The LRB Podcast

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money. In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow joins Clare Bucknell and Thomas Jones to discuss Austen’s acute reading of property and precarity, and why Fanny’s moral cautiousness is a strategic approach to the riskiest speculation of all: marriage.

Ronald Reagan, as Jackson Lears wrote recently in the LRB, was a ‘telegenic demagogue’ whose ‘emotional appeal was built on white people’s racism’. His presidency left the United States a far more unequal place at home, with a renewed commitment to deadly imperial adventures abroad. Yet he had a gift for making up stories that ‘made America feel good about itself again’. On the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Lears joins Tom to discuss Reagan’s life and self-made legend, from his hardscrabble Midwestern boyhood to the White House by way of Hollywood, and to consider the lasting effects of his presidency.

Adam Shatz is joined by Loubna Mrie and Omar Dahi to discuss the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the future of the country.

‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn’s zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the blink.’ By the late 1990s, Abba ‘were basically tap water’. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Chal joins Thomas Jones to discuss the foursome’s rise to global domination from distinctly Swedish origins, and whether the arc of history bends towards disco.

In this episode of the LRB podcast, Neal Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on the journalist Claud Cockburn and about his own life and career, from his time as propaganda secretary for the Uganda National Congress to the moment he witnessed preparations for the kidnapping of Mikhail Gorbachev in Crimea but ‘missed the scoop of a lifetime’.

As it’s Christmas, we have a full episode of Among the Ancients. Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the contradictions of the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. The writings known in English as The Meditations reveal the emperor’s preoccupations with illness, growing old, death and posthumous reputation, as he urges himself not to be troubled by such transient things.

Masud Khan was a protégé of D.W. Winnicott and the darling of British psychoanalysis. He was also much else besides. In this unforgettable piece from 2001, Wynne Godley describes his baffling and disastrous sessions with Khan.

Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Muhammad Shehada join Adam Shatz to describe what life was like in Gaza in the months and years leading up to the Hamas attack on Israel last October, and to discuss the experiences of Gazans during Israel’s subsequent – and ongoing – devastation of the territory.

As Elvis’s only child, Lisa Marie Presley was burdened from birth with extraordinary, largely unwanted fame. Before her death in 2023, she spent years as tabloid fodder, less for her sporadic music career than for her highly publicised relationships with Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage and Scientology. Jessica joins Tom to discuss Lisa Marie’s ambivalent relationship with fame, and how a new generation are encountering the Presley family saga through her daughter, Riley Keough.

William Davies joins Tom to assess the efforts of the UK’s new Labour government in tackling the country’s many economic challenges.

James Meek talks to Tom about his latest report from Ukraine. They discuss the current state of the conflict, what a Trump presidency might mean for US policy and whether Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles could make any difference to the progress of the war.

Adam Shatz is joined by Jamelle Bouie and Deborah Friedell to pick through the results and implications of Trump’s victory.

When Gregor Mendel published the results of his experiments on pea plants in 1866 he initiated a fierce debate about the nature of heredity and genetic determinism that continues today. In this episode Lorraine Daston joins Tom to chart the development of these arguments, described in a new book by Gregory Radick, through scientific and cultural discourse over the past 150 years.

Tom Johnson joins Malin Hay to discuss the revolution in numeracy and use of numbers in Early Modern England. How did the English go from seeing arithmetic as the province of tradespeople and craftsmen to valuing maths as an educational discipline? Tom and Malin consider the importance of the move from Roman to Arabic numerals and the uses and abuses of statistics in the period.

Jeremy Harding joins Tom to discuss How to Write about Africa, a posthumous collection of essays and stories by Binyavanga Wainaina, one of postcolonial Africa’s great anglophone satirists.