London Review Bookshop Podcast

Forced to leave her native Hungary by the 1956 suppression of the Hungarian Uprising, Ágota Kristóf took up residence in Switzerland and began writing in French. Most famous for her Notebook Trilogy – ‘A book through which I discovered what kind of person I really want to be’ (Slavoj Žižek) – her short stories, now available for the first time in English as the Penguin Classic volume I Don’t Care (tr. Chris Andrews), have been described by Max Porter as ‘pure genius’.

In this episode, Canadian writer Camilla Grudova discusses Kristóf’s work and place in the late modernist literary firmament with Jennifer Hodgson.

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Inspired by the new editions of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1966 novel The Image of Her and travel diary America Day by Day (Vintage), translator and novelist Lauren Elkin and writer and curator Lou Stoppard talked about the life, works and legacy of one of feminism’s most enduring icons.

Sylvia Plath’s second collection Ariel (Faber) was published in 1965, two years after the poet’s death, in a version somewhat reconfigured from her draft copy by Ted Hughes. Plath’s original arrangement was restored in 2004 in an edition edited by her daughter Frieda Hughes. To mark Ariel’s 60th birthday and the new Faber edition, poets Victoria Adukwei Bulley and Richard Scott read from Plath’s work and from their own, and examined the abiding legacy of one of the 20th century’s most influential literary documents. Fellow poet and essayist Lavinia Greenlaw was in the chair.

Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola and COVID-19 – in Edna Bonhomme’s groundbreaking analysis of six pivotal moments in medical history, the pandemic is revealed to be inevitably political. Urgent and illuminating, A History of the World in Six Plagues is far more than a history of disease – it is a call to reimagine a more equitable future in the face of ongoing global health challenges. Edna Bonhomme was in conversation with journalist and novelist Rachel Connolly.

Throughout its history the Labour left has been a key source of energy and ideas for the party – but left-right tensions have long been the cause of damaging divisions. What lessons does this story hold for today’s left and the struggling Starmer government? Are they irreconcilable enemies - or can they ever work together?

Guardian columnist Andy Beckett, author of When the Lights Went Out, Pinochet in Piccadily and The Searchers, a joint portrait of Labour mavericks Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, was in conversation with journalist and novelist Melissa Benn, whose selection of her father Tony Benn’s political writings The Most Dangerous Man in Britain? was recently published by Verso. In the chair was historian Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, whose most recent book Women and the Miners’ Strike, 1984-1985 is published by Oxford.