Adolfo Kaminsky, Beyond Borders
Adolfo Kaminsky, a first-class forger while still a teenager, saved thousands of lives as an agent of the French Resistance. After the war, he turned his counterfeiting skills towards anticolonialist ...
13 Sep 202332min
Fact-Checking ‘Ulysses’
Armed with Thom’s Directory, James Joyce strove to recreate 1904 Dublin as accurately as possible, down to the last solicitor and street railing. But, as Colm Tóibín explains in a recent piece, the no...
6 Sep 202345min
Amia Srinivasan: What’s it like to be an octopus?
‘Octopuses,’ Amia Srinivasan writes, ‘are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.’ In our third summer reading, Srinivasan explores the par...
30 Aug 202334min
John Lanchester: The Case of Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie, writes John Lanchester, ‘is the only writer by whom I’ve read more than fifty books. So – why?’ In the second of our summer readings, Lanchester dissects Christie’s compulsive readabi...
23 Aug 202340min
Terry Castle: Desperately Seeking Susan
In the first of our summer readings, Terry Castle reads her 2005 piece about her “on-again, off-again, semi-friendship” with Susan Sontag. She remembers Sontag as a “great comic character”: a high-min...
16 Aug 202350min
Life in Kyiv
Almost eighteen months since Russia invaded Ukraine, Kyiv residents have resumed something resembling pre-war life. James Meek recently returned to the city, and joins Tom to discuss the new normal: h...
9 Aug 20231h 3min
Chaucer's Ovid
Irina Dumitrescu joins Tom for a Close Readings fusion episode looking at Chaucer’s classical mind, and in particular his use of Ovid’s Heroides in The Legend of Good Women, in which the poet does pen...
2 Aug 202347min
The Secrets of J. Edgar Hoover
As Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover exercised a dictatorial influence over the department – and, it seems, everyone else. Meticulous and vindictive, he frequently weaponised secrets while carefull...
26 Jul 202347min
