Podcast
The LRB Podcast
Hosted by The London Review of Books · EN
The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas, hosted by Thomas Jones and Malin Hay, and featuring our fortnightly 'On Politics' podcast hosted by James Butler.
From the LRB
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67episodes
Episodes
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On Politics: The US at 250
3d ago01:08:20Tap to summarizeWould the Founding Fathers recognise the modern United States as the republic they declared in 1776? The nation formed from Britain’s North American colonies has become the most powerful and prosperous in the world, but the muted celebrations on 4 July reflected a divided country in which, for many of its citizens, the principles of the Declaration of Independence are hard to square with what’s happened to its democratic institutions. James is joined by Gary Gerstle, a professor of history at Cambridge, to reflect on some of the major changes in the political evolution of the United States, including the expansion of federal power in the 20th century, the perpetual state of war since 1941 and the voluntary ceding of influence by Congress to the executive under Trump. They also look at the past and future of the US ‘special relationship’ with the UK and what could come next for American democracy following this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential election. Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpoliticsFrom the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →Poetry and the Turning World: Money
4d ago01:30:32Tap to summarizeIn the sixth episode of their series, Sarah and Sandeep look at poems that explore the complexities of money and its metaphorical power: Frederick Seidel’s ‘In Late December’ starts with an image of degradation in the symbolic heart of global capitalism but ends with an ambiguous vision of the undead in an apparent appeal to common humanity; in Ella Fears’s Goodlord, an email from an estate agent triggers a stream-of-consciousness tour through a series of barely-habitable rental properties and a reflection on a financial system that traps people in dehumanising accommodation; and Danez Smith’s ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ provides a satirical exploration of the relationship between race, poverty and systemic exploitation, describing a compressed history of the evolution of oppression from slavery to sharecropping to the modern exploitations of capitalism. Read Frederick Seidel's 'In Late December' in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n24/frederick-seidel/in-late-december Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Among the Private Spies
1w ago00:38:29Tap to summarizeThe Trump-Russia dossier, leaked to the press in 2017, contained multiple allegations of collusion between the US president and Putin, including reports of meetings between Kremlin officials and members of Trump’s campaign team, and the existence of kompromat in the form of the infamous ‘pee tape’. Shortly after the dossier was leaked, Christopher Steele, the head of a private business intelligence firm called Orbis, was named as its author. Steele claimed that his company had access to sources which allowed them to ‘illuminate Vladimir Putin’s autocratic and closed regime’. In a review of Steele’s memoir in the LRB, Vadim Nikitin called the dossier ‘shoddy’ and ‘full of uncorroborated and implausible’ material. None of its claims have been proven. In this episode, Vadim joins Thomas Jones to discuss the legacy of the dossier, Steele’s career before and after its release and how the internal workings of the business intelligence industry are influencing politics in both the US and the UK. Archive: ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’/MSNBC ‘Russian oligarch met with Cohen at Trump tower’/CNN ‘This House Prefers Style Over Substance’/Cambridge Union ‘Special Report: Mueller report release’/CBS News ‘Your World’/Fox News ‘Times Radio Breakfast’/Times News More from the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →Poetry and the Turning World: Food
2w ago01:23:29Tap to summarizeThe most popular modern food poem is probably William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’, in which the speaker confesses to eating the plums his wife was saving for breakfast. Food has often been a means for poetry to represent intimate relationships, but, as Sarah and Sandeep explore in this episode, it has also provided ways of thinking about alienation, societal change, survival and displacement. In Tony Harrison’s 'V.', supermarkets and food providers become central motifs in a discussion of Britain’s changing landscapes; Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart uses the memory of a grandfather planting yogurt under a tree as a means of understanding the aftermath of Partition; and in Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s ‘Communion’, set in the Beddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, lentils become part of a living archive through which experiences are transmitted across generations. Read Tony Harrison's 'V.' in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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On Politics: The Andy Burnham Show
2w ago01:07:31Tap to summarizeAndy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak economy. To dissect the collapse of the Starmer project and the prospects for a Burnham administration, James is joined by Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator for the Times, and William Davies, a political economist at Goldsmiths. Patrick Maguire is the author of 'Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer',. William Davies is a regular contributor to the LRB and the author of 'This is Not Normal: The collapse of liberal Britain' among other books. Read William Davies on Burnham: https://lrb.me/opburnham01 From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →Poetry and the Turning World: Weather
3w ago01:14:35Tap to summarizeIn Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between internal and external experiences. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep look at the ways in which weather has functioned as a poetic tool, and consider three recent poems which describe the intimate and communal effects of atmospheric events: Maureen McLane's ‘Rocks’, with its ‘rain/when I’d just told her it would hold off’; ‘Surface Mapping’ by Jake Skeets, describing the death of 191 horses on Navajo land during a drought; and Ishion Hutchinson's ‘After the Hurricane’, in which the silence after a violent storm becomes a space to assess different forms of aftermath. Read Maureen McLane's 'Rocks' in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n01/maureen-n.-mclane/rocks Book tickets to a live recording of this series: https://lrb.me/ptwtickets Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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World Cup Cupidity
3w ago00:51:10Tap to summarize‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is that a nostalgic illusion? The second competition, held in Italy in 1934, was a podium for Mussolini and, as Skinner puts it, ‘an early advertisement of the tournament’s potential service to politically repressive hosts’ that has continued through the years to Russia 2018, Qatar 2022 and the ‘Fifa-MAGA pageant’ of 2026. In this episode Simon Skinner and Natasha Chahal join Tom to talk about the long relationship between football and politics and why Roberto Baggio can offer us no consolation. Read more: Simon Skinner: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod1 Natasha Chahal: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod4 John Lanchester on Qatar: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod2 Thomas Jones on Maradonna: https://lrb.me/worldcuppod3 More from the LRB: Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce
4w ago01:18:05Tap to summarizePoets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material for poetry, starting with a look at Milton’s prose arguments in favour of divorce and the ways in which ‘confessional’ poets such as Lowell and Sexton took on divorce as a subject alongside other taboo subjects and subverted the traditional poetry of romantic failure. They then turn to three more recent examples. In Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’, a picture of a marriage is constructed through defamiliarised domestic objects and the political metaphors of postwar Germany. Anne Carson’s ‘fictional essay’ The Beauty of a Husband draws on different genres and the writings of Keats to make sense of a chaotic, lonely experience with an untruthful husband. And in ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi chooses the palindromic form of the ‘specular’ as a metaphor for the non-linear collapse of a marriage. Read Hans Magnus Enzensberger's ‘The Divorce’ in the LRB: https://lrb.me/divorcepoem Further listening: Seamus Perry and Mark Ford on Lowell and Carson: https://lrb.me/ldptwpod Get 25% off a 12-month subscription to Close Readings with the code ’POETRY25’ at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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On Politics: What went wrong with HS2 (and almost everything else)
Jun 1701:04:02Tap to summarizeHS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projected cost of more than £100 billion, and perhaps won’t even be ‘high speed’. To discuss what this failure tells us about Britain’s capacity to build things and the consequences for our everyday lives, James is joined by Gill Plimmer, the FT's infrastructure correspondent, and Matthew Lawrence, director of Common Wealth. They discuss the unique features of the UK’s ‘outsourcing state’, beset by bloated projects weighed down by the increasing costs of private capital, and the long, corrosive impact of the failure of David Cameron’s government to invest in infrastructure when borrowing was cheap. Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics From the LRB Subscribe to the LRB: https://lrb.me/subslrbpod Close Readings podcast: https://lrb.me/crlrbpod LRB Audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiobookslrbpod Bags, binders and more at the LRB Store: https://lrb.me/storelrbpod Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcribe →Poetry and the Turning World: Technology
Jun 1401:30:30Tap to summarizeWhen Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar consider what happens when poetry, and poets, meet technology, and why a poem itself can, in Paul Valéry’s description, be such a powerful ‘kind of machine’. They explore ambivalent attitudes to technology in three poems: Mina Loy’s ‘Time Bomb’ is a reflection on the extreme destruction of the atomic bomb and the power of scientific discovery; Lavinia Greenlaw’s ‘A World Where News Travelled Slowly’ charts a history of technology that involves the gradual removal of the human body from methods of communication; and in Jorie Graham’s ‘Honeycomb’, fragments of technology reveal a divided self sitting at a desk in front of a computer, seen but not known by multiple tools of surveillance. Read Jorie Graham's poem in the LRB here: https://lrb.me/ptwgraham Mina Loy's 'Time Bomb' is published in 'The Lost Lunar Baedeker' (Carcanet, 1997, edited by Roger L Conover) For more discussions like this try the LRB's Close Readings podcast, which covers literature from Ancient Greece to the present day. Get 25% off a 12-month subscription with the code 'POETRY25' at checkout here: https://lrb.me/crpoetry Book tickets for the live recording on 8 July: https://lrb.me/poetrytickets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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