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Like Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare made good use of his time off when the theatres were shut for plague in 1593. 'Venus and Adonis' appeared in quarto that year and become by far the most popular work Shakespeare published in his lifetime, running to ten editions before his death (compared to just four for Romeo and Juliet). In this episode, Seamus and Mark consider the many ways in which Shakespeare’s poem displays its author's remarkable originality, from its peculiar reshaping of the Ovidian myth into a tale of comic mismatch, to its surprising diversion into the psychology of grief. They then look at his disturbing follow-up, 'The Rape of Lucrece' (1594), in which a chilling depiction of self-conscious, premeditated evil anticipates characters such as Iago and Macbeth. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Further reading in the LRB: Stephen Orgel on Shakespeare's poems: https://lrb.me/npshakespeare01 Barbara Everett on the sonnets: https://lrb.me/npshakespeare02

In The Light Eaters (2024), Zoë Schlanger reports from the frontiers of botany, where researchers are discovering forms of sensing, signalling and responding that challenge our ideas of plants as passive life forms. Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith explore Schlanger’s account of new research into plant behaviour. They examine the case for plant agency – and the far more speculative claims for plant consciousness – and attempt to make sense of some astonishing discoveries. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Get the book: https://lrb.me/schlangercr Further reading from the LRB: Francis Gooding on mushroom brains: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n10/francis-gooding/from-its-myriad-tips Andrew Sugden on the life of a leaf: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n03/andrew-sugden/hairy-spiny-or-naked Ian Hacking on human thinking about plants: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n04/ian-hacking/living-things Francis Gooding on the hidden life of trees: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n04/francis-gooding/thinking-about-how-they-think Next episode: ‘Blue Machine’ by Helen Czerski https://lrb.me/czerskicr

‘He opened him up and found nothing.’ These are the doctor’s findings at Charles Bovary’s autopsy near the end of 'Madame Bovary'. Taken on its own, it’s a simple medical observation. In the context of Emma Bovary’s tragic story, it serves as a condemnation not just of Charles’s emptiness but the whole provincial world Flaubert has been describing. In the second part of his analysis of 'Madame Bovary', James Wood considers the major episodes leading to Emma’s death and argues that what made Flaubert’s realism dangerous was not its depictions of infidelity, but its use of cliché to expose French bourgeois lives constructed entirely of received ideas and second-hand emotions. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Further reading in the LRB: Julian Barnes on translations of Madame Bovary: ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep201⁠ Michael Wood on 'Sentimental Education': ⁠https://lrb.me/realismep202⁠

The year London was founded will always be disputed, but the most recent archaeological evidence suggests the Romans had created the first settlement on the north bank of the Thames by 48 AD, five years after their invasion. That early military encampment expanded to become a busy, cosmopolitan supply base until it was burned down in the Boudican revolt of 60 AD. In the first episode of her series tracing the history of London, Rosemary Hill is joined by Dominic Perring, archaeologist and author of London in the Roman World, to examine the development of Londinium over its tumultuous first century, during which it grew to a population of 30,000 and it acquired all the recognisable Roman landmarks – forum, basilica, baths, amphitheatre – before facing its second great destructive event around 125 AD. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignuplr Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignuplr In their next episode, Rosemary and Dominic consider Roman London’s second revival and the emergence of new belief systems and monuments before its eventual abandonment by Rome at the start of the fifth century. Reading by Duncan Wilkins Read more in the LRB: Christopher Kelly on Roman London: ⁠https://lrb.me/londonep1roman2⁠ Tom Shippey on Roman Britain: ⁠https://lrb.me/londonep1roman1⁠

'Hero and Leander' was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a sixth-century version by Musaeus. Seamus and Mark begin their new series by looking at the playful but often troubling treatment of desire in a poem that contains one of the most explicit depictions of sex in English poetry. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Further reading in the LRB: Michael Dobson on the life of Marlowe https://lrb.me/np1marlowe1 Hilary Mantel on the murder of Marlowe: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe2 Charles Nicholl on Faustus: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe3

After following up a lead from a birdwatcher, Rachel Carson drew a web of connections that led to one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Silent Spring (1962) investigated the synthetic pesticides that proliferated after the Second World War, which were assiduously defended by overconfident policymakers, industrial chemists and agribusiness. The book quickly became a bestseller and kickstarted the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. In the first episode of Nature in Crisis, Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith discuss one of the truly great success stories in science writing. Carson was a masterful stylist and gifted scientist who could make abstruse developments in organic chemistry compelling, accessible and alarmingly intimate. Meehan and Peter show how Carson wrote at the edge of science, anticipating the study of epigenetics and endocrine disruption. They illustrate why, though some of her proposed solutions fell short, Silent Spring remains ‘both an exhilarating and melancholy pleasure’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ture In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ture Get the book: https://lrb.me/carsoncr Further reading from the LRB: Meehan Crist on Silent Spring https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n11/meehan-crist/a-strange-blight Stephen Mills on Rachel Carson https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n08/stephen-mills/chaffinches-with-their-beaks-pushed-into-the-soil-woodpigeons-with-a-froth-of-spittle-at-their-open-mouths Edmund Gordon on the insect crisis: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n09/edmund-gordon/bye-bye-firefly Anthony Giddens on chemical contamination: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n17/anthony-giddens/why-sounding-the-alarm-on-chemical-contamination-is-not-necessarily-alarmist

Gustave Flaubert recalled in a letter that the critic Sainte-Beuve compared his style to a surgeon’s scalpel, an image taken from 'Madame Bovary'. This was not a compliment: Sainte-Beuve was anxious about the ambition of Flaubert’s ‘realism’ to cut to the bone of its characters and society at large. Karl Marx, on the other hand, praised realist writers who ‘issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together’. In the first episode of his new series, James Wood considers the fears and criticisms that have dogged realism from its emergence in the 19th century through its long history of transformations up to the present day. He examines the ways in which Flaubert used detail (both significant and significantly insignificant), impersonal narration, lifelike dialogue and free indirect style to create realism’s essential grammar. This is part one of Wood’s analysis of 'Madame Bovary', going up to the moment that Emma meets Rodolphe Boulanger. He uses Geoffrey Wall's translation, published by Penguin Classics. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrwaor Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingswaor Read more in the LRB: Julian Barnes: Flaubert at Two Hundred https://lrb.me/realismep101 Two Letters from Flaubert to Colet: https://lrb.me/realismep102 Tim Parks on Flaubert's life: https://lrb.me/realismep103

In The Man Behind the Curtain, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha, is thought to be mad by everyone he meets because he believes he’s living in a book. But from a certain point of view that makes the hero of Cervantes’ novel the only character who has any idea what’s really going on. Tom and Tom discuss the machinery – narrative, theoretical, economic, psychological and literal (those windmills) – which underpins Cervantes’ masterpiece. This is a bonus episode from the Close Readings series. To listen to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ Further reading in the LRB: Karl Miller on ‘Don Quixote’: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n03/karl-miller/andante-capriccioso⁠ Michael Wood: Crazy Don ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v17/n15/michael-wood/crazy-don⁠ Gabriel Josipovici on Cervantes’ life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v01/n05/gabriel-josipovici/the-hard-life-and-poor-best-of-cervantes⁠ Robin Chapman: Cervantics ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n16/robin-chapman/cervantics⁠

George Gissing’s novels, Orwell once said, could be described in three words: ‘not enough money’. Writing is a matter of survival for the cast of ‘New Grub Street’ (1891), which follows a handful of literary men and women in London in the early 1880s. All of them have different ideas about success, love and personal fulfilment, and all those ideas – even the most brutally pragmatic – are subverted by the pressures of sexuality and the marketplace. In the final episode of Novel Approaches, Clare Bucknell and Tom Crewe discuss Gissing’s great portrait of London at its shabbiest. They explore Gissing’s unrelenting realism, his gift for writing nuanced characters, and why, in Tom’s words, if the novel is gloomy, it’s ‘an invigorating gloom’. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠⁠ Further reading from the LRB: Frank Kermode on George Gissing: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/frank-kermode/squalor⁠ Rosemarie Bodenheimer on Gissing’s life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n13/rosemarie-bodenheimer/give-us-a-break⁠ Jane Miller on Gissing’s letters: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n05/jane-miller/gissing-may-damage-your-health⁠ Ian Hamilton on a new ‘New Grub Street’: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n02/ian-hamilton/diary⁠ Patricia Beer on Gissing’s women: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n14/patricia-beer/new-women⁠ AUDIO GIFTS Close Readings and audiobooks: ⁠https://lrb.me/audiogifts

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The plot displays Dickens’s typical obsession with extracting maximum sentimentality from the pain and death of his characters, and the narrative voice veers unnervingly from preachy to creepy in its voyeuristic obsessions with physical excess. The book also offers a stiff social critique of the 1834 Poor Law and a satire on Malthusian ideas of population control. In this bonus episode from ‘Novel Approaches’, part of our Close Readings podcast, Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ AUDIO GIFTS Close Readings and audiobooks: https://lrb.me/audiogifts

Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this eccentric man deserved a poetic tribute for demonstrating ‘the power of the art without show’, a phrase that could as much describe the poem itself. In this episode, Seamus and Mark close their series by looking at the ways in which Johnson’s elegy, 'On the Death of Dr Robert Levet', rejects the pastoral heroism of the poem they started with, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, and compare it to two poems that offer their own kinds of unsentimental, eccentric portrait: 'Felix Randal' by Gerard Manley Hopkins and 'Stephen Boyd, 1957-99' by Mick Imlah. Seamus and Mark will be back in January to start their new series, 'Narrative Poems'. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrld⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsld⁠⁠⁠ Find tickets to Seamus's LRB Winter Lecture in London here: https://lrb.me/perrywlpod Further reading in the LRB: Freya Johnston on Samuel Johnson: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v41/n09/freya-johnston/i-m-coming-my-tetsie! Patricia Beer on Hopkins: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n11/patricia-beer/what-he-meant-by-happiness

Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of fantastic literature. This episode, recorded live at Swedenborg House, is an attempt to fill the gaps, or fail heroically. Marina and Adam Thirlwell are joined by Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review Books and author of ‘Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel’. Together they assess existing canons and definitions, redefine and rediscover categories and exceptions, and consider the pleasures and uses of the fantastic. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrff⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsff⁠⁠⁠⁠ Read more in the LRB: Colin Burrow: Fiction and the Age of Lies ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/colin-burrow/fiction-and-the-age-of-lies⁠ Marina Warner on fairytale: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n21/marina-warner/that-which-is-spoken⁠ Jonathan Lethem on Stanisław Lem and Science Fiction: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n03/jonathan-lethem/my-year-of-reading-lemmishly⁠ A.D. Nuttall on the rhetoric of the fantastic: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/a.d.-nuttall/really-fantastic

Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of fantastic literature. This episode, recorded live at Swedenborg House, is an attempt to fill the gaps, or fail heroically. Marina and Adam Thirlwell are joined by Edwin Frank, editorial director of the New York Review Books and author of ‘Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth Century Novel’. Together they assess existing canons and definitions, redefine and rediscover categories and exceptions, and consider the pleasures and uses of the fantastic. We apologise that the audio quality in this recording is poor in some places. Read more in the LRB: Colin Burrow: Fiction and the Age of Lies https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/colin-burrow/fiction-and-the-age-of-lies Marina Warner on fairytale: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v12/n21/marina-warner/that-which-is-spoken Jonathan Lethem on Stanisław Lem and Science Fiction: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n03/jonathan-lethem/my-year-of-reading-lemmishly A.D. Nuttall on the rhetoric of the fantastic: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v04/n21/a.d.-nuttall/really-fantastic

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nature of reality’. In the final episode of their series, Jonathan and James consider different ways of reading Woolf’s great novel: as a satirical portrait of her father through Mr Ramsay, as a study of creative expression through Lily Briscoe, or as a mystical, Platonic quest in which form and style respond to philosophical propositions, and the truth of human experience is to be found in movement, conversation and laughter. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrcip⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingscip⁠ Read more in the LRB: Jacqueline Rose: Where's Woolf? https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf1 Virgina Woolf: The Symbol https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf2 John Bayley: Superchild https://lrb.me/cipep13woolf3

After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as Shakespearean tragedy and the sensation novel. Mary Wellesley and Mark Ford join Clare Bucknell to unpick the many strands in Thomas Hardy’s first Wessex novel. They explore how the novel – at once ‘algorithmic’, theatrical and fatalistic – is suffused with Hardy’s class anxieties, affinity with Dorset and fascination with pagan England. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Directly in Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/applecrna⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ In other podcast apps: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://lrb.me/closereadingsna⁠⁠ Further reading and listening from the LRB: Mary and Mark discuss Hardy’s medievalism on the LRB Podcast: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/thomas-hardy-s-medieval-mind⁠⁠ Mark discusses Poems of 1912-13 with Seamus Perry in Love and Death: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/love-and-death-poems-of-1912-13-by-thomas-hardy⁠⁠  James Wood on Hardy’s life:⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n01/james-wood/anxious-pleasures⁠⁠ Hugh Haughton on Hardy’s ghosts: ⁠⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n21/hugh-haughton/ghosts⁠⁠ Next episode: New Grub Street by George Gissing.