arts
Hosted by London Review of Books · arts · EN
Close Readings is a multi-series podcast from the London Review of Books . Two contributors explore areas of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to some episodes for free here, and extracts from our ongoing subscriber-only series. How To Subscribe In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast feed to unlock the full episodes. Or for other podcast apps, sign up here: https://lrb.me/closereadings RUNNING IN 2026 'Who's afraid of realism?' with James Wood and guests 'Nature in Crisis' with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith 'Narrative Poems' with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford 'London Revisited' with Rosemary Hill and guests Bonus Series: 'The Man Behind the Curtain' with Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones ALSO INCLUDED IN THE CLOSE READINGS SUBSCRIPTION: 'Conversations in Phi
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Contact path
Verified email
Booking probability
36%
Guest openness
Selective
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Signup to Generate a PitchClose Readings is a multi-series podcast from the London Review of Books. Two contributors explore areas of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to some episodes for free here, and extracts from our ongoing subscriber-only series.
Recent episodes include "Narrative Poems: ‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson" (29 October 2026, 20 minutes), "The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce" (24 October 2026, 52 minutes), and "Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos" (21 October 2026, 24 minutes).
Close Readings publishes roughly weekly, with episodes averaging 22 minutes across 228 episodes.
Booking probability for Close Readings is 36%, and the host is rated Selective on guests. Close Readings requires a Pod Score of 80 or higher. Close Readings's contact route on record: verified email.
The strongest fits for Close Readings are Artists, Writers & Performers. Close Readings has an arts audience.
Close Readings is an arts podcast with 228 episodes published.
Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.
Episode #11
In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the first instalment of Idylls of the King came in 1859...
Episode #4
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the...
Episode #11
Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also require, has to be mined. ‘Everywhere that mines are...
Episode #11
What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity...
Episode #10
In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some...
Episode #8
‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its...
Episode #10
When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted’. The loss of an arm was hardly...
Episode #9
The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular, not least for the energy and locations it provided for two...
Episode #9
‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a kind of dream’, Browning recalled...
Episode #9
Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the species depicted by the artist John James Audubon...
Episode #9
If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of...
Episode #8
The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founded and the West End, with its squares, parks and...
Episode #8
According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he...
Episode #3
In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode...
Episode #8
At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped...
Episode #8
‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of...
Episode #7
When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half of...
Episode #7
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’...
Episode #7
In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her contemporary Jean...
Episode #6
When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention but the ready availability of refreshments and the high...
Recent guests on Close Readings. Study who booked and why before you pitch.
Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, Providence College
Entrepreneur, Owner of Hazlo Beverage, Content Creator, Host of "What Made You Do It Podcast", Cambridge University Library
Partner and Head of TMT in China at Linklaters, Healing Bay Pet Nutrition LLC
Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University, North Carolina A&T State University
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