The LRB Podcast London Review of Books

The D-Day planners said that everything would depended the weather. They needed 'a quiet day with not more than moderate winds and seas and not too much cloud for the airmen, to be followed by three more quiet days'. But who would make the forecast? The Meteorological Office? The US Air Force? The Royal Navy? In the event, it was all three. In this diary piece published in 1994, Lawrence Hogben, a New Zealand-born meteorologist and Royal Navy officer, describes the way this forecasting by committee worked, and why they very almost chose the wrong day.
Read by Stephen Dillane
Find the article and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/ddaypod
Watch the short film based on this piece: https://lrb.me/ddayyt
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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. In a recent piece, Edmund Gordon unpicks the contradictions and contrarianism in Ballard’s non-fiction writing, and he joins Tom to continue the dissection. They explore Ballard’s strange combination of ‘whisky and soda’ conservatism and the avant-garde, what he was trying to achieve through his fiction, and how ‘Ballardian’ Empire of the Sun really is.
Sponsored links:
Find out more about Pace Gallery London’s Kiki Kogelnik exhibition here: https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/kiki-kogelnik-the-dance/
Learn more about Serious Readers: www.seriousreaders.com/lrb
Sign up to the LRB's Close Readings subscription:
In Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/festacpod
Find out more about Serious Readers: https://www.seriousreaders.com/lrb

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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’.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/solnitpod
Find out more about Coram Boy at Chichister Festival Theatre here: https://www.cft.org.uk/events/coram-boy

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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.
Find Sophie’s piece and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/sophiesmithpod
Find out more about Pace Gallery’s upcoming exhibitions here: https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/
Find out more about Coram Boy at Chichister Festival Theatre here: https://www.cft.org.uk/events/coram-boy

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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.
Find out more about Bluets at the Royal Court theatre here: https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/bluets/
Find Tom Crewe’s piece and further reading at the episode page: https://lrb.me/prattsmithpod

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