiction and the Fantastic' is part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast. Sign up to Close Readings: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://lrb.me/crapplefflrbpod In other podcast apps: ⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff Sponsored link: Deaf Republic at the Royal Court: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/deaf-republic/

Beeb Birtles was born Gerard Bertelkamp in 1948, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Beeb is a celebrated musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist. As a founding member of iconic bands such as Zoot, Mississippi, and the Little River Band, Birtles has left an indelible mark on the music industry, both in Australia and internationally. His story is one of remarkable transition—from his Dutch heritage to becoming an influential figure in Australian rock.Gerard Bertelkamp, better known by his stage name Beeb Birtles, was born into a Dutch family in post-war Amsterdam. His father was a skilled carpenter and building contractor, while his mother shared a love for music that would influence her son's career. In 1959, the Bertelkamp family embarked on a life-changing journey - emigrating to Australia. Settling in Adelaide, South Australia, the family embraced their new home, which provided fertile ground for young Gerard's passion for music to flourish.While attending high School in Adelaide, Beeb formed his first band, Times Unlimited. This group evolved into Down the Line, where he began honing his craft by covering popular English Mod songs. In 1967, Birtles joined the influential band Zoot as the bassist and vocalist. Zoot gained popularity with its energetic performances and hits like a rock-infused version of The Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby.”Zoot's success propelled Beeb into the limelight, but the band disbanded in '71, paving the way for new musical endeavours. Beeb then formed the duo Frieze with fellow Zoot member (the late) Darryl Cotton, which marked another chapter in his early career.In '72, Beeb joined the folk-rock group Mississippi, which later transformed into the Little River Band (LRB) in 1975. As a founding member, Beeb played a pivotal role in crafting the band's harmonious rock sound, contributing to their global success. Hits like “Reminiscing,” “Help Is on Its Way,” and “Lonesome Loser” cemented the band's reputation as one of Australia's greatest musical exports. Beeb remained with the Little River Band until 1983, during which they sold millions of records worldwide.After leaving LRB, Birtles collaborated with Graeham Goble, another LRB alum, to form the duo Birtles & Goble, releasing the album The Last Romance. He later pursued solo projects, including the 2000 album Driven by Dreams. In 2002, Birtles reunited with former LRB members Glenn Shorrock and Graeham Goble to form Birtles Shorrock Goble, performing LRB classics alongside new material.Beeb Birtles' contributions to music have earned him widespread recognition. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his service to music and inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame in 2004 alongside his Little River Band colleagues. He was also appointed a Member of the Order of Australia “for significant service to the performing arts as a singer, songwriter and musician”.Despite his success in Australia and beyond, Beeb remains deeply connected to his Dutch roots. Today he resides in Nashville, USA where he continues to write and produce music. He has written an autobiography called 'Everyday of My Life" and his passion for music hasn't waned at all.Join us during this episode as Beeb shares the story of his incredible musical life through Zoot, Mississippi and the extraordinary Little River Band.

As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, entrusted with building his collection, Belle da Costa Greene could ‘spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of 26', as the New York Times put it in 1912. In the latest LRB, Francesca Wade reviews a new biography of Greene and a recent exhibition dedicated to her at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, of which Greene was the first director. Francesca joins Tom on the podcast to talk about Greene's life and work. They discuss her long-term, long-distance relationship with the art historian Bernard Berenson and her reasons for concealing her African American heritage. Find further reading in the LRB: https://lrb.me/wadepod Sponsored links: Get tickets for Good Night, Oscar: https://goodnightoscar.com Learn more about Stories in Colour: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/podcast LRB Audio Discover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod

Building on his seminal lecture ‘The Shoah After Gaza' (LRB 21 March 2024) and his earlier books From the Ruins of Empire and The Age of Anger, novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra's latest work The World After Gaza (Fern Press) seeks to place the current crisis in Gaza and Palestine within the broader context of the troubled and tragic history of colonialism and anticolonialism. ‘A brilliant book,' writes William Dalrymple, ‘as thoughtful, scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original. The World After Gaza does what great writing is meant to do: to remind us of what it is to be human, to help us feel another's pain, to reach out and make connections across the trenches of race, colour and religion.'Mishra is in conversation with curator and producer Gareth Evans. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this interview, Lamorna Ash, author of Don't Forget We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion, and one of my favourite modern writers, talked about working at the Times Literary Supplement, netball, M. John Harrison, AI and the future of religion, why we should be suspicious of therapy, the Anatomy of Melancholy, the future of writing, what surprised her in the Bible, the Simpsons, the joy of Reddit, the new Pope, Harold Bloom, New Atheism's mistakes, reading J.S. Mill. I have already recommended her new book Don't Forget We're Here Forever, which Lamorna reads aloud from at the end. Full transcript below.Uploading videos onto Substack is too complicated for me (it affects podcast downloads somehow, and the instructions to avoid this problem are complicated, so I have stopped doing it), and to upload to YouTube I have to verify my account but they told me that after I tried to upload it and my phone is dead, so… here is the video embedded on this page. I could quote the whole thing. Here's one good section.Lamorna: Which one would you say I should do first after The Sea, The Sea?Henry: Maybe The Black Prince.Lamorna: The Black Prince. Great.Henry: Which is the one she wrote before The Sea, The Sea and is just a massive masterpiece.Lamorna: I'll read it. Where do you stand on therapy? Do you have a position?Henry: I think on net, it might be a bad thing, even if it is individually useful for people.Lamorna: Why is that?Henry: [laughs] I didn't expect to have to answer the question. Basically two reasons. I think it doesn't take enough account of the moral aspect of the decisions being made very often. This is all very anecdotal and you can find yourself feeling better in the short term, but not necessarily in the long-- If you make a decision that's not outrageously immoral, but which has not had enough weight placed on the moral considerations.There was an article about how lots of people cut out relatives now and the role that therapy plays in that. What I was struck by in the article that was-- Obviously, a lot of those people are justified and their relatives have been abusive or nasty, of course, but there are a lot of cases where you were like, "Well, this is a long-term decision that's been made on a short-term basis." I think in 10 years people may feel very differently. There wasn't enough consideration in the article, at least I felt, given to how any children involved would be affected later on. I think it's a good thing and a bad thing.Lamorna: I'm so with you. I think that's why, because also the fact of it being so private and it being about the individual, and I think, again, there are certain things if you're really struggling with that, it's helpful for, but I think I'm always more into the idea of communal things, like AAA and NA, which obviously a very particular. Something about doing that together, that it's collaborative and therefore there is someone else in the room if you say, "I want to cut out my parent."There's someone else who said that happened to me and it was really hard. It means that you are making those decisions together a little bit more. Therapy, I can feel that in friends and stuff that it does make us, even more, think that we are these bounded individuals when we're not.Henry: I should say, I have known people who've gone to therapy and it's worked really well.Lamorna: I'm doing therapy right now and it is good. TranscriptHenry: Today I am talking to Lamorna Ash. Lamorna is one of the rising stars of her generation. She has written a book about a fishing village in Cornwall. She's written columns for the New Statesman, of which I'm a great admirer. She works for a publisher and now she's written a book called, Don't Forget, We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion. I found this book really compelling and I hope you will go and read it right now. Lamorna, welcome.Lamorna Ash: Thank you for having me.Henry: What was it like when you worked at the Times Literary Supplement?Lamorna: It was an amazing introduction to mostly contemporary fiction, but also so many other forms of writing I didn't know about. I went there, I actually wrote a letter, handwritten letter after my finals, saying that I'd really enjoyed this particular piece that somehow linked the anatomy of melancholy to infinite jest, and being deeply, deeply, deeply pretentious, those were my two favorite books. I thought, well, I'll apply for this magazine. I turned up there as an intern. They happened to have a space going.My job was Christmas in that I just spent my entire time unwrapping books and putting them out for editors to swoop by and take away. I'd take on people's corrections. I'd start to see how the editorial process worked. I started reading. I somehow had missed contemporary fiction. I hadn't read people like Rachel Kask or Nausgaard. I was reading them through going to the fiction pages. It made me very excited. Also, my other job whilst I was there, was I had the queries email. You'd get loads of incredibly random emails, including things like, you are cordially invited to go on the Joseph Conrad cycle tour of London. I'd ask the office, "Does anyone want to do this?" Obviously, no one ever said yes.I had this amazing year of doing really weird stuff, like going on Joseph Conrad cycling tour or going to a big talk at the comic book museum or the new advertising museum of London. I loved it. I really loved it.Henry: What was the Joseph Conrad cycling tour of London like? That sounds-Lamorna: Oh, it was so good. I remember at one point we stopped on maybe it was Blackfriars Bridge or perhaps it was Tower Bridge and just read a passage from the secret agent about the boats passing underneath. Then we'd go to parts of the docks where they believe that Conrad stayed for a while, but instead it would be some fancy youth hostel instead.It was run by the Polish Society of London, I believe-- the Polish Society of England, I believe. Again, each time it was like an excuse then to get into that writer and then write a little piece about it for the TLS. I guess, it was also, I was slightly cutting my teeth on how to do that kind of journalism as well.Henry: What do you like about The Anatomy of Melancholy?Lamorna: Almost everything. I think the prologue, Democritus Junior to the Reader is just so much fun and naughty. He says, "I'm writing about melancholy in order to try and avoid melancholy myself." There's six editions of it. He spent basically his entire life writing this book. When he made new additions to the book, rather than adding another chapter, he would often be making insertions within sentences themselves, so it becomes more and more bloated. There's something about the, what's the word for it, the ambition that I find so remarkable of every single possible version of melancholy they could talk about.Then, maybe my favorite bit, and I think about this as a writer a lot, is there's a bit called the digression of air, or perhaps it's digression on the air, where he just suddenly takes the reader soaring upwards to think about air and you sort of travel up like a hawk. It's this sort of breathing moment for a reader where you go in a slightly different direction. I think in my own writing, I always think about digression as this really valuable bit of nonfiction, this sense of, I'm not just taking you straight the way along. I think it'd be useful to go sideways a bit too.Henry: That was Samuel Johnson's favorite book as well. It's a good choice.Lamorna: Was it?Henry: Yes. He said that it was the only book that would get him out of bed in the morning.Lamorna: Really?Henry: Because he was obviously quite depressive. I think he found it useful as well as entertaining, as it were. Should netball be an Olympic sport?Lamorna: [laughs] Oh, it's already going to be my favorite interview. I think the reason it isn't an Olympic-- yes, I have a vested interest in netball and I play netball once a week. I'm not very good, but I am very enthusiastic because it's only played mostly in the Commonwealth. It was invented a year after basketball as a woman-friendly version because women should not run with the ball in case they get overexerted and we shouldn't get too close to contacting each other in case we touch, and that's awful.It really is only played in the Commonwealth. I think the reason it won't become an Olympic sport is because it's not worldwide enough, which I think is a reasonable reason. I'm not, of all the my big things that I want to protest about and care about right now, making that an Olympic sport is a-- it's reasonably low on my list.Henry: Okay, fair enough. You are an admirer of M. John Harrison's fiction, is that right?Lamorna: Yes.Henry: Tell us what should we read and why should we read him?Lamorna: You Should Come With Me Now, is that what it's called? I know I reviewed one of his books years ago and thought it was-- because he's part of that weird sci-fi group that I find really interesting and they've all got a bit of Samuel Delany to them as well. I just remember there was this one particular story in that collection, I think in general, he's a master at sci-fi that doesn't feel in that Dune way of just like, lists of names of places. It somehow has this, it's very literary, it's very odd, it's deeply imaginative. It is like what I wanted adult fiction to be when I was 12 or something, that there's the way the fantasy and imagination works.I remember there was one about all these men, married men who were disappearing into their attics and their wives thought they were just tinkering. What they were doing was building these sort of translucent tubes that were taking them off out of the world. I remember just thinking it was great. His conceits are brilliant and make so much sense, whilst also always being at an interesting slant from reality. Then, I haven't read his memoir, but I hear again and again this anti-memoir he's written. Have you read that?Henry: No.Lamorna: Apparently that's really brilliant too. Then he also, writes those about climbing. He's actually got this one foot in the slightly travel nature writing sports camp. I just always thought he was magic. I remember on Twitter, he was really magic as well. I spent a lot of time following him.Henry: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of writing and literature and books and this whole debate that's going on?Lamorna: It's hard to. I don't want to say anything fast and snappy because it's such a complicated thing. I could just start by saying personally, I'm worried about me and writing because I'm worried about my concentration span. I am so aware that in the same way that a piano player has to be practising the pieces they're going to play all the time. I think partly that's writing and writing, I seem to be able to do even with this broken, distracted form of attention I've got. My reading, I don't feel like I'm getting enough in. I think that means that what I produce will necessarily be less good if I can't solve that.I've just bought a dumb phone on the internet and I hope that's going to help me by no longer having Instagram and things like that. I think, yes, I suppose we do read a bit less. The generation below us is reading less. That's a shame. There's so much more possibility to go out and meet people from different places. On an anthropological level, I think anthropology has had this brilliant turn of becoming more subjective. The places you go, you have to think about your own relationship to them. I think that can make really interesting writing. It's so different from early colonial anthropology.The fact that, I guess, through, although even as I'm saying this, I don't know enough to say it, but I was going to say something about the fact that people, because we can do things like substacks and people can do short form content, maybe that means that more people's voices are getting heard and then they can, if they want to, transfer over and write books as well.I still get excited by books all the time. There's still so much good contemporary stuff that's thrilling me from all over the place. I don't feel that concerned yet. If we all do stop writing books entirely for a year and just read all the extraordinary books that have been happening for the last couple of thousand, we'd be okay.Henry: I simultaneously see the same people complaining that everything's dying and literature is over and that we have an oversupply of books and that capitalism is giving us too many books and that's the problem. I'm like, "Guys, I think you should pick one."Lamorna: [laughs] You're not allowed both those arguments. My one is that I do think it's gross, the bit of publishing that the way that some of these books get so oddly inflated in terms of the sales around them. Then, someone is getting a million pounds for a debut, which is enormous pressure on them. Then, someone else is getting 2K. I feel like there should be, obviously, there should be a massive cap on how large an advance anyone should get, and then more people will actually be able to stay in the world of writing because they won't have to survive on pitiful advances. I think that would actually have a huge impact and we should not be giving, love David Beckham as much as I do, we shouldn't be giving him five million pounds for someone else to go to write his books. It's just crazy.Henry: Don't the sales of books like that subsidize those of us who are not getting such a big advance?Lamorna: I don't think they always do. I think that's the problem is that they do have this wealth of funds to give to celebrities and often those books don't sell either. I still think even if those books sell a huge amount of money, those people still shouldn't be getting ridiculous advances like that. They still should be thinking about young people who are important to the literary, who are going to produce books that are different and surprising and whose voices we need to hear. That feels much more important.Henry: What do you think about the idea that maybe Anglo fiction isn't at a peak? I don't necessarily agree with that, but maybe we can agree that these are not the days of George Eliot and Charles Dickens, but the essay nonfiction periodicals and writing online, this is huge now. Right? Actually, our pessimism is sort of because we're looking in the wrong area and there are other forms of writing that flourish, actually doing great on the internet.Lamorna: Yes, I think so too. Again, I don't think I'm internet worldly enough to know this, but I still find these extraordinary, super weird substats that feel exciting. I also get an enormous amount of pleasure in reading Reddit now, which I only just got into many, many years late, but so many fun, odd things. Like little essays that people write and the way that people respond to each other, which is quick and sharp, and I suppose it fills the gap of what Twitter was.I think nonfiction, I was talking about this morning, because I'm staying with some writers, because we're sort of Cornish, book talk thing together and how much exciting nonfiction has come out this year that we want to read from the UK that is hybrid-y nature travel. Then internationally, I still think there's-- I just read, Perfection by Vincenzo, but there's enough translated fiction that's on the international book list this year that gets me delighted as well. To me, I just don't feel worried about that kind of thing at all when there's so much exciting stuff happening.I love Reddit. I think they really understand things that other people don't on there. I think it's the relief now that when you type in something to Google, you get the AI response. It's something like, it's so nice to feel on Reddit that someone sat down and answered you. Maybe that's such a shame that that's what makes me happy now, that we're in that space. It does feel like someone will tell you not just the answer, but then give you a bit about their life. Then, the particular tool that was passed down by their grandparents. That's so nice.Henry: What do you think of the new Pope?Lamorna: I thought it was because I'd heard all the thing around fat Pope, thin Pope, and obviously, our new Pope is maybe a sort of middle Pope, or at least is closer to Francis, but maybe a bit more palatable to some people. I guess, I'm excited that he's going to do, or it seems like he's also taking time to think, but he's good on migration on supporting the rights of immigrants. I think there's value in the fact of him being American as this being this counterpoint to what's happening in America right now. If feels always feels pointless to say because they're almost the idea of a Pope.I guess, Francis said that, who am I to judge about people being gay, but I think this Pope has so far has been more outly against gay people, but he stood up against JD Vance and his stupid thoughts on theology. I'm quietly optimistic. I guess I'm also waiting for Robert Harris's prophecy to come true and we get an intersex Pope next. Because I think that was prophecy, right? What he wrote.Henry: That would be interesting.Lamorna: Yes.Henry: The religious revival that people say is happening, particularly among young people, how is AI going to make it different than previous religious revivals?Lamorna: Oh, that's so interesting. Maybe first of all, question, sorry, I choked on my coffee. I was slightly questioned the idea if there is a religious revival, it's not actually an argument that I made in the book. When I started writing the book, there wasn't this quiet revival or this Bible studies and survey that suggests that more young people are going to church hadn't come out yet. I was just more, I guess, aware that there were a few people around me who were converting and I thought it'd be interesting if there's a few, there'll be more, which I think probably happens in every single generation, right? Is that that's one way to deal with the longing for meaning we all experience and the struggles in our lives.I was speaking to a New York Times journalist who was questioning the stats that have been coming out because first it's incredibly small pool. It's quite self-selecting that possibly there are people who might have gone to church already. It's still such a small uptick because it makes it hard to say anything definitive. I guess in general, what will the relationship be between AI and religion?I guess, there are so many ways you could go with that. One is that those spaces, religious spaces, are nicely insulated from technology. Not everywhere. Obviously, in some places they aren't, but often it's a space in which you put your phone away. In my head, the desire to go to church is as against having to deal with AI or having to deal with technology being integrated to every other aspect of my life.I guess maybe people will start worshiping the idea of the singularity. Maybe we'll get the singularity and Terminator, or the Matrix is going to happen, and we'll call them our gods because they will feel like gods. That's maybe one option. I don't know how AI-- I guess I don't know enough about AI that maybe you'll have AI, or does this happen? Maybe this has happened already that you could have an AI confession and you'd have an AI priest and they tell you--Henry: Sure. It's huge for therapy, right?Lamorna: Yes.Henry: Which is that adjacent thing.Lamorna: That's a good point. It does feel something about-- I'm sure, theologically, it's not supposed to work if you haven't been ordained, but can an AI be ordained, become a priest?Henry: IndeedLamorna: Could they do communion? I don't know. It's fascinating.Henry: I can see a situation where a young person lives in a secular environment or culture and is interested in things and the AI is the, in some ways, easiest place for them to turn to say, "I need to talk about-- I have these weird semi-religious feelings, or I'm interested." The AI's not going to be like, "Oh, really? That's weird." There's the question of will we worship AI or whatever, but also will we get people's conversions being shaped by their therapy/confessors/whatever chat with their LLM?Lamorna: Oh, it's so interesting. I read a piece recently in the LRB by James Vincent. It was about AI relationships, our relationship with AI, and he looked at AI girlfriends. There was this incredible case, maybe you read about it, about a guy who tried to kill the Queen some years back. His defense was that his AI girlfriend had really encouraged him to do that. Then, you can see the transcripts of the text, and he says, "I'm thinking about killing the Queen." His AI girlfriend is like, "Go for it, baby."It's that thing there of like, at the moment, AI is still reflecting back our own desires or refracting almost like shifting how they're expressed. I'm trying to imagine that in the same case of me saying, "I feel really lonely, and I'm thinking about Christianity." My friend would speak with all of their context and background, and whatever they've got going on for them. Whereas an AI would feel my desire there and go, "That's a good idea. It says online this." It's very straight. It would definitely lead us in directions that feel less than human or other than human.Henry: I also have this thought, you used to, I think you still do, but you see it less. You used to get a Samaritan's Bible in every hotel. The Samaritans, will they start trying to install a religious chatbot in places where people--? There are lots of ways in which you could use it as a distribution mechanism.Lamorna: Which does feel so far from the point. Not to think about the gospels, but that feeling of something I talk about in the book is that, so much of it is human contact. Is that this factor of being changed in the moment, person to person. If I have any philosophy for life at the moment is this sense of desperately needing contact that we are saved by each other all the time, not by our telephones and things that aren't real. It's the surprise.I quote it in the book, but Iris Murdoch describes love is the very difficult realization that someone other than yourself is real. I think that's the thing that makes us all survive, is that reminder that if you're feeling deeply depressed, being like, there is someone else that is real, and they have a struggle that matters as much as mine. I think that's something that you are never going to get through a conversation with a chatbot, because it's like a therapeutic thing. You are not having to ask it the same questions, or you are not having to extend yourself to think about someone else in those conversations.Henry: Which Iris Murdoch novels do you like?Lamorna: I've only read The Sea, The Sea, but I really enjoyed it. Which ones do you like?Henry: I love The Sea, The Sea, and The Black Prince. I like the late books, like The Good Apprentice and The Philosopher's Pupil, as well. Some people tell you, "Don't read those. They're late works and they're no good," but I was obsessed. I was absolutely compelled, and they're still all in my head. They're insane.Lamorna: Oh, I must, because I've got a big collection of her essays. I'm thinking is so beautiful, her philosophical thought. It's that feeling, I know I'm going the wrong-- starting in the wrong place, but I do feel that she's someone I'd really love to explore next, kind of books.Henry: I think you'd like her because she's very interested in the question of, can therapy help, can philosophy help, can religion help? She's very dubious about therapy and philosophy, and she is mystic. There are queer characters and neurodivergent characters. For a novelist in the '70s, you read her now and you're like, "Well, this is all just happening now."Lamorna: Cool.Henry: Maybe we should be passing these books out. People need this right now.Lamorna: Which one would you say I should do first after The Sea, The Sea?Henry: Maybe The Black Prince.Lamorna: The Black Prince. Great.Henry: Which is the one she wrote before The Sea, The Sea and is just a massive masterpiece.Lamorna: I'll read it. Where do you stand on therapy? Do you have a position?Henry: I think on net, it might be a bad thing, even if it is individually useful for people.Lamorna: Why is that?Henry: [laughs] I didn't expect to have to answer the question. Basically two reasons. I think it doesn't take enough account of the moral aspect of the decisions being made very often. This is all very anecdotal and you can find yourself feeling better in the short term, but not necessarily in the long-- If you make a decision that's not outrageously immoral, but which has not had enough weight placed on the moral considerations.There was an article about how lots of people cut out relatives now and the role that therapy plays in that. What I was struck by in the article that was-- Obviously, a lot of those people are justified and their relatives have been abusive or nasty, of course, but there are a lot of cases where you were like, "Well, this is a long-term decision that's been made on a short-term basis." I think in 10 years people may feel very differently. There wasn't enough consideration in the article, at least I felt, given to how any children involved would be affected later on. I think it's a good thing and a bad thing.Lamorna: I'm so with you. I think that's why, because also the fact of it being so private and it being about the individual, and I think, again, there are certain things if you're really struggling with that, it's helpful for, but I think I'm always more into the idea of communal things, like AAA and NA, which obviously a very particular. Something about doing that together, that it's collaborative and therefore there is someone else in the room if you say, "I want to cut out my parent."There's someone else who said that happened to me and it was really hard. It means that you are making those decisions together a little bit more. Therapy, I can feel that in friends and stuff that it does make us, even more, think that we are these bounded individuals when we're not.Henry: I should say, I have known people who've gone to therapy and it's worked really well.Lamorna: I'm doing therapy right now and it is good. I think, in my head, it's like it should be one among many and I still question it whilst doing it.Henry: To the extent that there is a religious revival among "Gen Z," how much is it because they have phones? Because you wrote something like, in fact, I have the quote, "There's a sense of terrible tragedy. How can you hold this constant grief that we feel, whether it's the genocide in Gaza or climate collapse? Where do I put all the misery that I receive every single second through my phone? Church can then be a space where I can quietly go and light a candle." Is it that these young people are going to religion because the phone has really pushed a version of the world into their faces that was not present when I was young or people are older than me?Lamorna: I think it's one of, or that the phone is the symptom because the phone, whatever you call it, technology, the internet, is the thing that draws the world closer to us in so many different ways. One being that this sense of being aware of what's happening around in other places in the world, which maybe means that you become more tolerant of other religions because you're hearing about it more. That, on TikTok, there's loads of kids all across the world talking about their particular faiths and their background and which aspera they're in, and all that kind of thing.Then, this sense of horror being very unavoidable that you wake up and it is there and you wake up and you think, "What am I doing? What am I doing here? I feel completely useless." Perhaps then you end up in a church, but I'm not sure.I think a bigger player in my head is the fact that we are more pluralistic as societies. That you are more likely to encounter other religions in schools. I think then the question is, well then maybe that'll be valuable for me as well. I think also, not having parents pushing religion on you makes kids, the fact of the generation above the British people, your parents' generations, not saying religion is important, you go to church, then it becomes something people can become more curious about in their own right as adults. I think that plays into it.I think isolation plays into it and that's just not about technology and the phone, but that's the sense of-- and again, I'm thinking about early 20s, mid 20s, so adults who are moving from place to place, who maybe feel very isolated and alone, who are doing jobs that make them feel isolated and alone, and there are this dearth of community spaces and then thinking, well, didn't people used to go to churches, it would be so nice to know someone older than me.I don't know how this fits in, but I was thinking about, I saw this documentary, The Encampments, like two days ago, which is about the Columbia University encampments and within that, Mahmood Khalil, who's the one who's imprisoned at the moment, who was this amazing leader within the movement and is from Palestine. The phone in that, the sense about how it was used to gather and collect people and keep people aware of what's happening and mean that everyone is more conscious and there's a point when they need more people in the encampments because the police are going to come. It's like, "Everyone, use your phone, call people now." I think I can often be like, "Oh no, phones are terrible," but this sense within protest, within communal activity, how valuable they can be as well.I haven't quite gotten into that thought. I don't know, basically. I think it's so hard. I've grown up with a phone. I have no sense of how much it plays a part in everything about me, but obviously, it is a huge amount. I do think it's something that we all think about and are horrified by whilst also seeing it as like this weird extension of ourselves. That definitely plays into then culturally, the decisions we make to either try and avoid them, find spaces where you can be without them.Henry: How old do you think a child should be when they're first given a phone? A smartphone, like an iPhone type thing?Lamorna: I think, 21.Henry: Yes?Lamorna: No, I don't know. I obviously wouldn't know that about a child.Henry: I might.Lamorna: I'd love to. I would really love to because, I don't know, I have a few friends who weren't allowed to watch TV until they were 18 and they are eminently smarter than me and lots of my other friends. There's something about, I don't know, I hate the idea that as I'm getting older, I'm becoming more scaremongering like, "Oh no, when I was young--" because I think my generation was backed in loads of ways. This thing of kids spending so much less time outside and so much less time being able to imagine things, I think I am quite happy to say that feels like a terrible loss.I read a piece recently about kids in New York and I think they were quite sort of middle-class Brooklyn-y kids, but they choose to go days without their phones and they all go off into the forest together. There is this sense of saying giving kids autonomy, but at the same time, their relationship with a phone is not one of agency. It's them versus tech bros who have designed things that are so deeply addictive, that no adult can let go of it. Let alone a child who's still forming how to work out self-control, discipline and stuff. I think a good parenting thing would be to limit massively these completely non-neutral objects that they're given, that are made like crack and impossible to let go of.Henry: Do you think religious education in schools should be different or should there be more of it?Lamorna: Yes, I think it should be much better. I don't know about you, but I just remember doing loads of diagrams of different religious spaces like, "This is what a mosque looks like," and then I'd draw the diagram. I knew nothing. I barely knew the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In fact, I probably didn't as a teenager.I remember actually in sixth form, having this great philosophy teacher who was talking about the idea of proto antisemitism within the gospels. I was like, "Wait, what?" Because I just didn't really understand. I didn't know that it was in Greek, that the Old Testament was in Hebrew. I just didn't know. I think all these holy texts that we've been carrying with us for thousands of years across the world have so much in them that's worth reading and knowing.If I was in charge of our R.E., I would get kids to write on all holy texts, but really think about them and try and answer moral problems. You'd put philosophy back with religion and really connect them and think, what is Nietzsche reacting against? What does Freud about how is this form of Christianity different like this? I think that my sense is that since Gove, but also I'm sure way before that as well, the sense of just not taking young people seriously, when actually they're thoughtful, intelligent and able to wrestle with these things, it's good for them to have know what they're choosing against, if they're not interested in religion.Also, at base, those texts are beautiful, all of them are, and are foundational and if you want to be able to study English or history to know things about religious texts and the practices of religion and how those rituals came about and how it's changed over thousands of years, feels important.Henry: Which religious poets do you like other than Hopkins? Because you write very nicely about Hopkins in the book.Lamorna: He's my favorite. I like John Donne a lot. I remember reading lots of his sermons and Lancelot Andrews' sermons at university and thinking they were just astonishingly beautiful. There are certain John Donne sermons and it's this feeling of when he takes just maybe a line from one of Paul's letters and then is able to extend it and extend it, and it's like he's making it grow in material or it's like it's a root where suddenly all these branches are coming off it.Who else do I like? I like George Herbert. Gosh, my brain is going in terms of who else was useful when I was thinking about. Oh it's gone.Henry: Do you like W.H. Auden?Lamorna: Oh yes. I love Auden, yes. I was rereading his poems about, oh what's it called? The one about Spain?Henry: Oh yes.Lamorna: About the idea of tomorrow.Henry: I don't have a memory either, but I know the poem you mean, yes.Lamorna: Okay. Then I'm trying to think of earlier religious poets. I suppose things like The Dream of the Rood and fun ways of getting into it and if you're looking at medieval poetry.Henry: I also think Betjeman is underrated for this.Lamorna: I've barely read any Betjeman.Henry: There's a poem called Christmas. You might like it.Lamorna: Okay.Henry: It's this famous line and is it true and is it true? He really gets into this thing of, "We're all unwrapping tinsely presents and I'm sitting here trying to work out if God became man." It's really good. It's really good. The other one is called Norfolk and again, another famous line, "When did the devil first attack?" It talks about puberty as the arrival of the awareness of sin and so forth.Lamorna: Oh, yes.Henry: It's great. Really, really good stuff. Do you personally believe in the resurrection?Lamorna: [chuckles] I keep being asked this.Henry: I know. I'm sorry.Lamorna: My best answer is sometimes. Because I do sometimes in that way that-- someone I interviewed who's absolutely brilliant in the book, Robert, and he's a Cambridge professor. He's a pragmatist and he talks about the idea of saying I'm a disciplined person means nothing unless you're enacting that discipline daily or it falls away. For him, that belief in a Kierkegaardian leap way is something that needs to be reenacted in every moment to say, I believe and mean it.I think there are moments when my church attendance is better and I'm listening to a reading that's from Acts or whatever and understanding the sense of those moments, Paul traveling around Europe and Asia Minor, only because he fully believed that this is what's happened. Those letters and as you're reading those letters, the way I read literature or biblical writing is to believe in that moment because for that person, they believe too. I think there are points at which the resurrection can feel true to me, but it does feel like I'm accessing that idea of truth in a different way than I am accessing truth about-- it's close to how I think about love as something that's very, very real, but very different from experiential feelings.I had something else I wanted to say about that and it's just gone. Oh yes. I was at Hay Festival a couple of weeks ago. Do you know the Philosopher Agnes Callard?Henry: Oh, sure.Lamorna: She gave a really great talk about Socrates and her love of Socrates, but she also came to my talk and she and her husband, who I think met through arguing about Aristotle, told me they argued for about half a day about a line I'd said, which was that during writing the book, I'd learned to believe in the belief of other people, her husband was like, "You can't believe in the belief of other people if you don't believe it too. That doesn't work. That doesn't make sense." I was like, "That's so interesting." I can so feel that if we're taking that analytically, that if I say I don't believe in the resurrection, not just that I believe you believe it, but I believe in your belief in the resurrection. At what point is that any different from saying, I believe in the resurrection. I feel like I need to spend more time with it. What the slight gap is there that I don't have that someone else does, or as I say it, do I then believe in the resurrection that moment? I'm not sure.I think also what I'm doing right now is trying to sound all clever with it, whereas for other people it's this deep ingrained truth that governs every moment of their life and that they can feel everywhere, or perhaps they can't. Perhaps there's more doubt than they suggest, which I think is the case with lots of us. Say on the deathbed, someone saying that they fully believe in the resurrection because that means there's eternal salvation, and their family believe in that too. I don't think I have that kind of certainty, but I admire it.Henry: Tell me how you got the title for this book from an episode of The Simpsons.Lamorna: It's really good app. It's from When Maggie Makes Three, which is my favorite episode. I think titles are horribly hard. I really struck my first book. I would have these sleepless nights just thinking about words related to the sea, and be like, blue something. I don't know. There was a point where my editor wanted to call it Trawler Girl. I said, "We mustn't. That's awful. That's so bad. It makes me sound like a terrible superhero. I'm not a girl, I'm a woman."With this one, I think it was my fun title for ages. Yes, it's this plaque that Homer has put-- Mr. Burns puts up this plaque to remind him that he will never get to leave the power plant, "Don't forget you're here forever."I just think it's a strong and bonkers line. I think it had this element of play or silliness that I wanted, that I didn't think about too hard. I guess that's an evangelical Christian underneath what they're actually saying is saying-- not all evangelicals, but often is this sense of no, no, no, we are here forever. You are going to live forever. That is what heaven means.That sense of then saying it in this jokey way. I think church is often very funny spaces, and funny things happen. They make good comedy series when you talk about faith.Someone's saying she don't forget we're here forever. The don't forget makes it so colloquial and silly. I just thought it was a funny line for that reason.Then also that question people always ask, "Is religion going to die out?" I thought that played into it. This feeling that, yes, I write about it. There was a point when I was going to an Extinction Rebellion protest, and everyone was marching along with that symbol of the hourglass inside a circle next to a man who had a huge sign saying, "Stop, look, hell is real, the end of the world is coming." This sense of different forms of apocalyptic thinking that are everywhere at the moment. I felt like the title worked for that as well.Henry: I like that episode of The Simpsons because it's an expression of an old idea where he's doing something boring and his life is going to slip away bit by bit. The don't forget you're here forever is supposed to make that worse, but he turns it round into the live like you're going to die tomorrow philosophy and makes his own kind of meaning out of it.Lamorna: By papering it over here with pictures of Maggie. They love wordplay, the writers of The Simpsons, and so that it reads, "Do it for her," instead. That feeling of-- I think that with faith as well of, don't forget we're here forever, think about heaven when actually so much of our life is about papering it over with humanity and being like, "Does it matter? I'm with you right now, and that's what matters." That immediacy of human contact that church is also really about, that joy in the moment. Where it doesn't really matter in that second if you're going to heaven or hell, or if that exists. You're there together, and it's euphoric, or at least it's a relief or comforting.Henry: You did a lot of Bible study and bible reading to write this book. What were the big surprises for you?Lamorna: [chuckles] This is really the ending, but revelation, I don't really think it's very well written at all. It shouldn't be in there, possibly. It's just not [unintelligible 00:39:20] It got added right in the last minute. I guess it should be in there. I just don't know. What can I say?So much of it was a surprise. I think slowly reading the Psalms was a lovely surprise for me because they contain so much uncertainty and anguish, and doubt. Imagining those being read aloud to me always felt like a very exciting thing.Henry: Did you read them aloud?Lamorna: When I go to more Anglo Catholic services, they tend to do them-- I never know how to pronounce this. Antiphonally.Henry: Oh yes.Lamorna: Back and forth between you. It's very reverential, lovely experience to do that. I really think I was surprised by almost everything I was reading. At the start of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, he does this amazing thing where he does four different versions of what could be happening in the Isaac and Abraham story underneath.There's this sense of in the Bible, and I'm going to get this wrong, but in Mimesis, Auerbach talks about the way that you're not given the psychological understanding within the Bible. There's so much space for readers to think with, because you're just being told things that happened, and the story moves on quickly, moment by moment. With Isaac and Abraham, what it would mean if Isaac actually had seen the fact that his father was planning to kill him. Would he then lose his faith? All these different scenarios.I suddenly realised that the Bible was not just a fixed text, but there was space to play with it as well. In the book, I use the story of Jacob and the angel and play around with the meaning of that and what would happen after this encounter between Jacob and an angel for both of them.Bits in the Gospels, I love the story of the Gerasene Demoniac. He was a knight. He was very unwell, and no one knew what to do with him. He was ostracised from his community. He would sit in this cave and scream and lacerate himself against the cave walls. Then Jesus comes to him and speaks to him and speaks to the demons inside him. There's this thing in Mark's Gospel that Harold Bloom talks about, where only demons are actually able to perceive. Most people have to ask Christ who he really is, but demons can perceive him immediately and know he's the son of God.The demons say that they are legion. Then Jesus puts them into 1,000 pigs. Is it more? I can't remember. Then they're sent off over the cliff edge. Then the man is made whole and is able to go back to his community. I just think there's just so much in that. It's so rich and strange. I think, yes, there's something about knowing you could sit down and just read a tiny bit of the Bible and find something strange and unusual that also might speak to something you've read that's from thousands of years later.I also didn't know that in Mark's Gospel, the last part of it is addended, added on to it. Before that, it ended with the women being afraid, seeing the empty tomb, but there's no resolution. There's no sense of Christ coming back as spirit. It ended in this deep uncertainty and fear. I thought that was so fascinating because then again, it reminds you that those texts have been played around with and thought with, and meddled with, and changed over time. It takes away from the idea that it's fixed and certain, the Bible.Henry: What did you think of Harold Bloom's book The Shadow of a Great Rock?Lamorna: I really loved it. He says that he treats Shakespeare more religiously and the Bible more like literature, which I found a funny, irreverent thing to say. There's lovely stuff in there where, I think it was Ruth, he was like, maybe it was written by a woman. He takes you through the different Hebrew writers for Genesis. Which again, becoming at this as such a novice in so many ways, realising that, okay, so when it's Yahweh, it's one particular writer, there's the priestly source for particular kinds of writing. The Yahwist is more ironic, or the God you get is more playful.That was this key into thinking about how each person trying to write about God, it's still them and their sense of the world, which is particular and idiosyncratic is forming the messages that they believe they're receiving from God. I found that exciting.Yes, he's got this line. He's talking about the blessings that God gives to men in Genesis. He's trying to understand, Bloom, what the meaning of a blessing is. He describes it as more life into a time without boundaries. That's a line that I just found so beautiful, and always think about what the meaning of that is. I write it in the book.My best friend, Sammy, who's just the most game person in the world, that you tell them anything, they're like, "Cool." I told them that line. They were like, "I'm getting it tattooed on my arm next week." Then got me to write in my handwriting. I can only write in my handwriting, but write down, "More time into life without boundaries." Now they've just got it on their arm.Henry: Nice.Lamorna: I really like. They're Jewish, non-practicing. They're not that really interested in it. They were like, "That's a good line to keep somewhere."Henry: I think it's actually one of Bloom's best books. There's a lot of discussion about, is he good? Is he not good? I love that book because it really just introduces people to the Bible and to different versions of the Bible. He does all that Harold Bloom stuff where he's like, "These are the only good lines in this particular translation of this section. The rest is so much dross.He's really attentive to the differences between the translations, both theologically but also aesthetically. I think a lot of people don't know the Bible. It's a really good way to get started on a-- sitting down and reading the Bible in order. It's going to fail for a lot of people. Harold Bloom is a good introduction that actually gives you a lot of the Bible itself.Lamorna: For sure, because it's got that midrash feeling of being like someone else working around it, which then helps you get inside it. I was reading that book whilst going to these Bible studies at a conservative evangelical church called All Souls. I wasn't understanding what on earth was going on in Mark through the way that we're being told to read it, which is kids' comprehension.Maybe it was useful to think about why would the people have been afraid when Christ quelled the storms? It was doing something, but there was no sense of getting inside the text. Then, to read alongside that, Bloom saying that the Christ in Mark is the most unknowable of all the versions of Christ. Then again, just thinking, "Oh, hang on." There's an author. The author of Mark's gospel is perceiving Christ in a particular way. This is the first of the gospels writing about Christ. What does it mean? He's unknowable. Suddenly thinking of him as a character, and therefore thinking about how people are relating to him. It totally cracks the text open for you.Henry: Do you think denominational differences are still important? Do most people have actual differences in dogma, or are they just more cultural distinctions?Lamorna: They're ritual distinctions. There really is little that you could compare between a Quaker meeting and a Catholic service. That silence is the fundamental aspect of all of it. There's a sense of enlighten.My Quaker mate, Lawrence, he's an atheist, but he wouldn't go to another church service because he's so against the idea of hierarchy and someone speaking from a pulpit. He's like, honestly, the reincarnated spirit of George Fox in many ways, in lots of ways he's not.I guess it becomes more blurry because, yes, there's this big thing in the early 20th century in Britain anyway, where the line that becomes more significant is conservative liberal. It's very strange that that's how our world gets divided. There's real simplification that perhaps then, a liberal Anglican church and a liberal Catholic church have more in relationship than a conservative Catholic church and a conservative evangelical church. The line that is often thinking about sexuality and marriage.I was interested, people have suddenly was called up in my book that I talk about sex a lot. I think it's because sex comes up so much, it feels hard not to. That does seem to be more important than denominational differences in some ways. I do think there's something really interesting in this idea of-- Oh, [unintelligible 00:48:17] got stung. God, this is a bit dramatic. Sorry, I choked on coffee earlier. Now I'm going to get stung by a bee.Henry: This is good. This is what makes a podcast fun. What next?Lamorna: You don't get this in the BBC studios. Maybe you do. Oh, what was I about to say? Oh, yes. I like the idea of church shopping. People saying that often it speaks to the person they are, what they're looking for in a church. I think it's delightful to me that there's such a broad church, and there's so many different spaces that you can go into to discover the church that's right for you. Sorry. I'm really distracted by this wasp or bee. Anyway.Henry: How easy was it to get people to be honest with you?Lamorna: I don't know. I think that there's certain questions that do tunnel right through to the heart of things. Faith seems to be one of them. When you talk about faith with people, you're getting rid of quite a lot of the chaff around with the politeness or whatever niceties that you'd usually speak about.I was talking about this with another friend who's been doing this. He's doing a play about Grindr. He was talking about how strange it is that when you ask to interview someone and you have a dictaphone there, you do get a deeper instant conversation. Again, it's a bit like a therapeutic conversation where someone has said to you, "I'm just going to sit and listen." You've already agreed, and you know it's going to be in a book. "Do you mind talking about this thing?"That just allows this opportunity for people to be more honest because they're aware that the person there is actually wanting to listen. It's so hard to create spaces. I create a cordon and say, "We're going to have a serious conversation now." Often, that feels very artificial. I think yes, the beauty of getting to sit there with a dictaphone on your notebook is you are like, "I really am interested in this. It really matters to me." I guess it feels easy in that way to get honesty.Obviously, we're all constructing a version of ourselves for each other all the time. It's hard for me to know to what extent they're responding to what they're getting from me, and what they think I want to hear. If someone else interviewed them, they would probably get something quite different. I don't know. I think if you come to be with openness, and you talk a bit about your journey, then often people want to speak about it as well.I'm trying to think. I've rarely interviewed someone where I haven't felt this slightly glowy, shimmery sense of it, or what I'm learning feels new and feels very true. I felt the same with Cornish Fisherman, that there was this real honesty in these conversations. Many years ago, I remember I got really obsessed with interviewing my mom. I think I was just always wanting to practice interviewing. The same thing that if there's this object between you, it shifts the dimensions of the conversation and tends towards seriousness.Henry: How sudden are most people's conversions?Lamorna: Really depends. I was in this conversation with someone the other day. When she was 14, 15, she got caught shoplifting. She literally went, "Oh, if there's a God up there, can you help get me out of the situation?" The guy let her go, and she's been a Christian ever since. She had an instantaneous conversion. Someone I interviewed in the book, and he was a really thoughtful card-carrying atheist. He had his [unintelligible 00:51:58] in his back pocket.He hated the Christians and would always have a go at them at school because he thought it was silly, their belief. Then he had this instant conversion that feels very charismatic in form, where he was just walking down an avenue of trees at school, and he felt the entire universe smiling at him and went, "Oh s**t, I better become a Christian."Again, I wonder if it depends. I could say it depends on the person you are, whether you are capable of having an instant conversion. Perhaps if I were in a religious frame of mind, I'd say it depends on what God would want from you. Do you need an instant conversion, or do you need to very slowly have the well filling up?I really liked when a priest said to me that people often go to church and expect to be changed in a moment. He's like, "No, you have to go for 20 years before anything happens." Something about that slow incremental conversion to me is more satisfying. It's funny, I was having a conversation with someone about if they believe in ghosts, and they were like, "Well, if I saw one, then I believe in ghosts." For some people, transcendental things happen instantaneously, and it does change them ultimately instantly.I don't know, I would love to see some stats about which kinds of conversions are more popular, probably more instant ones. I love, and I use it in the book, but William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. He talks about there's some people who are sick-souled or who are also more porous bordered people for whom strange things can more easily cross the borders of their person. They're more likely to convert and more likely to see things.I really like him describing it that way because often someone who's like that, it might just be described as well, you have a mental illness. That some people are-- I don't know, they've got sharper antennae than the rest of us. I think that is an interesting thought for why some people can convert instantly.Henry: I think all conversions take a long time. At the moment, there's often a pivotal moment, but there's something a long time before or after that, that may or may not look a conversion, but which is an inevitable part of the process. I'm slightly obsessed with the idea of quests, but I think all conversions are a quest or a pilgrimage. Your book is basically a quest narrative. As you go around in your Toyota, visiting these places. I'm suspicious, I think the immediate moment is bundled up with a longer-term thing very often, but it's not easy to see it.Lamorna: I love that. I've thought about the long tail afterwards, but I hadn't thought about the lead-up, the idea of that. Of what little things are changing. That's such a lovely thought. Their conversions began from birth, maybe.Henry: The shoplifter, it doesn't look like that's where they're heading. In retrospect, you can see that there weren't that many ways out of this path that they're on. Malcolm X is like this. One way of reading his autobiography is as a coming-of-age story. Another way of reading it is, when is this guy going to convert? This is going to happen.Lamorna: I really like that. Then there's also that sense of how fixed the conversion is, as well, from moment to moment. That Adam Phillips' book on wanting to change, he talks about our desire for change often outstrips our capacity for change. That sense of how changed am I afterwards? How much does my conversion last in every moment? It goes back to the do you believe in the resurrection thing.I find that that really weird thing about writing a book is, it is partly a construction. You've got the eye in there. You're creating something that is different from your reality and fixed, and you're in charge of it. It's stable, it remains, and you come to an ending. Then your life continues to divert and deviate in loads of different ways. It's such a strange thing in that way. Every conversion narrative we have fixed in writing, be it Augustine or Paul, whatever, is so far from the reality of that person's experience.Henry: What did the new atheists get wrong?Lamorna: Arrogance. They were arrogant. Although I wonder, I guess it was such a cultural moment, and perhaps in the same way that everyone is in the media, very excitedly talking about revival now. There was something that was created around them as well, which was delight in this sense of the end of something. I wonder how much of that was them and how much of it was, they were being carried along by this cultural media movement.I suppose the thing that always gets said, and I haven't read enough Dawkins to say this with any authority, but is that the form of religion that he was attempting to denigrate was a very basic form of Christianity, a real, simplified sense. That he did that with all forms of religion. Scientific progress shows us we've progressed beyond this point, and we don't need this, and it's silly and foolish.I guess he underestimated the depth and richness of religion, and also the fact of this idea of historical progress, when the people in the past were foolish, when they were as bright and stupid as we are now.Henry: I think they believed in the secularization idea. People like Rodney Stark and others were pointing out that it's not really true that we secularized a lot more consistency. John Gray, the whole world is actually very religious. This led them away from John Stuart Mill-type thinking about theism. I think everyone should read more John Stuart Mill, but they particularly should have read the theism essays. That would have been--Lamorna: I've only just got into him because I love the LRB Close Reading podcast. It's Jonathan Rée and James Wood. They did one on John Stuart Mill's autobiography, which I've since been reading. It's an-Henry: It's a great book.Lamorna: -amazing book. His crisis is one of-- He says, "The question of religion is not something that has been a part of my life, but the sense of being so deeply learned." His dad was like, "No poetry." In his crisis moment, suddenly realizing that that's what he needed. He was missing feeling, or he was missing a way of looking at the world that had questioning and doubt within it through poetry.There was a bit in the autobiography, and he talks about when he was in this deep depression, whenever he was at 19 or something. That he was so depressed that he thought if there's a certain number of musical notes, one day there will be no more new music because every single combination will have been done. The sense of, it's so sweetly awful thinking, but without the sense-- I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here.I found his crisis so fascinating to read about and how he comes out of that through this care and attention of beautiful literature and thinking, and through his love of-- What was his wife called again?Henry: Harriet.Lamorna: Harriet. He credits her for almost all his thinking. He wouldn't have moved towards socialism without her. Suddenly, humans are deeply important to him. He feels sorry for the fact that his dad could not express love or take love from him, and that that was such a terrible deficiency in his life.Henry: Mill's interesting on religion because he looks very secular. In fact, if you read his letters, he's often going into churches.Lamorna: Oh, really?Henry: Yes, when he's in Italy, because he had tuberculosis. He had to be abroad a lot. He's always going to services at Easter and going into the churches. For a secular person, he really appreciates all these aspects of religion. His stepdaughter was-- there's a diary of hers in their archives. She was very religious, very intense. As a young woman, when she's 16, 17, intensely Catholic or Anglo-Catholic. Really, it's quite startling.I was reading this thing, and I was like, "Wait, who in the Mill household is writing this? This is insane." There are actually references in his letters where he says, "Oh, we'll have to arrive in time for Good Friday so that she can go to church." He's very attentive to it. Then he writes these theism essays, right at the end of his life. He's very open-minded and very interrogatory of the idea. He really wants to understand. He's not a new atheist at all.Lamorna: Oh, okay. I need to read the deism essays.Henry: You're going to love it. It's very aligned. What hymns do you like?Lamorna: Oh, no.Henry: You can be not a hymn person.Lamorna: No. I'm not a massive hymn person. When I'm in church, the Anglican church that I go to in London now, I always think, "Remember that. That was a really nice one." I like to be a pilgrim. I really don't have the brain that can do this off the cuff. I'm not very musically. I'm deeply unmusical.There was one that I was thinking of. I think it's an Irish one. I feel like I wrote this down at one point, because I thought I might be asked in another interview. I had to write down what I thought in case a hymn that I liked. Which sounds a bit like a politician, when they're asked a question, they're like, "I love football." I actually can't think of any. I'm sorry.Henry: No, that's fine.Lamorna: What are your best? Maybe that will spark something in me.Henry: I like Tell Out My Soul. Do you know that one?Lamorna: Oh, [sings] Tell Out My Soul. That's a good one.Henry: If you have a full church and people are really going for it, that can be amazing. I like all the classics. I don't have any unusual choices. Tell Out My Soul, it's a great one. Lamorna Ash, this has been great. Thank you very much.Lamorna: Thank you.Henry: To close, I think you're going to read us a passage from your book.Lamorna: I am.Henry: This is near the end. It's about the Bible.Lamorna: Yes. Thank you so much. This has definitely been my favourite interview.Henry: Oh, good.Lamorna: I really enjoyed it. It's really fun.Henry: Thank you.Lamorna: Yes, this is right near the end. This is when I ended up at a church, St Luke's, West Holloway. It was a very small 9:00 AM service. Whilst the priest who'd stepped in to read because the actual priest had left, was reading, I just kept thinking about all the stories that I'd heard and wondering about the Bible and how the choices behind where it ends, where it ends.I don't think I understand why the Bible ends where it does. The final lines of the book of Revelation are, "He who testifies to these things says, Yes, I am coming soon. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus, the grace of the Lord Jesus be with God's people. Amen." Which does sound like a to-be-continued. I don't mean the Bible feels incomplete because it ends with Revelation. What I mean is, if we have continued to hear God and wrestle with him and his emissaries ever since the first overtures of the Christian faith sounded.Why do we not treat these encounters with the same reverence as the works assembled in the New Testament? Why have we let our holy text grow so antique and untouchable instead of allowing them to expand like a divine Wikipedia updated in perpetuity? That way, each angelic struggle and Damascene conversion that has ever occurred or one day will, would become part of its fabric.In this Borgesian Bible, we would have the Gospel of Mary, not a fictitious biography constructed by a man a century after her death, but her true words. We would have the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch on the road between Jerusalem and Gaza from Acts, but this time given in the first person. We would have descriptions from the Picts on Iona of the Irish Saint Columba appearing in a rowboat over the horizon.We would have the Gospels of those from the early Eastern Orthodox churches, Assyrian Gospels, Syriac Orthodox Gospels. We would have records of the crusades from the Christian soldiers sent out through Europe to Jerusalem in order to massacre those of other faiths, both Muslim and Jewish. In reading these accounts, we would be forced to confront the ways in which scripture can be interpreted

Marguerite Yourcenar entered the Académie Française in 1981, the first woman to be admitted. Her novel Memoirs of Hadrian, published thirty years earlier, is ‘often considered the best French novel of the 20th century', as Joanna Biggs wrote in a recent issue of the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, Joanna joins Tom to discuss Yourcenar's life and work, and what makes Memoirs of Hadrian – a reimagining of the life of the Roman emperor – such a good book.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/yourcenarpodFind Memoirs of Hadrian at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/hadrianpodSponsored links:Find out more about the National Gallery's Siena exhibition here: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/siena-the-rise-of-painting Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘How useful is it,' Daniel Trilling asked recently in the LRB, ‘to compare the current global resurgence of right-wing nationalism to fascism?' In this episode of the podcast Daniel joins TJ to explore the question in light of his review of Richard Seymour's book Disaster Nationalism. They discuss the continuities between earlier forms of far-right politics and its more recent manifestations, as well as what's new about the current moment, and why fascism may be a useful frame for thinking not only about where right-wing nationalism comes from, but also about what might be done to forestall it.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/is-this-fascismSponsored links:Find out more about the National Gallery's Siena exhibition here: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/siena-the-rise-of-painting Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this extended extract from their series 'Conversations in Philosophy', part of the LRB's Close Readings podcast, Jonathan Rée and James Wood look at one of Friedrich Nietzsche's early essays, 'Schopenhauer as Educator'. For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer's genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to forget what we already know. ‘Schopenhauer as Educator' was written in 1874, when Nietzsche was 30, and was published in a collection with three other essays – on Wagner, David Strauss and the use of history – that has come to be titled Untimely Meditations. Jonathan and James consider the essays together and their powerful attack on the ethos of the age, railing against the greed and power of the state, fake art, overweening science, the triviality of universities and the deification of success.James Wood is a contributor to the LRB and staff writer at The New Yorker, whose books include The Broken Estate, How Fiction Works and a novel, Upstate.Jonathan Rée is a writer, philosopher and regular contributor to the LRB whose books include Witcraft and A Schoolmaster's War.To listen to the rest of this episode and all our other Close Readings series, sign up;In Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/nietzscheapplecrIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/nietzschesccr Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘The Church​ needs to change; the Church cannot afford to change,' Colm Tóibín wrote recently in the LRB. In this episode of the podcast, he joins Tom to discuss how the new pope will have to navigate this paradox. He also looks back at the Francis papacy, and the way that Francis behind his smile ran the Vatican with an iron first; at relations between the Vatican and the Trump administration; and at Francis's motives for bringing the future Pope Leo XIV to Rome in 2023: ‘the reason, in my view, is the same reason that Francis began to smile.'Read Colm Tóibín on Pope Leo: https://lrb.me/toibinpopepodSponsored links:To find out about financial support for professional writers visit the Royal Literary Fund here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/LRB AudioDiscover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Sheila Fitzpatrick first went to Moscow in the 1960s as a young academic, the prevailing understanding of the Soviet Union in the West was governed by the ‘totalitarian hypothesis', of a system ruled entirely from the top down. Her examination of the ministry papers of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar of Enlightenment after the Revolution, challenged this view, beginning a long career in which she has frequently questioned the conventional understanding of Soviet history and changed the field with works such as Everyday Stalinism. In this episode, Sheila talks to Daniel about her work in the Soviet archives, about some of the obstacles researchers face, and her latest books, Lost Souls and The Death of Stalin.Read more by Sheila in the LRB: https://lrb.me/fitzpatrickpodSponsored links:To find out about financial support for professional writers visit the Royal Literary Fund here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/LRB AudioDiscover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.With the papal conclave convening in Rome to pick Pope Francis's successor, Matt and Sam are joined by novelist Brandon Taylor to discuss the 2024 film Conclave, directed by Edward Berger and starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Isabella Rossellini. The film, as you might guess, depicts the shabby and conspiratorial inner-workings of a (fictional) College of Cardinals as they go about picking a new pope. Fun movie! Great chat!Furthering Reading:Brandon Taylor, Real Life, (2020)— Filthy Animals, (2021)— The Late Americans, (2023)— "Is it even good? Two Years with Zola," LRB, April 4, 2024.Ben Munster, "Cardinals are watching ‘Conclave' the movie for guidance on the actual conclave," Politico, May 6, 2025.Dan Walden, "Gender, Sex, and other Nonsense," Commonweal, March 1, 2021.

The Soviet Women's Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in 1941 to foster connections with Allied countries and encourage British and US women to ‘invest personally' in the war effort. Two years later, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship in New York started its own letter-writing programme. The correspondence between a few hundred pairs of women in the US and the Soviet Union – sharing the details of their everyday lives, discovering what they had in common as well as their differences – carried on until the mid-1950s, even as hostilities between their governments escalated. In this episode, Miriam Dobson joins Tom to talk about her recent review of Dear Unknown Friend by Alexis Peri, which documents this ‘remarkable correspondence'. Drawing on her own research, Dobson also discusses other exchanges between ordinary people on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, and how the letter-writing changed the women's ideas about their own lives.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/penpalspodLRB AudioDiscover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's now possible to take a home pregnancy test eight days after ovulation, yet in the 16th century, women sometimes turned to astrologers for confirmation. And in the 1950s and 1960s, one might send a urine sample to an address in Sloane Street where they would inject it into a tropical frog that would lay eggs. In this episode of the LRB Podcast, Erin Maglaque joins Thomas Jones to discuss how the understanding of conception has changed over the centuries since the early modern period, what knowledge has been gained but also what may have been lost.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/conceptionpodLRB AudioDiscover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Judith Butler and Aziz Rana join Adam Shatz to discuss Donald Trump's use of executive orders to target birthright citizenship, protest, support of Palestinian rights, academic freedom, constitutionally protected speech and efforts to ensure inclusion on the basis of race, gender and sexual orientation. They consider in particular the content of Executive Order 14168, which ‘restores' the right of the government to decide what sex people are, as well as the wider programme of rights-stripping implied by Trump's agenda.Read Judith's piece here:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/judith-butler/this-is-wrongRead Adam on Columbia University:https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/march/submissionLRB AudioDiscover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In response to several requests from our (wonderful) Patreon subscribers, we're unlocking this episode from behind the paywall. Consider subscribing at Patreon.com/KnowYourEnemy to never miss an episode. March 2025 marked five years since the formal start of the pandemic in the United States, when the federal government declared the arrival and spread of the novel coronavirus to be a national emergency. The official Covid death toll in the United States now stands at over 1.2 million; globally it surpasses 20 million people. Tens of millions of others were hospitalized, and many who survived infection are facing long Covid or related health complications. Our lives were upended, whether by sheltering-in-place, working from home, and barely leaving our home or apartment, or, for others, by endangering themselves by continuing to show up to work in hospitals, making deliveries, or staffing essential businesses. And yet, as David Wallace-Wells recently argued in the New York Times, "We tell ourselves we've moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us."We wanted to have a conversation with David about that reality: why, collectively, we resist acknowledging what Covid really cost us, and the ways it continues to shape our lives. The discussion begins by revisiting the first weeks and months of the pandemic, the fear we felt, and the remarkable displays of solidarity that occurred in blue states as well as red states. From there we explore the different "phases" of the pandemic, how public-health measures became culture-war fodder, the impact of the vaccine on how both the public and elected officials perceived the risks of Covid, the pandemic's profound influence on our politics, the fallout from school closures, the Lab Leak Theory, and more.Listen again: "How to Survive a Pandemic" (w/ Peter Staley), Feb 21, 2021Sources:David Wallace-Wells, "How Covid Remade America," New York Times, Mar 4, 2025— "The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else," New York Times, Feb 26, 2025— "We've Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong," New York Times, Feb 28, 2023— "Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong'," New York Times, April 24, 2023David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)Nicholson Baker, "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis," New York Magazine, Jan 4, 2021Zeynep Tufekci, "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives," NYTimes, Mar 16, 2025.Sam Adler-Bell, "Doctor Do-Little​: The Case Against Anthony Fauci," The Drift, Jan 24, 2021— "David Leonhardt: The Pandemic Interpreter," NYMag, Feb 24, 2022.Jacqueline Rose, "To Die One's Own Death," LRB, Nov 19, 2020.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author's defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular.Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the many puzzles of the Alice books. They discuss the way Carroll illuminates other questions raised in this series: of dream states, the nature of consciousness, the transformative power of language and the arbitrariness of authority.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/applecrffIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsffFurther reading in the LRB:Marina Warner: You Must Not Askhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n01/marina-warner/you-must-not-askDinah Birch: Never Seen A Violethttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n17/dinah-birch/never-seen-a-violetMarina Warner: Doubly Damnedhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n03/marina-warner/doubly-damnedGet the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklistNext episode: The stories of Franz Kafka, with Adam Thirlwell.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.

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemyThis month marked five years since the formal start of the pandemic in the United States in March 2020, when the federal government declared the arrival and spread of the novel coronavirus to be a national emergency. The official Covid death toll in the United States now stands at over 1.2 million; globally it surpasses 20 million people. Tens of millions of others were hospitalized, and many who survived infection are facing long Covid or related health complications. Our lives were upended, whether by sheltering-in-place, working from home, and barely leaving our home or apartment, or, for others, by endangering themselves by continuing to show up to work in hospitals, making deliveries, or staffing essential businesses. And yet, as David Wallace-Wells recently argued in the New York Times, "We tell ourselves we've moved on and hardly talk about the disease or all the people who died or the way the trauma and tumult have transformed us. But Covid changed everything around us."We wanted to have a conversation with David about that reality: why, collectively, we resist acknowledging what Covid really cost us, and the ways it continues to shape our lives. The discussion begins by revisiting the first weeks and months of the pandemic, the fear we felt, and the remarkable displays of solidarity that occurred in blue states as well as red states. From there we explore the different "phases" of the pandemic, how public-health measures became culture-war fodder, the impact of the vaccine on how both the public and elected officials perceived the risks of Covid, the pandemic's profound influence on our politics, the fallout from school closures, the Lab Leak Theory, and more.Listen again: "How to Survive a Pandemic" (w/ Peter Staley), Feb 21, 2021Sources:David Wallace-Wells, "How Covid Remade America," New York Times, Mar 4, 2025— "The Covid Alarmists Were Closer to the Truth Than Anyone Else," New York Times, Feb 26, 2025— "We've Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong," New York Times, Feb 28, 2023— "Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong'," New York Times, April 24, 2023David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (2019)Nicholson Baker, "The Lab-Leak Hypothesis," New York Magazine, Jan 4, 2021Zeynep Tufekci, "We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives," NYTimes, Mar 16, 2025.Sam Adler-Bell, "Doctor Do-Little​: The Case Against Anthony Fauci," The Drift, Jan 24, 2021— "David Leonhardt: The Pandemic Interpreter," NYMag, Feb 24, 2022.Jacqueline Rose, "To Die One's Own Death," LRB, Nov 19, 2020.

‘If ever a book of history was blessed with contemporary relevance, this one is', writes Andrew O'Hagan of Helen Castor's The Eagle and the Hart (Allen Lane). ‘The dumbfounding, delusional, narcissistic King Richard; the white-knuckle ride of Henry IV, dogged all the way by notions of illegitimacy. I feel these men could have been ripped from today's headlines.' Castor, whose 2010 book She-Wolves was adapted for television by the BBC, discussed Richard and Henry with Mary Wellesley, author of Hidden Hands: Lives of Manuscripts and their Makers and co-presenter of the medieval strand of the LRB's Close Readings​ podcast series. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We're back at The Tabernacle in March with another fantastic line-up of speakers! Join us for an inspiring evening of storytelling. Katherine Rundell is a fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford, and a contributing editor at the LRB. Her novels for children have won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children's Book Award, among many others. Her books for adults include Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, and Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

The folk tales collected and rewritten by the Brothers Grimm may ‘seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone', Colin Burrow wrote recently in the LRB, but ‘this is an illusion'. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Colin joins Thomas Jones to talk about the distinctive place and time in which Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm lived and worked, as well as the enduring appeal and ‘vital weirdness' of the tales.Sponsored links:Visit the Munch exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery: https://www.npg.org.uk/munchSee The Years at the Harold Pinter Theatre: https://theyearsplay.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Two recent books, by Peter Beinart and Rachel Shabi, discuss the response of Jewish communities in the West to the Hamas attacks of 7 October and Israel's subsequent destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, and the shifting politics of antisemitism. In this episode Adam Shatz talks to Peter and Rachel about the moral rupture Israel's actions have caused, particularly along generational lines, among Jews in both the US and UK, and why the question of antisemitism has become separated from the larger politics of anti-racism, allowing the political right to claim this moral territory in defence of Israel.Sponsored Link:Visit the Munch exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery: https://www.npg.org.uk/munchLRB AudioDiscover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Italo Calvino's novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo's time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Travels of Marco Polo, and explore how both blur the lines between reality and fantasy, storyteller and audience. They discuss the connections between Calvino's love of fairytales and his anti-fascist politics, and why he saw the fantastic as a mode of truth-telling.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/applecrffIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsffFurther reading in the LRB:Salman Rushdie: Calvinohttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n17/salman-rushdie/calvinoJames Butler: Infinite Artichokehttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n12/james-butler/infinite-artichokeJonathan Coe: Calvinoismhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n06/jonathan-coe/calvinoismNext episode: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.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.

A decade ago, the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall was known as a Lib Dem donor and founder of the Ark academy chain. Now, as the owner of UnHerd, GB News and, since last September, the Spectator, he's a right-wing media tycoon. Peter Geoghegan joins Thomas Jones to discuss Marshall's transformation. He explains the ‘symbiotic relationship' between Marshall and Michael Gove, their shared connection to evangelical Christianity, and the changing shape of conservative politics in Britain.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/marshallpodSponsored links:Use the code ‘LRB' to get £150 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thomas Love Peacock didn't want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk', published in 1831, appears largely like a playscript in which disparate characters assemble for a house party next to the Thames before heading up the river to Wales. Their debates cover, among other things, the Captain Swing riots of 1830, the mass dissemination of knowledge, the emerging philosophy of utilitarianism and the relative merits of medieval and contemporary values.In this extended extract from 'Novel Approaches', a Close Readings series from the LRB, Clare Bucknell is joined by Freya Johnston and Thomas Keymer to discuss where the book came from and its use of ‘sociable argument' to offer up-to-date commentary on the economic and political turmoil of its time.To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrnaIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnaSponsored links: Use the code ‘LRB' to get £150 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrbSee A Knock on the Roof at the Royal Court Theatre: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/a-knock-on-the-roof/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since 1995, at least 51 prisoners aged 21 and under have died in Scottish prisons. These include Katie Allan and William Lindsay, who shared strong support networks and, despite vastly different life experiences, died in alarmingly similar circumstances. Their deaths were deemed preventable in a long-awaited inquiry that identified a ‘catalogue' of failures but led to no prosecutions.Dani Garavelli has been investigating William and Katie's deaths since 2018. She joins Malin to discuss the high rate of suicide in custody and why Scotland's supposedly enlightened approach to youth justice is deeply flawed.Find Dani Garavelli's piece on the episode page: https://lrb.me/deathsincustodypodSponsored links: Use the code ‘LRB' to get £150 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrbSee A Knock on the Roof at the Royal Court Theatre: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/a-knock-on-the-roof/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2015, a vigorous response to climate change seemed possible: even fossil fuel companies talked about transitioning to cleaner energy. But exploration and exploitation of oil and gas reserves have continued unabated, and in 2024, annual temperatures surpassed the 1.5ºC limit set by the Paris Agreement. In a recent piece, Brett Christophers describes the global shift from active policymaking to acceptance and surrender. He joins Tom to discuss the roles of Europe, the US and China in climate change, why solutions like ‘carbon capture' are futile and where there's room for cautious optimism.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/climateovershootpodSponsored links:Use the code ‘LRB' to get £150 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan Swift's 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it's read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not'? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver's Travels as a text in which empiricism and imagination are tightly woven, where fantastical realms are created to give different perspectives on reality and both writer and reader are liberated from having to decide what to think.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/applecrffIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsffFurther reading in the LRB:Terry Eagleton:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n16/terry-eagleton/a-spot-of-firm-governmentClare Bucknell: Oven-Ready Childrenhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n02/clare-bucknell/oven-ready-childrenThomas Keymer: Carry Up your Coffee Boldlyhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n08/thomas-keymer/carry-up-your-coffee-boldlyNext episode: Marco Polo's Il Milione and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.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 Hometown Bluegrass Show – Featuring Sammy Shelor of Lonesome River BandIn this special episode of The Hometown Bluegrass Show, hosts Tim Batts and Josh Williams sit down with one of the greatest banjo players in bluegrass history—Sammy Shelor of the legendary Lonesome River Band. With a career spanning decades, multiple IBMA awards, and an unmistakable style that has influenced generations of pickers, Sammy shares stories from the road, insights into his playing technique, and the legacy of LRB.From his early influences to his time leading one of the most iconic bands in bluegrass, this episode is packed with music, memories, and plenty of laughs. Don't miss this deep dive into the world of bluegrass banjo with one of the best in the business!

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen's 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement' and the transformative power of money.In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen's acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny's moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.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/applecrnaIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsnaClare 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.Next episode: ‘Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock.Further reading from the LRB:John Mullan: Noticing and Not Noticinghttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n22/john-mullan/noticing-and-not-noticingColm Toíbìn: The Importance of Auntshttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n06/colm-toibin/the-importance-of-auntsW.J.T. Mitchell: In the Wildernesshttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v15/n07/w.j.t.-mitchell/in-the-wilderness Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue' whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people's racism'. His presidency left the United States a far more unequal place at home, with a renewed commitment to deadly imperial adventures abroad. Yet he had a gift for making up stories that ‘made America feel good about itself again'. On the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Lears joins Tom to discuss Reagan's life and self-made legend, from his hardscrabble Midwestern boyhood to the White House by way of Hollywood, and to consider the lasting effects of his presidency.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/reaganpodSponsored link:Sign up for The Syllabus: https://the-syllabus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the month since Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was overthrown by a coalition of rebel forces, thousands of political prisoners have been released while many more remain missing, assumed lost to the regime. The most powerful group among the rebels, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has moved to take control of the country while Israel has seized the opportunity to carry out extensive bombing of Syria's military facilities. In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Loubna Mrie and Omar Dahi to discuss these events and consider what the end of fifty years of Ba'athist tyranny means for the Syrian people both at home and in exile.Loubna Mrie is a Syrian activist and writer living in the United States.Omar Dahi is a professor of economics at Hampshire College and a research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.Read more in the LRB:Tom Stevenson: Assad's Fallhttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n24/tom-stevenson/assad-s-fallLRB AudioDiscover audiobooks, Close Readings and more from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiolrbpod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 taken from Yasmine Seale's new translation 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. ‘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/applecrffIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsffFurther reading in the LRB:Marina Warner: Travelling Texthttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/marina-warner/travelling-textSteven Connor: One's Thousand One Nightinesshttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n06/steven-connor/one-s-thousand-one-nightinessesWilliam Gass: A Book at Bedtimehttps://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-oneNEXT EPISODE: ‘Gulliver's Travels' by Jonathan Swift, out on Monday 10 February.Get the book: https://lrb.me/sealenightsffMarina 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.

‘OK, that's that. It's over now,' Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,' as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn's zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the blink.' By the late 1990s, Abba ‘were basically tap water'. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Chal joins Thomas Jones to discuss the foursome's rise to global domination from distinctly Swedish origins, and whether the arc of history bends towards disco.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/abbamaniapodSponsored links:Get a copy of the new edition of Pellegrino Artusi's groundbreaking cookbook from Toronto Univer​​​​​​​sity Press: https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802086570 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/applecrcipIn other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingscipFurther reading in the LRB:Jonathan Rée: Dancing in the Service of Thought https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard1James Butler: Reading Genesis https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard2Roger Poole: A Walk with Kierkegaard https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard3Terry Eagleton: A Long Way from Galilee https://lrb.me/cipkierkegaard4James 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 AUDIOBOOKSDiscover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre:https://lrb.me/audiobookscip Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 AustenCrotchet Castle (1831) by Thomas Love PeacockWuthering Heights (1847) by Emily BrontëVanity Fair (1847) by William Makepeace ThackerayNorth and South (1854) by Elizabeth GaskellAurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett BrowningAnthony Trollope (TBD)Mill on the Floss (1860) by George EliotOur Mutual Friend (1864) by Charles DickensWashington Square (1880)/Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry JamesKidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis StevensonThe Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) by Thomas HardyNew Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.The first four texts:The Thousand and One Nights (Yasmine Seale's translation)Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's TravelsThe 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Neal Ascherson has worked as a journalist for more than six decades, reporting from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, its successor states and elsewhere. He has also written more than a hundred pieces for the London Review of Books, from its seventh issue (in February 1980) to its most recent. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on the journalist Claud Cockburn and about his own life and career, from his time as propaganda secretary for the Uganda National Congress to the moment he witnessed preparations for the kidnapping of Mikhail Gorbachev in Crimea but ‘missed the scoop of a lifetime'.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/aschersonpodListen to Neal Ascherson deliver the 2012 LRB Winter Lecture: https://lrb.me/aschersonwlSubscribe to Close Readings for 2025: https://lrb.me/audioOr give your loved ones a Close Readings subscription: https://lrb.me/audiogifts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

William Davies joins Tom to assess the efforts of the new Labour government in tackling the UK's many economic challenges. They consider whether Rachel Reeves's first budget, with its substantial tax rises, can do anything more than arrest the decline of the public finances, and what Keir Starmer hopes to achieve with his public overtures to the likes of Google and BlackRock. Will their technocratic style of government be able to survive the pressures of populist politics, or is their long-term thinking simply too long-term to bring election-winning improvements to people's everyday lives?Read William Davies's piece: https://lrb.me/davies4622podMore audio from the LRB:Discover the LRB's subscription podcast, Close Readings, and audiobooks here: https://lrb.me/audio Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Meek talks to Tom about his latest report from Ukraine, where he spent time in Kharkiv and Kupiansk in the east of the country. In Kharkiv, he found a population living in fear not only of the Russian glide bombs falling daily on the city, but also of the increasingly ruthless activity of the Ukrainian military recruitment office, desperate to secure fresh troops to resist Russia's advances. James and Tom discuss the current state of the conflict, what a Trump presidency might mean for US policy and whether Ukraine's use of long-range missiles could make any difference to the progress of the war.Read James's latest report from Ukraine:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/james-meek/nobody-wants-to-hear-thisSponsored Link:Get 10% off creative writing courses at NCW Academy in 2025 with code LRB10:https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/academy/More audio from the LRB:Discover the LRB's subscription podcast, Close Readings, and audiobooks here: https://lrb.me/audio Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In her first novel The Last Sane Woman (Verso) poet Hannah Regel investigates the pains and pleasures of artistic practice carried out against the odds. While researching in a small archive dedicated to women's art young graduate Nicola Long happens upon one half of a correspondence, conducted half a century before, written by a recently graduated ceramicist to a friend. As Nicola reads on she becomes obsessed with the parallels between her own life and that of the woman she encounters in the letters.Regel was joined in conversation by LRB contributor and art critic Emily LaBarge.Find more events at the Bookshop: https://lrb.me/eventspodGet the book: https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/the-last-sane-woman-hannah-regel Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Adam Shatz is joined by Jamelle Bouie and Deborah Friedell to pick through the results and implications of Trump's victory. The US has a booming economy of high wages and nearly full employment, yet economic discontent, particularly around inflation, has been one of the more popular explanations for the election result. As well as considering the importance of inflation, Jamelle and Deborah look at what went wrong with the Harris campaign's big bet on abortion rights, why Republican-voting women say they feel safer under Trump and why the Democrats' insistence that democracy was on the ballot failed to resonate with many voters.Read Adam Tooze on the Democrats' defeat in the LRB:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n22/adam-tooze/the-democrats-defeatRead Deborah Friedell on J.D. Vancehttps://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/deborah-friedell/short-cutsDiscover the LRB's subscription podcast, Close Readings, and audiobooks here: https://lrb.me/audio Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On budget day, Tom Johnson joins Malin Hay to discuss the revolution in numeracy and use of numbers in Early Modern England, from the black and white squares of the ‘reckoning cloth' to logarithmic calculating machines, as described in a new book by Jessica Marie Otis. How did the English go from seeing arithmetic as the province of tradespeople and craftsmen to valuing maths as an educational discipline? Tom and Malin consider the importance of the move from Roman to Arabic numerals in this ‘quantitative transformation' and the uses and abuses of statistics in the period.Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/earlymodernmathsSponsored links:Use the code 'LRB' to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrbTo find out about financial support for professional writers visit the Royal Literary Fund here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/Find out more about ACE Cultural Tours: https://aceculturaltours.co.ukDiscover the LRB's subscription podcast, Close Readings, and audiobooks here: https://lrb.me/audio Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the latest issue of the LRB, Jeremy Harding reviews How to Write about Africa, a posthumous collection of essays and stories by Binyavanga Wainaina, one of postcolonial Africa's great anglophone satirists. Jeremy joins Tom to talk about Wainaina's life and work, including the title essay and his ambivalent response to its popularity (‘I went viral,' he later said, ‘I became spam'); his reporting from South Sudan; the ‘lost chapter' from his memoir in which he imagines coming out to his parents; and his account of travelling to Senegal to interview the musician Youssou N'Dour, a piece that Harding describes as both ‘beautifully done' and ‘extremely funny'.Find further reading and external links on the episode page: https://lrb.me/wainainapodSponsored links:Use the code 'LRB' to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrbFind out more about ACE Cultural Tours: https://aceculturaltours.co.ukSee Hansel and Gretel at the Royal Opera House: https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/hansel-and-gretel-details Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his third conversation looking at the crisis in the Middle East, Adam talks to Mohamad Bazzi about Israel's expansion of its war into Lebanon and the recent assassinations of Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah. They discuss the factors behind Israel's unprecedented aggression and why, as in Gaza, it's able to operate without restraint, not least from the Biden administration.Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and a professor of journalism at New York University.Read Adam Shatz on the death of Nasrallah in the latest LRB.https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/adam-shatz/after-nasrallah Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the second of three conversations about the crisis in the Middle East, recorded shortly before the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was reported, Yezid Sayigh talks to Adam Shatz about why he sees Hamas's attack on Israel on 7 October as an inflection point both for the Palestinian movement and global history. Sayigh believes that the attacks reflected an erosion of Palestinian leadership, as well as a moral and strategic crisis. Only a new vision of Palestinian liberation, rooted in progressive ideals rather than in the ethno-religious project of Hamas, he argues, can lead to genuine Palestinian freedom and sovereignty.Yezid Sayigh is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.Read Adam Shatz on the death of Nasrallah in the latest LRB:https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/adam-shatz/after-nasrallah Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘The department store is dying,' Rosemary Hill wrote recently in the LRB, reviewing an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris on the origins of the grands magasins. She joins Tom to talk about their 19th and 20th-century heyday as cathedrals of consumerism as well as places where women could spend time away from home, and away from men, safely and respectably. She also recalls the Christmas she worked in the toy department at Selfridges, demonstrating wind-up bath toys.Sponsored links:Use the code 'LRB' to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrbFind out more about ACE Cultural Tours: https://aceculturaltours.co.ukSee Maddaddam at the Royal Opera House: https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/maddaddam-details Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The final report of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry established that the fire on 14 June 2017, which killed 72 people, was the ‘culmination of decades of failure'. Every death was avoidable, and every death was the result of choices made by corporations, individuals and elected officials. James Butler, who writes about the report and its findings in the current issue of the LRB, joins Tom to discuss the causes and consequences of the fire and whether those responsible will be brought to justice.Read James's piece: https://lrb.me/butlergrenfellSponsored links:Use the code 'LRB' to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrbTo find out about financial support for professional writers visit the Royal Literary Fund here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/Discover the LRB's subscription podcast, Close Readings, and audiobooks here: https://lrb.me/audio Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.