In a world where communication is only as effective as its ‘truthiness’, numbers are vital to political success. But, as John Lanchester explains, some of the most influential stats in UK politics are ‘pants’. John joins Tom to discuss why GDP, immigration numbers and English Premier League odds are so frequently misleading, and how we can be better attuned to the misuse of data.
Adolfo Kaminsky, a first-class forger while still a teenager, saved thousands of lives as an agent of the French Resistance. ‘Forgery wasn’t just an art he perfected,’ Adam Shatz writes, ‘but a vocation and an ethics.’
As Colm Tóibín explains in a recent piece, Ulysses is pockmarked with errors, only some intentional. Colm joins Tom to discuss Joyce’s deliberate and accidental mistakes, Trieste’s essential influence on the novel, and why a queer reading of Ulysses really does hold water.
‘Octopuses,’ Amia Srinivasan writes, ‘are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.’ In our third summer reading, Srinivasan explores the paradoxical nature of octopus lives, and the difficulties humans have in understanding them.
John Lanchester dissects Agatha Christie’s compulsive readability, and considers why, despite her brazen lack of style, she was a great formalist.
In the first of our summer readings, Terry Castle reads her 2005 piece about her “on-again, off-again, semi-friendship” with Susan Sontag.
Almost eighteen months since Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv residents have resumed something resembling pre-war life. James Meek recently returned to the city, and joins Tom to discuss the new normal.
Irina Dumitrescu joins Tom for a Close Readings fusion episode looking at Chaucer’s classical mind, and in particular his use of Ovid’s Heroides in The Legend of Good Women, in which the poet does penance for his poor depictions of women by retelling the stories of Ariadne, Phaedra, Lucrece and others in a more sympathetic light.
As Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover exercised a dictatorial influence over the department – and, it seems, everyone else. Deborah Friedell joins Tom to discuss some of the most puzzling features of Hoover’s personality and approach to policing.
Patricia Lockwood joins Joanne O'Leary to discuss David Foster Wallace’s work in the light of posthumous publications and the shadow of #MeToo.
The political economist William Davies joins Tom to discuss the UK’s high inflation, what government policies could alleviate the crisis and whether next year’s general election will lead to any significant change.
Amia Srinivasan discusses the UK's recent appointment of a "free speech tsar", whether students are increasingly leaning left and how activists across the political spectrum weaponise the concept of harm.
Rosemary Hill and Jeremy Harte discuss the many groups and stories that have emerged throughout the 20th century to challenge the narratives about Stonehenge presented by archaeologists.
For the third episode in her short series on Stonehenge, Rosemary Hill is joined by Seamus Perry to experience the stone circle through the mind and eyes of a Romantic, with the likes of Wordsworth, Blake, Turner and Constable.
Kevin Okoth and Jeremy Harding join Tom to discuss two recent books reassessing African decolonisation.