Podcasts

Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict apparently...

Marina Warner and Adam Thirlwell look at the ways in which two ferocious works of comic horror, by James Hogg and Mikhail Bulgakov, tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or...

As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian, Belle da Costa Greene could ‘spend more money in an afternoon than any other young woman of 26’, as the New York Times put it in 1912, following her successful...

Lieutenant Sethia is accused of a second crime: the theft of HMS Conqueror’s log books. Two journalists and the Serious Crime Squad try to hunt him down. 

Armed with the diary, Tam Dalyell goes on the attack – but the cover-up continues. A second whistle-blower from within the Ministry of Defence is arrested for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

Lieutenant Sethia quits the navy and moves to the Caribbean. He thinks the Falklands War is behind him, but back in the UK, an eccentric, anti-war MP notices a discrepancy in the government’s account...

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen,...

Marina Warner and Adam Thirlwell look at the ways in which two ferocious works of comic horror, by James Hogg and Mikhail Bulgakov, tackle the challenge of representing fanaticism, be it Calvinism or...

Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally...

Lauren Oyler is one of our rowdiest and sharpest literary critics, twice causing the LRB website to crash from too much traffic, and author of the novel Fake Accounts. No Judgement is her first collection...

Fernanda Eberstadt’s Bite Your Friends is both a history of the body as a site of resistance to power, and a subversive memoir, drawing on a cast of outrageous heroes including Diogenes, Saint Perpetua,...

When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is a detective story, memoir and cultural history of Ireland’s...

This week’s Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict.

This week’s Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen...

This week’s episode on the great political fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above...