In the final episode of their series, Colin and Clare arrive at Muriel Spark, who would never have considered herself a satirist though her writing was as bitingly satirical as any 20th-century novelist's. A Far Cry from Kensington has a deceptively simple plot: Agnes Hawkins, working for a publisher in London in the 1950s, insults Hector Bartlett, a would-be author, by calling him a ‘pisseur de copie’. Bartlett seeks revenge with the help of Hawkins’s fellow lodger, Wanda, with tragic results. Yet the true plot of any Spark novel is difficult to pin down, not least when the word ‘plot’ is deployed so frequently by her characters to imply conspiracy and misinformation. Colin and Clare discuss Spark’s kaleidoscopic view of reality and the ways in which both Catholicism and Calvinism play through her work.

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://apple.co/4dbjbjG

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Read more in the LRB:

Jenny Turner:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n15/jenny-turner/she-who-can-do-no-wrong

Frank Kermode:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n17/frank-kermode/mistress-of-disappearances

Susan Eilenberg:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v27/n24/susan-eilenberg/complacent-bounty

James Wood:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n17/james-wood/can-this-be-what-happened-to-lord-lucan-after-the-night-of-7-november-1974

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As an undergraduate, Seamus Heaney visited Station Island several times, an ancient pilgrimage site traditionally associated with St Patrick and purgatory. Decades later, Heaney worked through competing calls for political engagement and his long-lapsed Catholicism in ‘Station Island’, a poem he described as an ‘exorcism’.

A dreamlike reworking of Dante’s Purgatorio, ‘Station Island’ describes Heaney’s encounters with the ghosts of childhood acquaintances, literary heroes and victims of the Troubles. Seamus and Mark explore Heaney’s unusually autobiographical poem, which wrestles with the inescapability of politics.

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://apple.co/4dbjbjG

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings 

Further reading in the LRB:

Paul Muldoon: Sweaney Peregraine

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n20/paul-muldoon/sweaney-peregraine

Seamus Perry: We Did and We Didn’t

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n09/seamus-perry/we-did-and-we-didn-t

John Kerrigan: Hand and Foot

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n11/john-kerrigan/hand-and-foot

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Apuleius’ ‘Metamorphoses’, better known as ‘The Golden Ass’, is the only ancient Roman novel to have survived in its entirety. Following the story of Lucius, forced to suffer as a donkey until the goddess Isis intervenes, the novel includes frenetic wordplay, filthy humour and the earliest known version of the Psyche and Cupid myth. In this episode, Tom and Emily discuss Apuleius’ anarchic mix of the high and low brow, and his incisive depiction of the lives of impoverished and enslaved people.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading in the LRB:

Peter Parsons: Ancient Greek Romances

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n15/peter-parsons/ancient-greek-romances

Leofranc Holford-Strevens: God’s Will

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n10/leofranc-holford-strevens/god-s-will

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If you’re looking for advice on sustaining a marriage, or robbing a grave, or performing liver surgery, then a series of self-help stories by a 14th-century Spanish prince is a good place to start. Tales of Count Lucanor, written between 1328 and 1335 by Prince Juan Manuel of Villena, is one of the earliest works of Castilian prose. The tales follow the familiar shape of many medieval stories, presented as a kind of medicine to improve the lives of its readers by example. Yet in his preface Manuel makes an unusual assertion about the individuality of all people, a philosophy that, as Mary and Irina discuss in this episode, leads to bizarre and opaque moral messages intended more to make the reader think for themselves than reach a universal conclusion.

Find a translation of the Tales here: https://elfinspell.com/CountLucanor1.html

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:

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

Get in touch: [email protected]

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In 'Black Music', a collection of essays, liner notes and interviews from 1959 to 1967, Amiri Baraka captures the ferment, energy and excitement of the avant-garde jazz scene. Published while he still went by LeRoi Jones, it provides a composite picture of Baraka’s evolving thought, aesthetic values and literary experimentation. In this episode, Brent and Adam discuss the ways in which Baraka tackled the challenge of writing about music and his intimate connections to the major players in jazz. Whether you’re familiar with the music or totally new to the New Thing, 'Black Music' is an essential guide to a period of political and artistic upheaval.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Subscribe to Close Readings:

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

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.

Get in touch: [email protected]

Further reading in the LRB:

Adam Shatz: The Freedom Principle

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/may/the-freedom-principle

Adam Shatz: On Ornette Coleman

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n14/adam-shatz/diary

Philip Clark: On Cecil Taylor

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/april/cecil-taylor-1929-2018

Ian Penman: Birditis

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n02/ian-penman/birditis

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In 1946 Evelyn Waugh declared that 20th-century society – ‘the century of the common man’, as he put it – was so degenerate that satire was no longer possible. But before reaching that conclusion he had written several novels taking aim at his ‘crazy, sterile generation’ with a sparkling, acerbic and increasingly reactionary wit. In this episode, Colin and Clare look at A Handful of Dust (1934), a disturbingly modernist satire divorced from modernist ideas. They discuss the ways in which Waugh was a disciple of Oscar Wilde, with his belief in the artist as an agent of cultural change, and why he’s at his best when describing the fevered dream of a dying civilisation.

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://apple.co/4dbjbjG

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading in the LRB:

Seamus Perry:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n16/seamus-perry/isn-t-london-hell

John Bayley:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v16/n20/john-bayley/mr-toad

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Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism. Mark and Seamus discuss why, despite Wordsworth’s claim of being innately republican, discussion of the intellectual underpinnings of the revolution is strangely absent from the poem, which is more often preoccupied with romance and the imagination, particularly in their power to soften zealotry.

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://apple.co/4dbjbjG

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading in the LRB:

Seamus Perry:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n24/seamus-perry/regrets-vexations-lassitudes

E.P. Thompson

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n22/e.p.-thompson/wordsworth-s-crisis

Colin Burrow:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n13/colin-burrow/a-solemn-and-unsexual-man

Marilyn Butler

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n12/marilyn-butler/three-feet-on-the-ground

Thomas Keymer

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n12/thomas-keymer/after-meditation

Get in touch: [email protected]

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In this episode, we tackle Juvenal, whose sixteen satires influenced libertines, neoclassicists and early Christian moralists alike. Conservative to a fault, Juvenal’s Satires rails against the rapid expansion and transformation of Roman society in the early principate. But where his contemporary Tacitus handled the same material with restraint, Juvenal’s work explodes with vivid and vicious depictions of urban life, including immigration, sexual mores and eating habits. Emily and Tom explore the idiosyncrasies of Juvenal’s verse and its handling in Peter Green’s translation, and how best to parse his over-the-top hostility to everyone and everything.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:

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

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Further reading in the LRB:

Remembering Peter Green

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/september/peter-green-1924-2024

Claude Rawson: Blistering Attacks

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n21/claude-rawson/blistering-attacks

Clare Bucknell & Colin Burrow: What is satire?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/on-satire-what-is-satire

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Mary and Irina resume their discussion of Boccaccio’s Decameron, focusing on three stories of female agency, deception and desire. Alibech, an aspiring hermitess, is tricked into indulging her powerful sexual urges; Petronella combines business and pleasure at the expense of her husband and lover; while Lydia demonstrates her devotion by killing hawks and pulling teeth. As Mary and Irina discuss, these stories exemplify the ambiguous depiction of women in the Decameron, where the world is powered by rapacious female lusts, sex has no consequences and conventional morality is suspended.

Read more on the Decameron in the LRB: https://lrb.me/decameronpod

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:

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Brent Hayes Edwards talks to Adam about Aimé Césaire's 1950 essay Discourse on Colonialism, a groundbreaking work of 20th-century anti-colonial thought and a precursor to the writings of Césaire's protégé, Frantz Fanon. Césaire was Martinique’s most influential poet and one of its most prominent politicians as a deputy in the French National Assembly, and his Discourse is addressed directly at his country’s colonisers. Adam and Brent consider Césaire’s poetry alongside his political arguments and the particular characteristics of his version of négritude, the far-reaching movement of black consciousness he founded with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas.

Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

Subscribe to Close Readings:

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

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Brent Hayes Edwards is a scholar of African American and Francophone literature and of jazz studies at Columbia University.

Get in touch: [email protected]

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By the end of 1895 Oscar Wilde’s life was in ruins as he sat in Reading Gaol facing public disgrace, bankruptcy and, two years later, exile. Just ten months earlier the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest at St James’s Theatre in London had been greeted rapturously by both the audience and critics. In this episode Colin and Clare consider what Wilde was trying do with his comedy, written on the cusp of this dark future. The ‘strange mixture of romance and finance’ Wilde observed in the letters of his lover, Alfred Douglas, could equally be applied to Earnest, and the satire of Jane Austen before it, but is it right to think of Wilde’s play as satirical? His characters are presented in an ethical vacuum, stripped of any good or bad qualities, but ultimately seem to demonstrate the impossibility of living a purely aesthetic life free from conventional morality.

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://apple.co/4dbjbjG

In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Read more in the LRB:

Colm Tóibín on Wilde's letters: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n08/colm-toibin/love-in-a-dark-time

Colm Tóibín the Wilde family: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n23/colm-toibin/the-road-to-reading-gaol

Frank Kermode: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n19/frank-kermode/a-little-of-this-honey

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