Best Bulgakov Podcasts (2025)

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The Debt to David Graeber 59:53

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2d ago59:53

59:53

When David Graeber died in 2020, at the age of 59, he left not only a substantial body of work on economic and social anthropology, and high-profile books including Debt: The First 5000 Years and Bullshit Jobs, but also a legacy as an influential political activist and leading figure in the Occupy movement, credited with contributing the slogan ‘We…

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Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy 13:28

5d ago13:28

13:28

Without Emma Gifford, we might never have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy’s first wife was instrumental in his decision to abandon architecture for a writing career, and a direct influence – possibly collaborator – on his early novels. Their marriage, initially passionate, defied family expectations and class barriers, but by the time of Emma’s death,…

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What’s so great about Formula One? 1:02:08

9d ago1:02:08

1:02:08

Joanne O’Leary, an editor at the LRB, has been following Formula One since she was a child. Thomas Jones wrote recently in the LRB about the life and times of Enzo Ferrari. In this episode, they discuss the ways F1 has changed over the years (not least how it’s become safer), what it’s like to drive a ‘regular’ Ferrari, the extreme demands of handl…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges 13:10

11d ago13:10

13:10

Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursi…

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Close Readings: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens 35:43

16d ago35:43

35:43

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. In this extended extract …

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre 15:22

18d ago15:22

15:22

What is an emotion? In his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), Sartre picks up what William James, Martin Heidegger and others had written about this question to suggest what he believed to be a new thought on human emotion and its relation to consciousness. For Sartre, the emotions are not external forces acting upon consciousness but an a…

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The Psychology of Tennis 46:12

23d ago46:12

46:12

As well as raw talent and incredible athleticism, professional tennis ‘requires extraordinary psychological capacities’, Edmund Gordon wrote recently in the LRB: ‘obsessive focus, epic self-belief’. Edmund – whose son is a rising star on the London under-nine circuit – joins Tom to discuss four recent books about the so-called golden generation of …

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Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens 17:27

25d ago17:27

17:27

'Our Mutual Friend' was Dickens’s last completed novel, published in serial form in 1864-65. The story begins with a body being dredged from the ooze and slime of the Thames, then opens out to follow a wide array of characters through the dust heaps, paper mills, public houses and dining rooms of London and its hinterland. For this episode, Tom is …

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Why you should care about golf 55:56

1M ago55:56

55:56

With the world's most famous amateur golfer now in charge of the 'free world', the sport has never been more important in the lives of non-golfers. When Donald Trump was spotted cheating recently on a course in Scotland, it was recognised by enthusiasts and sportswriters as a major violation in a game traditionally based on self-policing and high p…

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Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson 13:47

1M ago13:47

13:47

Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to men…

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Close Readings: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley 34:21

1M ago34:21

34:21

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘yearwithout a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creationmyth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horrorand trauma narrative, and continues to spark reinvention and reinterpretation. In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina …

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley 32:30

1M ago32:30

32:30

Born from grief, exile, intellectual ferment and the ‘yearwithout a summer’, Frankenstein is a creation myth with its own creationmyth. Mary Shelley’s novel is a foundational work of science fiction, horrorand trauma narrative, and continues to spark reinvention and reinterpretation. In their fourth conversation together, Adam Thirlwell and Marina …

1
Rat Universes 44:03

1M ago44:03

44:03

The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun placed large numbers of these rats in a controlled environment for more than a year, and found evidence for the same anxieties sparked by their urban cousins: overpopulation and an ensuing ‘behavioural si…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger 15:31

2M ago15:31

15:31

What does it mean for a jug to be a jug? Or for any thing to be called a ‘thing’? In his 1950 lecture ‘Das Ding’, Heidegger attempts to cajole his audience away from their everyday way of seeing the world as consisting of objects that can be represented objectively, and into the kind of thinking that ‘responds and recalls’. For Heidegger, the world…

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Pinochet and the Nazis 45:32

2M ago45:32

45:32

Walther Rauff, a notorious Nazi war criminal, lived openly in Chile after the Second World War, working for the Pinochet regime’s secret police in the 1970s and avoiding extradition to West Germany. When General Pinochet was himself arrested in London in 1998 under an international warrant issued by a Spanish judge, the British government returned …

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Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot 16:49

2M ago16:49

16:49

The Mill on the Floss is George Eliot’s most autobiographical novel, and the first she published after her identity as a woman was revealed. A ‘dreamscape’ version of her Warwickshire childhood, the book is both a working-through and a reimagining of her life. Ruth Yeazell and Deborah Friedell join Tom to discuss the novel and its protagonist Maggi…

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Israel's War of Opportunity 49:43

2M ago49:43

49:43

Iran’s supreme leader recently claimed victory, simply by reason of survival, in the war launched by Israel on 13 June, and joined a week later by the United States. With the twelve-day conflict apparently over, Adam Shatz talks to Narges Bajoghli, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Robert Malley, a former lead negotiator for t…

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Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more 12:09

2M ago12:09

12:09

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an an…

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Close Readings: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg 34:01

2M ago34:01

34:01

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 19…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg 32:13

2M ago32:13

32:13

James Hogg’s ghoulish metaphysical crime novel 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' (1824) was presented as a found documented dating from the 17th century, describing in different voices the path to devilry of an antinomian Calvinist, Robert Wringhim. Mikhail Bulgakov’s 'The Master and Margarita', written between 1928 and 19…

Bulgakov Podcasts

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The LRB Podcast

The London Review of Books

1
Books of Some Substance

David Southard and Nathan Sharp

1
Bookish

Bookish

1
Close Readings

London Review of Books

1
Mihail Neamtu

Mihail Neamtu

1
The Debt to David Graeber 59:53

1
Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy 13:28

1
What’s so great about Formula One? 1:02:08

1
Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges 13:10

1
Close Readings: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens 35:43

1
Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre 15:22

1
The Psychology of Tennis 46:12

1
Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens 17:27

1
Why you should care about golf 55:56

1
Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson 13:47

1
Close Readings: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley 34:21

1
Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley 32:30

1
Rat Universes 44:03

1
Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger 15:31

1
Pinochet and the Nazis 45:32

1
Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot 16:49

1
Israel's War of Opportunity 49:43

1
Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more 12:09

1
Close Readings: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg 34:01

1
Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg 32:13