London Revisited: Plague, Rebellion and Guilds

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1. 

   16 May 2026 · 1 min

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   Have you got four minutes to share your feedback on Close Readings? It will help shape how we develop the podcast over the coming year. We’ve set up a short survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/XCR7LQ7 Thanks for your time, and for listening to our podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

2. 

   S19 · E5 · 13 May 2026 · 22 min

   Narrative Poems: ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by Robert Burns and ‘Peter Grimes’ by George Crabbe

   ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ first appeared as a lengthy footnote in Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland (1791) after Robert Burns convinced Grose to include the ruined Alloway Kirk in his volume, and its supernatural associations (invented by Burns). Its story of the drunken Tam's encounter with witches in the stormy Ayrshire landscape has served as both a celebration and chastisement of Scottish masculinity ever since its publication, but the attitude of its narrator remains elusive throughout. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss the poem’s moral and stylistic turns, its influence on…

3. 

   S18 · E5 · 4 May 2026 · 29 min

   Nature in Crisis: 'Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth' by James Lovelock

   In ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’ (1979), James Lovelock proposed that the Earth is something like a single living organism, capable of manipulating its circumstances and the environment to suit its needs. While many scientists reject the fullest formulation of this idea, it has nonetheless had a profound influence on our understanding of the ways in which animal and plant life interact with the non-living parts of the environment, to the extent that observations in biological and earth systems science are often assessed for which version of Gaia they might support. In this episode,…

4. 

   S17 · E5 · 27 Apr 2026 · 23 min

   Who’s afraid of realism? ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy

   In the late 1870s, shortly after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced what might be described today as a midlife crisis. In his short autobiographical book A Confession, finished in 1880, he questioned what meaning there is in life that is not annihilated by the inevitability of death. His answer was to live according to God’s law, a realisation that shaped that rest of his life and writing, and guides the story of his late masterpiece, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886). To discuss The Death of Ivan Ilyich and its place both in Tolstoy’s work and the development of realism,…

5. 

   S16 · E2 · 24 Apr 2026 · 35 min

   The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley

   Mary Shelley signed off her introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by bidding her ‘hideous progeny go forth and prosper’. In this episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones look at the machinery that Shelley used to assemble her immortal creature and bring it to life. As well as its origins and afterlives, they consider the many systems that the novel draws on, challenges, reproduces and mutates – the laws of nature, philosophy, science, the human body, the traditional family – and ask whether the real horror at the heart of Frankenstein is not the…

6. 

   S19 · E4 · 13 Apr 2026 · 15 min

   Narrative Poems: ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope

   Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty. The incident caused an irreconcilable rift between the two families, who were both Catholic. Shortly afterwards, the young poet Alexander Pope, also Catholic, was approached by a friend who suggested he turn the incident into a comic poem. The result was one of the bestselling poems of the age, ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712), a mock-epic that fused the grand styles of Homer, Virgil and Milton with an acerbic social satire, in which the…

7. 

   S18 · E4 · 6 Apr 2026 · 13 min

   Nature in Crisis: ‘The Burning Earth’ by Sunil Amrith

   The ‘great acceleration’ is a term used to describe the dramatic surge in the 1950s of both human and earth systems indicators that marked a shift from a relatively stable planetary state to one that's characterised by increasing environmental instability. Alongside measures of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane levels, this shift can be tracked in numerous other areas of human activity, such as GDP, financialisation, foreign direct investment and the spread of telecommunications. In ‘The Burning Earth’ (2024), Sunil Amrith uses history as a way of understanding why we got to this…

8. 

   S17 · E4 · 30 Mar 2026 · 24 min

   Who’s afraid of realism? Three stories by Anton Chekhov

   ‘Instead of sheets – dirty tablecloths.’ The notebooks of Anton Chekhov are full of enigmatic observations such as this, the unexplained details that suggest a whole scene, short story or character. When asked by an actor how he should play the role of Trigorin in The Seagull, Chekhov simply answered: ‘he wears checked trousers’. As James Wood argues, this mastery of the telling detail is central to Chekhov’s radical realism. Unlike Flaubert and Ibsen, Chekhov sought to avoid imposing authorial meaning or irony, instead handing over perception to his characters. In this episode, James looks…

9. 

   S20 · E3 · 23 Mar 2026 · 24 min

   London Revisited: The Medieval Capital

   When the Angles, Saxons and Jutes began settling across England in the wake of the Roman retreat in the early fifth century, the city they found on the north bank of the Thames was hardly a city at all. Within its walls were the great abandoned ruins of antiquity, ‘the works of giants’ as one Anglo-Saxon poet put it, and little else. For hundreds of years the site was patchily inhabited, but two features indicated its future importance. In 604, the first Bishop of London was appointed, leading to the continuous presence of Christianity and the founding of St Paul’s Cathedral; and down the…

10. 

    S19 · E3 · 16 Mar 2026 · 16 min

    Narrative Poems: ‘Paradise Lost’ (Book 9) by John Milton

    When Milton came to describe Eve’s tasting of the forbidden fruit, he knew he couldn’t rely on suspense to grip the reader. Instead, he used multiple genres and perspectives to interrogate the moral and emotional significance of ‘man’s first disobedience’, self-consciously drawing on the resources of Renaissance tragedy, pastoral and love poetry to achieve his great innovation, the Christian epic. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at the ways in which Milton’s study of temptation and free will became an unparalleled expression of poetic brilliance, from its thrillingly ambiguous and…