The LRB Podcast
London Review of Books
Weekly conversations, and occasional readings, from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas, hosted by Thomas Jones and Malin Hay, with guest hosts Adam Shatz, Meehan Crist and more.
- 1 hour 10 minutesOn Politics: Iran and the Oil Crisis
Trump’s war on Iran has highlighted recent dramatic changes in the politics of oil. While the United States still guarantees maritime security in the Middle East, it is no longer the primary beneficiary, with most oil and gas exports from the Persian Gulf going to Asia. In Britain, meanwhile, debates over drilling in the North Sea point to the urgent need for electrification, both to achieve greater energy security and to reach net zero by 2050.
In this episode, James is joined by Helen Thompson, a professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge, who argues that the war, though far from inevitable, stems in part from regional and international tensions caused by the shifting of energy flows. They discuss the central role that finance, and insurance in particular, plays in deciding whether tankers can sail, and how energy requirements helped Trump to secure the backing of major US corporations in the 2024 presidential election.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
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3 April 2026, 5:00 am - 56 minutes 21 secondsInsulin Wars
Diabetes has been recognised as a fatal condition for thousands of years: its symptoms are described in ancient Chinese, Sanskrit and Greek texts. But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that its cause began to be understood, as scientists conducted experiments on dogs. It was a pair of researchers at the University of Toronto in the early 1920s who – through a gruelling series of experiments that would not pass an ethics review today – eventually isolated the hormone that patients with diabetes are lacking.
On this episode, Liam Shaw, who reviewed the latest edition of Michael Bliss’s classic book The Discovery of Insulin in a recent issue of the LRB, joins Thomas Jones to discuss the history of diabetes treatments from insulin to Ozempic, the all-too-human scientists who discovered them and the companies that profit from them.
Read Liam’s piece: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n06/liam-shaw/bring-me-bimagrumab
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1 April 2026, 6:00 am - 1 hour 11 minutesOn Politics: Why you can’t change someone’s mind
Something has gone wrong in the way we discuss politics. If democratic systems since the Athenian polity have been founded on debate, then what does debate do for us today, aside from making us angrier and filling billionaire-owned social media sites with monetisable content? Sarah Stein Lubrano has argued that the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is a myth and the best ideas often don’t win out. In this episode she joins James Butler to talk about the things that do and don’t change people’s minds and why meaningful change is better achieved through means other than argument, such as social ties and collective action. They also consider what technology has done to shape the political landscape and individual behaviour, and the ways in which it has been exploited most effectively by those on the right.
Sarah Stein Lubrano is the author of Don’t Talk About Politics.Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
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25 March 2026, 6:00 am - 56 minutes 25 secondsOrdinary Abuse
‘I hadn’t wanted to have sex with the prince,’ Virginia Giuffre said, ‘but I felt I had to.’ Reviewing Giuffre’s memoir, Nobody’s Girl, in the LRB, Andrew O’Hagan writes: ‘All the pomp, tradition, ceremony and “loyalty” in the world can’t wash away the simple facts. Ghislaine Maxwell took this young girl to Jeffrey Epstein, who abused her a number of times, then they flew her around the world to be abused by their powerful friends.’
In the same issue, Susan Pedersen observes that ‘the scandal lays bare the entitlement felt and impunity enjoyed by the powerful and crass,’ while pointing out that ‘a girl doesn’t have to fall into Epstein’s clutches to see sexual abuse up close.’
On this episode of the podcast, Susan and Andrew join Thomas Jones to discuss whether the Epstein scandal has anything new to tell us about sexual abuse.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/ordinaryabuse
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18 March 2026, 3:00 pm - 1 hour 11 minutesOn Politics: Keir Starmer’s Mess
Less than two years after winning a huge majority, even many of Keir Starmer’s own MPs think he’s doomed. But is he? Despite a historic loss to the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election last month, the prime minister has managed to cling on, for now. His critics point to a lack of vision in government, the alienation of Labour members and a failure to accept the need for radical reform. Those less critical argue it’s simply a problem with communicating his achievements, and that Britain is pretty much ungovernable anyway.
James Butler is joined by Sienna Rodgers, deputy editor at the House magazine, and Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural and political theory at the University of East London, to consider the reasons for Starmer’s mess, from the selection of his MPs to the ‘iron law of oligarchy’. And if he’s not prime minister at the end of the year, who will be?Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
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12 March 2026, 6:00 am - 58 minutes 33 secondsWhat next in Iran?
On 9 March, Donald Trump described the war against Iran as ‘very complete, pretty much’. Later that day, his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, told ABC that the ongoing strikes were ‘just the beginning’.
In this episode, Adam Shatz is joined by Robert Malley and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj to discuss the chaos of Trump’s Iran strategy, whether the United States and Israel are aligned in their objectives for the region, and what Iran’s future might look like if Trump decides to bring the conflict to an end in the near term. They also examine how the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new leader of the Islamic Republic could shape the course of the war, and whether Iran will be able to sustain its current military strategy.
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11 March 2026, 6:00 am - 43 minutes 56 secondsCaravaggio’s Bodies
In the 1590s, Caravaggio was one of ‘the swaggering, violent young men who terrorised Romans’, Erin Maglaque wrote recently in the LRB, and he ‘made his name by painting this violent, chaotic world’.
On this episode, Erin joins Thomas Jones to discuss the ways that Caravaggio represented his models' bodies on canvas – their muscles, skin, hair, clothing and dirty toenails – and what makes his paintings so unnerving that even the people who commissioned them sometimes got rid of them as soon as they could.
Find the article and further reading and listening on the episode page: https://lrb.me/caravaggiopod
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4 March 2026, 6:00 am - 1 hour 5 minutesOn Politics: The Rearmament Consensus
‘We must build our hard power because that is the currency of the age,’ Keir Starmer declared to the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. It’s a sentiment shared across Europe, where leaders have cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rise of Chinese power and US instability to justify substantially increased defence spending. But the rearmament consensus has so far not been accompanied by much detail on where the money needs to go or what accountability there will be for the use of this ‘hard power’.
To discuss the origins and implications of Europe's militarisation, James is joined by Sam Jones, European security correspondent at the Financial Times, and Anna Stavrianakis, professor of international relations at the University of Sussex.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
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25 February 2026, 6:00 am - 45 minutes 3 secondsEarly Modern News
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. For a horse and rider, that was just under fifteen kilometres per hour. Yet postal systems, as pioneered by the enterprising Tassis family, were becoming ever more reliable and efficient, at first in northern Italy and then across much of Europe – despite plague, war and the efforts of bandits and spies to intercept the mail.
If the post was highly organised, news spread more organically, whether in the form of manuscript newsletters, printed pamphlets or word of mouth, at the local barbershop, from a ballad singer on a street corner, on the Rialto bridge in Venice or in the nave of St Paul's Cathedral in London.
On this episode of the LRB podcast, John joins Thomas Jones to discuss how information (and disinformation) circulated in early modern Europe, and whether our predecessors were any better than we are at sifting fake news from fact.
Read John Gallagher’s piece: https://lrb.me/earlymodernnewspod
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18 February 2026, 6:00 am - 1 hour 6 minutesOn Politics: Mandelson and the Private Life of Power
When Peter Mandelson was a minister in Gordon Brown’s government he passed confidential advice to Jeffrey Epstein, who had recently been convicted of procuring a child for prostitution. This is among the many extraordinary details of Mandelson’s relationship with Epstein revealed by the release of more than three million pages of documents by the US Justice Department last month. In this episode, James is joined by investigative journalists Peter Geoghegan and Ethan Shone to discuss what Mandelson’s actions reveal about the vast influence network maintained by Epstein and the ways in which the increasing power of the lobbying and advisory industries are undermining democratic legitimacy.
Peter Geoghegan is the author of 'Democracy for Sale' and Ethan Shone is an investigations reporter for openDemocracy.
Read more on politics in the LRB: https://lrb.me/lrbpolitics
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11 February 2026, 6:00 am - 50 minutes 44 secondsJessica Mitford’s Handbag
When Jessica Mitford (aka Decca) was eleven, in 1928, she opened a Running Away Account at Drummonds Bank. A few years later she ran away to Spain to help in the fight against Franco, and not long after that moved to the US where she became a naturalised citizen and joined the Communist Party.
The Mitford sisters wrote many books and even more have been written about them, but Carla Kaplan's scholarly new biography of Jessica is a welcome addition to the ‘Mitford industry’, according to Rosemary Hill, because she approaches her subject as an ‘American communist with an unusual background in the English aristocracy’.
In this episode, Rosemary joins Thomas Jones to talk about Decca’s eventful life, her work as a civil rights activist and writer, and her complicated relationships with the other Mitfords. When asked whether the bond with her sisters had ‘stood between her and life’s cruel circumstances’, Decca replied: ‘Sisters were life’s cruel circumstances.’
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/mitfordpod
Listen and subscribe to Rosemary Hill’s Close Readings series:
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