The LRB Podcast London Review of Books

For forty years, Thomas James Wise made a fortune forging copies of books that had never existed, sometimes even convincing their authors they were the real deal. Despite a damning exposé by amateur detectives in the 1930s, Wise never confessed or faced legal repercussions, and his fakes have become collectors’ pieces in their own right. Gill Partington joins Tom to explain Wise’s success and final undoing, and to discuss the value of forgeries, hoaxes and reproductions as art.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/wisepod
Find out more about the Royal Literary Fund: https://rlf.org.uk

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For the second episode of our series on the UK election, James Butler is joined by Sam Freedman to talk about the enormous challenges facing the next government. From hospital waiting lists to criminal court backlogs and even potholes, the fabric of the British state seems to be beyond repair. It’s not simply a problem of funding: poor management, a lack of scrutiny and extreme centralisation combined with the almost total destruction of local government have all played a part. James and Sam consider whether there’s anything to be done about this chronic dysfunction, and whether the next official opposition could in fact be the Liberal Democrats.
Sam Freedman is co-author of the substack Comment is Freed. His book Failed State: Why Britain’s Institutions are Broken and How We Fix Them will be released in July 2024.
Read more from James Butler the LRB:
James Butler on the crisis in care: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n05/james-butler/this-concerns-everyone
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In the first in a series of episodes on the UK general election, James Butler is joined by Ann Pettifor and Adrienne Buller to discuss climate policy and its apparent absence from the campaign so far. Several years ago the Labour Party was committed to a Green New Deal but has since backed away from that promise, while the Conservatives have decided that abandoning their own climate commitments is a vote-winner. Ann, Adrienne and James consider why political leadership and courage have disappeared on this issue, what environmental policy might look like with a Labour government, and how Chinese bicycles demonstrate the problem of international climate action.
Read James's latest blog post on the election: https://lrb.me/butlersunakpod
And more on climate in the LRB:
Will Davies on why capitalism won't save the planet: https://lrb.me/daviesclimatepod
James Butler on Andreas Malm and ecoterrorism: https://lrb.me/butlerclimatepod2

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From the ghetto's creation in 1516 until its dissolution at the end of the 18th century, Jews in Venice were confined to a district enclosed by canals, patrolled by guards and locked at night. Yet its residents were essential players in Venetian life, and in practice the ghetto saw far more traffic through its gates than its founders intended. Erin Maglaque joins Tom to discuss what life in the ghetto was like, and why an open-air prison could be considered relatively tolerant by the standards of early modern Europe.
Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/ghettopod
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Find out more about Solved from the University of Toronto Press: https://utorontopress.com/9781487506827/solved/
Learn more about Serious Readers: https://seriousreaders.com/lrb/

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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.
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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

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