John Lanchester, Tom Crewe and Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite join James Butler to dissect Keir Starmer's victory and the historic collapse of the Conservative Party.
The day before the election, James Butler is joined by William Davies to talk about something everyone seems to agree on: the very poor state of the UK’s public finances.
Tom Stevenson and Iona Craig join James to discuss the challenges facing the next foreign secretary, from Gaza to the pressures of a possible Trump presidency.
For forty years, Thomas James Wise made a fortune forging copies of books that had never existed, sometimes even convincing their authors they were the real deal. Despite a damning exposé by amateur detectives in the 1930s, Wise never confessed or faced legal repercussions, and his fakes have become collectors’ pieces in their own right. Gill Partington joins Tom to explain Wise’s success and final undoing, and to discuss the value of forgeries, hoaxes and reproductions as art.
For the second episode of our series on the UK election, James Butler is joined by Sam Freedman to talk about the enormous challenges facing the next government.
In the first in a series of episodes on the UK general election, James Butler is joined by Ann Pettifor and Adrienne Buller to discuss climate policy and its apparent absence from the campaign so far.
From the ghetto's creation in 1516 until its dissolution at the end of the 18th century, Jews in Venice were confined to a district enclosed by canals, patrolled by guards and locked at night. Yet its residents were essential players in Venetian life, and in practice the ghetto saw far more traffic through its gates than its founders intended. Erin Maglaque joins Tom to discuss what life in the ghetto was like, and why an open-air prison could be considered relatively tolerant by the standards of early modern Europe.
The D-Day planners said that everything would hang on the weather. But who would make the forecast? Stephen Dillane reads Lawrence Hogben’s diary piece on forecasting D-Day by committee, and why they very almost chose the wrong day.
J.G. Ballard’s life and work contains many incongruities, outraging the Daily Mail and being offered a CBE (which he rejected), and variously appealing to both Spielberg and Cronenberg. Edmund Gordon joins Tom to explore Ballard’s strange combination of ‘whisky and soda’ conservatism and the avant-garde.
Marilyn Nance was 23 when she photographed Festac ’77, a global celebration of Black and African art that she described as ‘the Olympics, plus a Biennial, plus Woodstock’. In his review of Nance’s book, Sean Jacobs traces a more fraught history of the festival than her photographs would suggest. Sean joins Tom to discuss what Festac meant for politicians, attendees and the proponents of négritude, third worldism and pan-Africanism.
Rebecca Solnit has lived in San Francisco since 1980, but the city she used to know is fast disappearing, ‘fully annexed’, as she puts it, by the tech firms from Silicon Valley. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Solnit reads her piece from the 8 February issue of the paper, both a eulogy for the city that’s been lost and a dissection of the dystopia that’s replacing it, ‘returning us’, as she puts it, ‘to a kind of feudalism’.
The recovery of history’s ‘lost’ women is often associated with the advent of feminism, but, Sophie Smith writes, women’s contributions to Western philosophy have been regularly rediscovered since at least the 14th century. She joins Tom to discuss what we can learn from the women who held their own alongside Plato, Descartes and Hume.
James Pratt and John Smith were the last men hanged in England for the crime of sodomy, reported to the authorities by nosy landlords who later petitioned for clemency. Tom Crewe joins Thomas Jones to explain how exceptional – and unexceptional – the case was, the historical forces that led to the death sentence and the surprising ambivalence many Londoners felt about ‘unnatural crimes’ in the 1830s.
The word ‘culture’ now drags the term ‘wars’ in its wake, but this is too narrow an approach to a concept with a much more capacious history. In the closing LRB Winter Lecture for 2024, Terry Eagleton examines various aspects of that history – culture and power, culture and ethics, culture and critique, culture and ideology – in an attempt to broaden the argument and understand where we are now.
In her recent LRB Winter Lecture, Hazel V. Carby considered the ways that contemporary Indigenous artists are making the ordinarily invisible repercussions of ecocide and genocide visible. She joins Adam Shatz to expand on the artists discussed in her lecture, and how they disrupt the ways we’re accustomed to seeing borders, landmasses and landscapes empty – or emptied – of people.