The 3 Best The LRB Podcast Episodes
1) How do you change things?
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor talks to Adam Shatz about the intellectual and historical background to the Black Lives Matter movement, and why she’s optimistic that the current protests might bring change.F...Show More
2) James Wood: These Etonians
James Wood recalls his time at the college, with David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and others.Read more by James Wood in the LRB: https://lrb.me/jameswoodpodSubscribe to the LRB from just ...Show More
3) Picasso’s Guernica Revisited
In his 2011 Winter Lecture at the British Museum, T.J. Clark shows how the painting of Guernica in May and June 1937 changed the way Picasso imagined space. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for ...Show More
4) What Don Quixote Knew
In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first e...Show More
5) What Dickens taught Mariah Carey
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens w...Show More
6) Is ‘Wuthering Heights’ amoral?
Emily Brontë died on the 19 December 1848. As Patricia Lockwood said in an episode of Close Readings, there is evidence that Brontë was writing a second novel to follow ‘Wuthering Heights’, but if she...Show More
7) Who owns Judy Garland?
For a century, Judy Garland’s joyous and vulnerable singing voice has captivated audiences at the theatre, over the airwaves and in the cinema. Camille Paglia wrote of her that she ‘became an emblemat...Show More
8) On Politics: Inside Britain’s Asylum System
The politics of migration have driven some of the most consequential changes in Britain’s recent history and look set to dominate the next general election. Since the end of Rishi Sunak’s government, ...Show More
9) The Life and Death of a Photographer in Gaza
Fatma Hassona was a Palestinian photographer from Gaza City who was killed with her family by an Israeli airstrike in April 2025. A year earlier, the Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi began recording vi...Show More
10) Next Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London
We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests ‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfr...Show More