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Podcasts and audiobooks from the London Review of Books.
A multi-series podcast subscription exploring different themes and periods of literature through selections of key works.
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Our six-part series hosted by Andrew O'Hagan: listen to the full series with bonus material, including extended and additional interviews and clips.
More Episodes
Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiography, history, biography, fiction, music criticism and pol...
· 14 min 28 sec
Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, h...
· 18 min 39 sec
Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, h...
· 17 min 54 sec
‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist poli...
· 58 min 7 sec
‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist poli...
· 57 min 22 sec
In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account...
· 13 min 17 sec
In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account...
· 14 min 2 sec
The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and cl...
· 12 min 5 sec
The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and cl...
· 41 min 32 sec
After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife,...
· 14 min 12 sec
After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife,...
· 14 min 57 sec
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic...
· 14 min 51 sec
What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic...
· 15 min 36 sec
Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln i...
· 11 min 20 sec
Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln i...
· 10 min 35 sec
In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to se...
· 14 min 27 sec
In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to se...
· 15 min 12 sec
The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in th...
· 11 min 26 sec
The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in th...
· 50 min 18 sec
Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, p...
· 12 min 44 sec