The LRB Podcast

As Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley was burdened from birth with extraordinary, largely unwanted fame. Before her death in 2023, she spent years as tabloid fodder, less for her sporadic music career than for her highly publicised relationships with Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and Scientology. Jessica joins Tom to discuss Lisa Marie’s ambivalent relationship with fame, and how a new generation are encountering the Presley family saga through her daughter, Riley Keough.

William Davies joins Tom to assess the efforts of the UK’s new Labour government in tackling the country’s many economic challenges.

James Meek talks to Tom about his latest report from Ukraine. They discuss the current state of the conflict, what a Trump presidency might mean for US policy and whether Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles could make any difference to the progress of the war.

Adam Shatz is joined by Jamelle Bouie and Deborah Friedell to pick through the results and implications of Trump’s victory.

When Gregor Mendel published the results of his experiments on pea plants in 1866 he initiated a fierce debate about the nature of heredity and genetic determinism that continues today. In this episode Lorraine Daston joins Tom to chart the development of these arguments, described in a new book by Gregory Radick, through scientific and cultural discourse over the past 150 years.

Tom Johnson joins Malin Hay to discuss the revolution in numeracy and use of numbers in Early Modern England. How did the English go from seeing arithmetic as the province of tradespeople and craftsmen to valuing maths as an educational discipline? Tom and Malin consider the importance of the move from Roman to Arabic numerals and the uses and abuses of statistics in the period.

Jeremy Harding joins Tom to discuss How to Write about Africa, a posthumous collection of essays and stories by Binyavanga Wainaina, one of postcolonial Africa’s great anglophone satirists.

In his third conversation looking at the crisis in the Middle East, Adam talks to Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s expansion of its war into Lebanon and the recent assassinations of Yahya Sinwar and Hassan Nasrallah.

In the second of three conversations about the crisis in the Middle East, recorded shortly before the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was reported, Yezid Sayigh talks to Adam Shatz about why he sees Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October as an inflection point both for the Palestinian movement and global history.

In the first of three episodes on the crisis in the Middle East, Adam Shatz is joined by Mairav Zonszein and Amjad Iraqi to discuss the experiences of Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel. 

Rosemary Hill joins Tom to talk about their 19th and 20th-century heyday as cathedrals of consumerism but as places, too, where women could spend time away from home, and away from men, safely and respectably.

James Butler joins Tom to discuss the findings of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, including the causes and consequences of the fire and whether those responsible will be brought to justice.

In November 2022, archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Philadelphia, two hours south of Cairo, discovered a clump of papyri in a shallow grave. On one of them were written nearly a hundred lines from two lost plays by Euripides. Robert Cioffi, who has been working with the same team on a new archaeological mission, joins Tom to discuss the find, the precarious transmission of ancient manuscripts and the time he tried to make papyrus in his kitchen.

Singing, acting, directing, writing: Barbra Streisand always insisted on doing it her way. Malin Hay, who recently reviewed Streisand’s 992-page autobiography, joins Tom to discuss her performances on stage and screen, her prodigious voice and why her best movie may be one where she doesn’t sing at all.

Jane Ellen Harrison was Britain’s first female career academic, a maverick public intellectual labelled ‘the cleverest woman in England’. Her quips and quirks have become legendary, but many of those anecdotes were promulgated by Harrison herself. Mary Beard joins Tom to discuss Harrison’s legacy, the challenges in writing her life and the careful cultivation of her voice.