What Dickens taught Mariah Carey
Colin Burrow, Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones, 23 December 2025
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.
Bee Wilson joins Malin Hay to discuss Judy Garland’s years at MGM Studios, where she was mistreated and overworked by her employers but also made some of her best pictures, growing from a contract player...
James is joined by Colin Yeo and Nicola Kelly to explain how Britain's asylum system works and assess the recent changes by the home secretary Shabana Mahmood.
Adam Shatz talks to Sepideh Farsi about the process of making Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, her film about the Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona.
Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet...
Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of fantastic literature. This episode, recorded...
Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s 1927 novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical,...
After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Mary...
‘Follow the money.’ That was George W. Bush’s directive to the US Treasury after 9/11. Choking off al-Qaida’s finances proved complicated — but what happened next went far beyond that. A small...
The events of 9/11 exposed cracks in the US intelligence apparatus. In response, the National Security Agency built the most extensive surveillance system in history.
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq created a dilemma for the Bush administration: what to do with the thousands of detainees captured during the War on Terror. Habeas corpus was suspended, the constitution...
After the Twin Towers fell, Donald Rumsfeld reportedly told President Bush: 'Now we can do Iraq.' The neo-conservatives said it would be easy. But the occupation quickly unravelled, leaving Iraq in chaos.
The Belgrano affair reaches its climax as the stories of Narendra Sethia and Clive Ponting connect. The two whistleblowers appear in court and the diary makes its final journey.
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...
To mark the publication of a new edition of Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, the hosted a discussion of Rose’s masterpiece and its legacy, featuring James Butler, Rebekah Howes and the former Archbishop...
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...
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