Podcasts

James is joined by Colin Yeo and Nicola Kelly to explain how Britain's asylum system works and assess the recent changes by the home secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Adam Shatz talks to Sepideh Farsi about the process of making Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, her film about the Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona.

As the BBC falls into crisis again, James is joined by former BBC journalist Lewis Goodall and author Dan Hind to ask if the corporation is capable of surviving in the digital era.

Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s 1927 novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical,...

After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Mary...

Seamus and Mark look at elegies by Thom Gunn including ‘Talbot Road’, ‘The Gas-poker’ and others from his celebrated collection The Man with Night Sweats, where Gunn combined his allusive, rhetorical...

The events of 9/11 exposed cracks in the US intelligence apparatus. In response, the National Security Agency built the most extensive surveillance system in history.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq created a dilemma for the Bush administration: what to do with the thousands of detainees captured during the War on Terror. Habeas corpus was suspended, the constitution...

After the Twin Towers fell, Donald Rumsfeld reportedly told President Bush: 'Now we can do Iraq.' The neo-conservatives said it would be easy. But the occupation quickly unravelled, leaving Iraq in chaos.

Lieutenant Sethia is accused of a second crime: the theft of HMS Conqueror’s log books. Two journalists and the Serious Crime Squad try to hunt him down. 

Armed with the diary, Tam Dalyell goes on the attack – but the cover-up continues. A second whistle-blower from within the Ministry of Defence is arrested for a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

Lieutenant Sethia quits the navy and moves to the Caribbean. He thinks the Falklands War is behind him, but back in the UK, an eccentric, anti-war MP notices a discrepancy in the government’s account...

Lauren Oyler is one of our rowdiest and sharpest literary critics, twice causing the LRB website to crash from too much traffic, and author of the novel Fake Accounts. No Judgement is her first collection...

Fernanda Eberstadt’s Bite Your Friends is both a history of the body as a site of resistance to power, and a subversive memoir, drawing on a cast of outrageous heroes including Diogenes, Saint Perpetua,...

When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets is a detective story, memoir and cultural history of Ireland’s...