Podcasts

‘Anti-communist​ dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder...

James is joined by historian Greg Grandin to discuss what the seizure of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, reveals about Trump’s intentions in the region and his wider foreign policy, and...

‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens...

Seamus and Mark begin their new series by looking at the playful but often troubling treatment of desire in Marlowe's Hero and Leander, a poem that contains one of the most explicit depictions of sex...

After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic...

James Wood examines the ways in which Flaubert used detail (both significant and significantly insignificant), impersonal narration, lifelike dialogue and free indirect style to create realism’s essential...

‘Follow the money.’ That was George W. Bush’s directive to the US Treasury after 9/11. Choking off al-Qaida’s finances proved complicated — but what happened next went far beyond that. A small...

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...

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...