When is giving up not failure, but a way of succeeding at something else? In this conversation with Hermione Lee, recorded at the London Review Bookshop, the psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips explores the ways in which knowing our limitations can be an act of heroism.
When Deborah Friedell and Adam Thirlwell met twenty years ago, they started a discussion about Jewish identity they are still puzzling over today. Revisiting Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1986), Adam and Deborah discuss the nuances of Jewish experience and novel-writing across the Atlantic.
Gerontologist, pacifist, novelist, medical doctor and mollusc expert – Alex Comfort was far more than just the author of the staggeringly popular Joy of Sex. Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite joins Tom to trace Comfort’s life from evangelical child prodigy to the anarchist free love advocate who became emblematic of the sexual liberation movement.
Anna Della Subin joins Tom to discuss some new translations of poetry by Enheduana, a Sumerian princess who lived around 2300 BCE and is thought to be the first known author.
Despite overwhelming numbers and popular support, the mass protest movements of the 2010s failed to achieve their aims. James Butler joins Tom to make sense of the ‘mass protest decade’, sharing historical examples, theoretical approaches and first-hand experiences that help explain the defeats of the 2010s.
In the first episode of their new Close Readings series on political poetry, Seamus Perry and Mark Ford look at ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ by Andrew Marvell, a poem about politics but also political inasmuch as nobody can agree on what it says.
Ethiopia is one of the world’s most populous countries, and yet the 2020-22 Tigray War and ongoing suffering in the region has been largely ignored by the world at large. Tom Stevenson joins the podcast to break down the history of the conflict, and explore why Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a Nobel laureate, has come to preside over such a brutal civil war. He also considers Abiy’s future intentions, both within and beyond his country’s borders.
Were the Middle Ages funny? Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Wellesley begin their series in quest of the medieval sense of humour with Chaucer’s 'Miller’s Tale', a story that is surely still (almost) as funny as when it was written six hundred years ago.
Michael Wood talks to Tom about several translations of Proust, old and new, and the ways in which they question what the novel does.
James Meek joins Tom to talk about a recent book by Peter Biskind on ‘the New TV’, reviewed by James in the latest issue of the paper. They discuss the rise of cable TV in the 1990s, the emergence of the streaming giants, the power of the showrunner and whether the golden age of television drama is really coming to an end.
Tom Crewe, Patricia Lockwood, Deborah Friedell, John Lanchester, Rosemary Hill and Colm Tóibín talk to Tom about some of their favourite LRB pieces, including Terry Castle’s 1995 essay on Jane Austen's letters, Hilary Mantel’s account of how she became a writer, and Alan Bennett’s uncompromising take on Philip Larkin.
Byron’s early poems – his so-called ’dark tales’ – have been dismissed by critics as the tawdry, slapdash products of an uninteresting mind. Clare Bucknell talks to Tom about her recent piece in the LRB, which looked past the poet's famous biography to reappraise the youthful Byron’s mind in poems such as The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814) and Lara (1814).
In Renaissance Venice, Aldus Manutius turned his mid-life crisis into a publishing revolution, printing books that permanently changed the way we read. Erin Maglaque tells Tom about Aldus’s achievements, his monumental ego and his part in the creation of one of the most bizarre books in publishing history.
Adam Shatz explains how Albert Camus’s travel diaries shed light on his tumultuous personal life, his conflicted stance on colonialism and where his humanism deviates from his existentialist peers.
In June, the pope invited dozens of artists to Rome for the 50th anniversary of the Vatican Museum’s contemporary art collection. Patricia Lockwood was one of them. She tells Tom more about the surreal experience and why irony, in the words of Pope Francis, is ‘a marvellous virtue’.