Adam Shatz is joined by Joëlle Abi-Rached and Mohamad Bazzi to discuss life on the ground in Lebanon, Israel’s strategic objectives in the region and Hizbullah’s relationship to the the Lebanese state.
Tom Crewe and James Butler join Malin to discuss their two recent pieces in the LRB, on the Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebott and the historian Noel Malcolm’s book Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe.
From their Close Readings series, ‘Conversations in Philosophy’, Jonathan Rée and James Wood consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter.
Helen Thompson joins James to discuss the dramatic changes in the politics of oil revealed by Trump's war on Iran.
Liam Shaw 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.
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 joins James to talk about the things that do and don’t change people’s minds.
Reviewing Virginia Giuffre’s memoir, 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.’ Susan and Andrew join Thomas Jones to discuss whether the Epstein scandal has anything new to tell us about sexual abuse.
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.
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.
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’. 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.
‘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, 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’.
‘Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,’ John Gallagher wrote recently in the LRB. 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.
James is joined by investigative journalists Peter Geoghegan and Ethan Shone to discuss what Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein reveals 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.
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 and joined the Communist Party. Rosemary Hill 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.
Adam Shatz talks to Chowra Makaremi and Amir Ahmadi Arian about the evolution of public dissent in Iran since 1979 and the origins of the latest protests.