Close Readings

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

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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

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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.

This is 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