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.

  • 38 minutes 1 second
    Saving Masud Khan

    Wynne Godley was by turns a professional oboist, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, an economist at the Treasury and a director of the Royal Opera House. Yet at thirty he found himself ‘living through an artificial self’ and turned to psychoanalysis for help.


    Masud Khan was a protégé of D.W. Winnicott and the darling of British psychoanalysis. He was also much else besides. In this unforgettable piece from 2001, Godley describes his baffling and disastrous sessions with Khan.


    Read by Duncan Wilkins.


    Find the original piece and further reading at the episode page: https://lrb.me/godleypod

    Give your loved one a Close Readings subscription or audiobook for Christmas: https://lrb.me/audiogifts


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    18 December 2024, 12:00 pm
  • 1 hour 25 minutes
    Gaza, Before and After

    Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the experiences of Gazans during Israel’s subsequent – and ongoing – devastation of the territory.


    More in the LRB:


    Adam Shatz: Israel's Descent

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


    Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza

    Also available to watch: https://youtu.be/_w3Pe00I_Ro


    Audio Gifts from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiogifts


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    13 December 2024, 4:22 pm
  • 42 minutes 14 seconds
    On Lisa Marie Presley

    As Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley was burdened from birth with extraordinary, largely unwanted fame. Before her death in 2023, she spent years as tabloid fodder, less for her sporadic music career than for her highly publicised relationships with Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and Scientology.


    In a recent review of her posthumous memoir, Jessica Olin celebrates Lisa Marie’s resilience and charisma in the face of ruthless publicity. Jessica joins Tom to discuss Lisa Marie’s ambivalent relationship with fame, and how a new generation are encountering the Presley family saga through her daughter, Riley Keough.


    Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/lisamariepod


    Sponsored Links:


    Find out more about ACE Cultural Tours: https://aceculturaltours.co.uk


    To learn more about financial support for professional writers, visit the Royal Literary Fund here: https://www.rlf.org.uk/


    Audio Gifts from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiogifts


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    4 December 2024, 12:00 pm
  • 53 minutes 19 seconds
    Labour's Economic Conundrum

    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/davies4622pod


    Audio Gifts from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiogifts


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    27 November 2024, 1:01 pm
  • 57 minutes 29 seconds
    Endgame in Ukraine

    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-this


    Sponsored Link:

    Get 10% off creative writing courses at NCW Academy in 2025 with code LRB10:

    https://nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk/academy/


    Audio Gifts from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiogifts


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    20 November 2024, 10:54 am
  • 53 minutes 20 seconds
    The Trump Takeover

    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-defeat


    Read Deborah Friedell on J.D. Vance

    https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n20/deborah-friedell/short-cuts


    Audio Gifts from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiogifts


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    14 November 2024, 4:34 pm
  • 52 minutes 19 seconds
    The Mendel Inheritance

    When Gregor Mendel published the results of his experiments on pea plants in 1866 he initiated a fierce debate about the nature of heredity and genetic determinism that continues today. The battle lines were drawn in England in the late 19th century by William Bateson, who believed in fixed genetic inheritance, and W.F.R. Weldon, who argued that Mendel’s experiments revealed far more variation than Bateson and his supporters acknowledged. In this episode Lorraine Daston joins Tom to chart the development of these arguments, described in a new book by Gregory Radick, through scientific and cultural discourse over the past 150 years, and consider why the history of science has a tendency to track such controversies in antagonistic terms, often to the detriment of the science itself.

    Read Lorraine's piece: https://lrb.me/dastonpod


    Sponsored links:

    Use the code ’LRB’ to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb


    Close Readings

    Sing up to the LRB's Close Readings podcast:

    Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq

    In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/crpod


    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    6 November 2024, 1:43 pm
  • 36 minutes 42 seconds
    Early Modern Maths

    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/earlymodernmaths


    Sponsored links:


    Use the code ’LRB’ to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb

    To 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.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.

    30 October 2024, 3:49 pm
  • 44 minutes 9 seconds
    On Binyavanga Wainaina

    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/wainainapod


    Sponsored links:

    Use the code ’LRB’ to get £100 off Serious Readers lights here: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb

    Find out more about ACE Cultural Tours: https://aceculturaltours.co.uk

    See 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.

    23 October 2024, 3:37 pm
  • 47 minutes 36 seconds
    A New War in Lebanon

    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.

    18 October 2024, 3:02 pm
  • 36 minutes 51 seconds
    The End of Hamas?

    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.

    17 October 2024, 4:43 pm
  • More Episodes? Get the App
© MoonFM 2024. All rights reserved.