Nolan v. Homer
Thomas Jones and Emily Wilson, 29 July 2026
Emily Wilson joins Tom to talk through Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of the Odyssey and look at the compositional history of Homer’s poem.
Emily Wilson joins Tom to talk through Christopher Nolan's new adaptation of the Odyssey and look at the compositional history of Homer’s poem.
Peter Geoghegan joins Thomas Jones to discuss Palantir's origins, rapid rise and expansion – with the help of Peter Mandelson – into the British state. They talk about the risks of handing...
James is joined by Gary Gerstle to reflect on some of the major changes in the political evolution of the United States, including the expansion of federal power in the 20th century, the perpetual state...
For the sixth episode in their series, Sandeep and Sarah explore the use of money and its metaphorical power in poems by Frederick Seidel, Ella Frears and Danez Smith
James Wood discusses the Bellovian prose style with its Melvillian love of words and biblical undertones, and explores the book’s evocation of a postwar Manhattan imbued with masculinist conventionality....
Rosemary is joined again by Vanessa Harding to see why James I’s Stuart settlement eventually failed under the personal rule of Charles I, leading to a civil war in which London became the financial...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most...
Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s 'Braiding Sweetgrass' argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual...
In May 2002, six months after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the Iraq war, the London Review of Books held a debate: ‘The War on Terrorism: Is There an Alternative?’ The panel comprised...
For the final episode, host Daniel Soar is joined by Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili and Tom Stevenson for a live discussion on the War on Terror and its aftershocks.
‘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...
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 Belgrano affair reaches its climax as the stories of Narendra Sethia and Clive Ponting connect. The two whistleblowers appear in court and the diary makes its final journey.
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...
To mark the publication of a new edition of Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, the hosted a discussion of Rose’s masterpiece and its legacy, featuring James Butler, Rebekah Howes...
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,...
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...
Listen to LRB essays and reviews in full.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.