James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection, Dubliners, when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In their eighth episode, Mark and Seamus discuss the astonishing confidence of Joyce’s ... Show More
Dec 31
The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes
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 i ... Show More
1h 4m
Jan 2025
671 Shakespeare's Tragic Art (with Rhodri Lewis) | My Last Book with Joel Warner
It is a truth universally acknowledged that tragedy is one of the world's highest art forms, and that Shakespeare was one of the form's greatest practitioners. But how did he do it? What models did he have to draw upon, and where did he innovate? In this episode, Jacke talks to S ... Show More
56m 6s
Oct 20
742 Edgar Allan Poe (with Richard Kopley) | Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (#12 GBOAT) | My Last Book with Christopher Herbert
It's October, the perfect month to celebrate the master of mystery and the macabre. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Richard Kopley about his book Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, a comprehensive critical biography that combines a narrative of Poe's enduring challenges (including h ... Show More
1h 17m
<p><strong>John Keats</strong> (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet prominent in the second generation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Romantic</a> poets, with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w ... Show More
