Lydia Davis will reflect on some of the concepts of the Stoic philosophers, especially the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, author of a private notebook of meditations written, many of them, in his tent on a battlefield. She will associate these concepts with the ideas conveyed by other texts, including some of the English sonnets, and will also describe her attempts to try out the ideas of the Stoics on the vagaries of her own daily life in a world that, while culturally so distinct from that of Marcus Aurelius, shares the same challenges presented by such difficult passions as anger, envy, grief, ambition and fear of death.

Close Readings is the London Review of Books’ multi-series podcast, in which longstanding contributors explore literature, history and philosophy through a selection of key works. This year, James Wood, professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard and staff writer at the New Yorker, has been considering the question: Who’s afraid of realism? For this live recording of Close Readings at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, James will be joined by Clair Wills, a regular contributor to the LRB, whose memoir, Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets was published last year. Their subject, or at least their starting point, will be Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost, in which Mantel reflects on childhood, illness, family and ghosts, both metaphorical and ‘real’.

Twenty years ago, the London Review of Books published a controversial piece by the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in which they argued that the Israel lobby had succeeded in diverting US foreign policy ‘far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of Israel are essentially identical’. Two days on from Israel’s legislative elections, US editor Adam Shatz chairs a conversation about the current state of US-Israel relations for a live recording of the LRB Podcast. He’ll be joined by Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group, who advised three US administrations on Middle Eastern affairs; Ian Lustick, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and the author, with Eli Clifton, of Israel’s Lobby; and Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist at Barnard College, who has written widely on Israel-Palestine.