Close Readings London Review of Books

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope’s mock-epic tells the story of the Empire of Dullness and its lineage of terrible writers, the Dunces. Unlike other satires featured in this series so far, it makes no effort to hide the identities of its targets. Clare and Colin provide an ABC for understanding this vast and knotty fulmination, and explore the feverish, backstabbing and politically turbulent world in which it was created.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

Shelley’s angry, violent poem was written in direct response to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819, in which a demonstration in favour of parliamentary reform was attacked by local yeomanry, leaving 18 people dead and hundreds injured. The ‘masque’ it describes begins with a procession of abstract figures – Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy – embodied in members of the government, before eventually unfolding into a vision of England freed from the tyranny and anarchy of its institutions. As Mark and Seamus discuss in this episode, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, with its incoherence and inconsistencies, amounts to perhaps the purest expression in verse both of Shelley’s political indignation and his belief that, with the right way of thinking, such chains of oppression can be shaken off ‘like dew’.
Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College, London, and Seamus Perry is Professor of English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.
Sign up to the Close Readings subscription to listen ad free and to all our series in full:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/ppapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/ppsignup
Read more in the LRB:
Seamus Perry: Wielded by a Wizard https://lrb.me/perrypp
Thomas Jones: Hard Eggs and Radishes https://lrb.me/jonespp

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

This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full and to our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jones is an editor at the London Review of Books.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

As Mary and Irina discussed in the previous episode of Medieval LOLs, fabliaux had an enormous influence on Chaucer, but outside of his work, only one survives in Middle English. Dame Syrith, a story of lust, deception and a mustard-eating dog, is medieval humour at its silliest and most troubling. Mary and Irina explore the surprising representations of old women, magic and consent in fabliaux, the poem’s possible role as a pedagogical tool, and medieval audiences’ love for the procuress trope.
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

In A House for Mr Biswas, his 1961 comic masterpiece, V.S. Naipaul pays tribute to his father and the vanishing world of his Trinidadian youth. Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz in their first of four episodes to discuss the novel, a pathbreaking work of postcolonial literature and a particularly powerful influence on Pankaj himself. They explore Naipaul’s fraught relationship to modernity, and the tensions between his attachment to individual freedom and his insistence on the constraints imposed by history. 
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Pankaj Mishra is a writer, critic and reporter who regularly contributes to the LRB. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and two novels, most recently Run and Hide.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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

In The Beggar’s Opera we enter a society turned upside down, where private vices are seen as public virtues, and the best way to survive is to assume the worst of everyone. The only force that can subvert this state of affairs is romantic love – an affection, we discover, that satire finds hard to cope with. John Gay’s 1727 smash hit ‘opera’, which ran for 62 performances in its first run, put the highwaymen, criminal gangs and politicians of the day up on stage, and offered audiences a tuneful but unnerving reflection of their own corruption and mortality. Clare and Colin discuss how this satire on the age of Walpole came about, what it did for its struggling author, and why it’s an infinitely elusive, strangely modernist work.
This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadings
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk

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