Podcasts

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction,...

The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun placed large numbers of these rats in a controlled...

Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in the 1970s and avoiding extradition to West Germany....

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...

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘year without a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creation myth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction,...

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing...

The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood,...

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...

This week’s Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict.

This week’s Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen...

This week’s episode on the great political fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above...