On Politics: Germany's Far-Right Future?
On Sunday, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won the state election in Saxony-Anhalt with 44 per cent of the vote, the h...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & Podcasts
Society & Culture
The LRB Podcast
The LRB Podcast brings you weekly conversations from Europe’s leading magazine of culture and ideas. Hosted by Thomas Jones, it also features regular contributions from US Editor Adam Shatz...
Episodes
20 of 478 episodesThe Romantic History of the Bayeux Tapestry
The story of why, and how, an arrow ended up in Harold's eye in the Bayeux Tapestry is tied to the politics of the early 19th century, to Na...
Roman Scandinavia
In the late 160s AD, the Roman armies of Marcus Aurelius recruited large numbers of troops from the islands east of Jutland, in what is now...
Travel with Close Readings: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 imp...
Seamus Perry: Pluralism and the Modern Poet
Many thinkers have characterised modernity by its investment in the idea of pluralism, ‘of things being various’, in Louis MacNeice’s phrase...
Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James
In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Is...
Adam Shatz: Visions of America
‘The very word “America” remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘...
Travel with Close Readings: Byron’s ‘Don Juan’
Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with...
Amia Srinivasan: The Impossible Patient
Not for the first time, theorists of politics are turning to the unconscious and its strange workings – repression and fantasy, libido and d...
Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Prelude’ (Books 9 and 10) by William Wordsworth
Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contempo...
Adam Tooze: Electrostates, Petrostates and the New Cold War
China is racing ahead in electrification, while the US turns its back on green energy in favour of a new era of fossil fuel machismo. An ali...
Travel with Close Readings: ‘The Travels of Sir John Mandeville’
To continue our summer of travel with Close Readings, Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley look at the medieval bestseller The Travels of Sir...
The long history of Black voter suppression in the US
In April this year, the US Supreme Court struck down Louisiana's voting map on the grounds that state lawmakers had violated the constitutio...
On Politics: Burnham’s First Week
Andy Burnham’s early promises to end rough sleeping and sort out social care won’t surprise anyone who’s followed his political career, but...
Nolan v. Homer
It could be argued that Christopher Nolan has been remaking the Odyssey for his whole career, and his latest film revisits many of the theme...
Palantir and the NHS
The US tech giant Palantir ‘holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local gov...
On Politics: The US at 250
Would the Founding Fathers recognise the modern United States as the republic they declared in 1776? The nation formed from Britain’s North...
Poetry and the Turning World: Money
In the sixth episode of their series, Sarah and Sandeep look at poems that explore the complexities of money and its metaphorical power: Fre...
Among the Private Spies
The Trump-Russia dossier, leaked to the press in 2017, contained multiple allegations of collusion between the US president and Putin, inclu...
Poetry and the Turning World: Food
The most popular modern food poem is probably William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’, in which the speaker confesses to eating the...