The LRB Podcast

In the second episode of her short series looking at why Stonehenge has occupied such an important place in the story of Britain, Rosemary Hill talks to Kate Bennett about the two antiquarians, John Aubrey and William Stukeley, who first treated the stone circle as a material object whose secrets could be revealed through careful measurement and study, and so pioneered many of the practices of modern archaeology.

Following the Turkish president’s success in the run-off election on Sunday, Izzy Finkel and Tom Stevenson join Tom to discuss whether Erdoğan’s victory was ever in doubt.

Rosemary Hill begins a new four-part series looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge over the past few hundred years, and why it’s come to matter so much in the story of Britain. In the first episode she talks to architectural historian Vaughan Hart about how Inigo Jones and John Wood were inspired by the great stone structure.

Rory Scothorne joins Tom to discuss the evolution of Scottish politics over the past century or so, and how best to understand a country that’s shifted from a centre right electoral majority in the 1950s to a Labour stronghold in the 1980s, to being governed by the SNP since 2007. 

Daniel Cohen joins Malin to discuss the history of Spotify, how it’s changed the way music is made and listened to, and the strangeness of streaming culture, rife with ethical dilemmas.

Pankaj Mishra joins Tom to discuss Gautam Adani and Narendra Modi’s intertwined careers, and their shared role in shaping an increasingly ethnonationalist, plutocratic India.

Two worlds collide in this Close Readings fusion episode in which Mary Wellesley talks to Mark Ford about the medieval in Thomas Hardy and the wider Victorian imagination.

In his introduction to our twelfth LRB Collection, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and Andrew O’Hagan, both younger sons in big families. Their conversation considers the examples of the brothers Mann, Yeats, James and Windsor, and why, as Czesław Miłosz observed, when there’s a writer in the family, that family is finished. 

Miranda Carter joins Tom to talk about the life and historical fiction of Mary Renault, whose popular and ingenious retellings of stories from Ancient Greece have never been out of print. They discuss her eventful life, which took her from Edwardian East London to apartheid South Africa, and her meticulous classical reconstructions.

In the run up to the local elections, and following his recent piece on the care crisis, James Butler joins Tom to discuss some of the other problems facing the UK, and what the two major parties are promising to do to alleviate (or exacerbate) them.

Francis Gooding joins Tom to discuss Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber’s posthumously published study of 17th- and 18th-century piracy. Golden Age pirates maintained surprisingly egalitarian working practices, and legendary pirate republics may have been run on similar grounds.

With the future of TikTok increasingly uncertain in the US and other countries, Malin Hay talks to Tom about the app’s powerful reading-focused corner, BookTok: what it is, how it works, and the tropes which dominate its favourite genre, romance fiction.

Expanding on her recent Winter Lecture, Clair Wills talks to Tom about the stories people tell about abortions – stories conditioned by tradition, coerced by the courts, compelled by politics and shared in solidarity. 

Jade Sasser discusses how advocates for population control harness the language of social justice, her students’ highly personal responses to climate change, and the ways scholarship on climate anxiety has neglected questions of race.

William Davies talks to Tom about his recent LRB Winter Lecture, looking at how reactions – facial expressions, gestures or emojis – have become the main currency of the digital public sphere.