Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor talks to Adam Shatz about the intellectual and historical background to the Black Lives Matter movement, and why she’s optimistic that the current protests might bring change.
Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her landmark 1958 play, A Taste of Honey.
John Lanchester talks to Thomas Jones about the author of the Maigret stories, whose output was so prodigious that even he didn't know how many books he wrote.
Sonia Gandhi and Rupert Beale, scientists at the Francis Crick Institute, talk to Thomas Jones about the ways Covid-19 can affect the nervous system, the steps required to reopen the NHS after lockdown, the state of testing, and reasons for optimism about a vaccine.
Andrew O’Hagan talks to Thomas Jones about the friendship between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, and the time they spent together in Bournemouth.
Michael Wood talks to Adam Shatz about critical theory, its origins, developments and various diversions, and where it stands today.
Colm Tóibín talks to Thomas Jones about the breakdown of Elizabeth Hardwick’s marriage to Robert Lowell, and its literary consequences.
Mary Wellesley talks to Joanna Biggs about islands, blessed and not so blessed, from Homer to the Fyre Festival.
Joanna Biggs talks to Thomas Jones about the life of Simone de Beauvoir.
Lana Spawls talks to Thomas Jones about working on a paediatric ward during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the ways hospitals have changed in response to the virus.
Rupert Beale talks again to Thomas Jones about his work at the Francis Crick Institute, where he's helping to develop a testing lab for Covid-19. He talks about the challenges of creating a scalable testing process, explains why an antibody test could be hard to develop, and finds some reasons to be hopeful.
Erin Maglaque talks to Thomas Jones about the lockdown imposed by the city of Florence in January 1631 in response to a plague outbreak, the similarities with our current situation, and the differences.
In the first episode in a new series of Close Readings, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford take on Gerard Manley Hopkins: Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest.
Following his piece for the LRB about Covid-19, Rupert Beale talks to Thomas Jones about what the novel coronavirus is, how well countries are dealing with it, and what hopes there are for stopping the contagion.
Rosemary Hill and Iain Sinclair talk to Sam Kinchin-Smith about London, as part our 40th anniversary event series.