Close Readings

Euripides was the youngest of the fifth-century Athenian tragedians, and is often described as the most radical. But how daring was he?

If a Middle Ages full of castles, jousts, hawking, illicit love affairs and playful singing in the meadows is what you’re looking for, then look no further than the Lais of Marie de France.

In episode four of The Long and Short, we turn to the squarely modernist Katherine Mansfield, whose writing famously attracted the envy of Virginia Woolf. At turns lyrical, ruthless, moving and darkly comic, these stories demonstrate her knack for close observation and mimicry – no wonder one of them is Mark’s ‘desert island’ story.

In the fourth episode of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom ask: what was it like to go to the theatre in Athens in 468 BC? And how far do modern ideas about tragedy, derived from Aristotle, apply to Sophocles’ plays?

In their fourth episode, Mary and Irina climb inside a tiny cell to explore the Ancrene Wisse, a guidebook written in the early 13th century. Originally intended for three anchoresses, it would eventually find a much wider audience (there was even a copy in Henry VIII’s library).

The third episode of The Long and Short turns to the short stories of Henry James, with a particular look at ‘The Aspern Papers’, a story which, like Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, offers a diagnosis of obsession, in this case through a sensuous, excruciating and often comedic Venetian psychodrama.

In the third episode, Emily and Tom move from epic to lyric, with the poems of Sappho, or what remains of them. They consider what we know, and don’t know, about her life, and how her poetry challenges the heroic tradition, both in its subversion of Homeric ideas of war and nostos, and in its playful use of language.

In the third episode of their series, Mary and Irina explore the much-chronicled life of St Cuthbert, as told by the most famous writer of the early medieval period, the so-called Venerable Bede.

In the second episode of The Long and Short, Mark and Seamus turn to Walt Whitman's ‘Song of Myself’, from Leaves of Grass (1855), for Mark ‘one of the most exciting things literature has to offer’.

In episode two of Among the Ancients, Tom and Emily turn to Homer’s Odyssey. They discuss the twisting, turning nature of both the narrative and its hero, the poem’s complex interrogation of the idea of ‘home’, and the violence Odysseus brings with him on his return from the Trojan War.

In episode two of Medieval Beginnings, Mary and Irina turn the pages of the Exeter Book, a remarkable 10th century manuscript containing numerous enigmatic and beautiful poems and riddles.

Mark and Seamus’s starting point for The Long and Short, their new series of Close Readings podcasts, is Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, a weird and disturbing poem about obsession that Tennyson himself was obsessed by.

In episode one of Among the Ancients, Emily and Tom begin with a beginning, Homer’s Iliad: its depictions of anger and grief, of capricious gods and warriors’ bodies, and the sheer narrative force of the great epic of the Trojan War.

Mary and Irina open Medieval Beginnings, their new series of Close Readings podcasts, with Beowulf, a tale of monsters and heroes that is also a complex collection of interwoven stories about war and the conduct of a warrior society.

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry turn to 'The Waste Land' for the final episode in their second Close Readings series on 19th and 20th century poetry, recorded live at the London Review Bookshop.