Best K Ree Roberts Podcasts (2025)

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Novel Approaches: 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens 34:09

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1d ago34:09

34:09

Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens went on to write four more lucrative Christmas books in the 1840s. But in many ways, this ‘ghost story of Christmas’ couldn’t be less Christmassy. The …

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Love and Death: Samuel Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mick Imlah 16:55

3d ago16:55

16:55

Samuel Johnson’s doctor, Robert Levet, had piecemeal medical knowledge at best, was described as an ‘an obscure practiser in physick’ by James Boswell and was only paid for his work with gin. Yet for Johnson this eccentric man deserved a poetic tribute for demonstrating ‘the power of the art without show’, a phrase that could as much describe the p…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: A Taxonomy 15:46

8d ago15:46

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Though the last twelve episodes have taken Marina Warner and her interlocutors through many worlds and texts, no series could ever encompass the full scope of fantastic literature. This episode, recorded live at Swedenborg House, is an attempt to fill the gaps, or fail heroically. Marina and Adam Thirlwell are joined by Edwin Frank, editorial direc…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf 18:58

17d ago18:58

18:58

In 1908, Virginia Woolf wrote that she hoped to revolutionise the novel and ‘capture multitudes of things at present fugitive’. ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927) marks perhaps her fullest realisation of the novel as philosophical enterprise, and not simply because one of its central characters is engaged with the problem of ‘subject and object and the nat…

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Novel Approaches: ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ by Thomas Hardy 13:39

24d ago13:39

13:39

After drunkenly selling his wife and child at auction, a young Michael Henchard resolves to live differently – and does so, skyrocketing from impoverished haytrusser to mayor of his adoptive town. Every unexpected disaster and sudden reversal in The Mayor of Casterbridge stems from its opening, in a plot which draws as much from realist fiction as …

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Next Year on Close Readings: Realism, Nature, Narrative Poems and a history of London 16:41

26d ago16:41

16:41

We’re pleased to announce our four new Close Readings series starting in January next year: ‘Who’s Afraid of Realism?’ with James Wood and guests ‘Nature in Crisis’ with Meehan Crist and Peter Godfrey-Smith ‘Narrative Poems’ with Seamus Perry and Mark Ford ‘London Revisited’ with Rosemary Hill and guests Bonus Series: 'The Man Behind the Curtain’ w…

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Love and Death: Thom Gunn and Paul Muldoon 17:36

1M ago17:36

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Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despite loosening his early formalism after absorbing the work of the New American Poets, Gunn’s vision of the poet was not as a confessional diarist but rather a careful stylist of well-wrought verse drawin…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Two Novels by Ursula K. Le Guin 14:03

1M ago14:03

14:03

When the polymorphous writer Ursula K. Le Guin died in 2018, she left behind novels, short stories, poetry, essays, manifestos and French and Chinese translations. The huge and loyal readership among children and older readers that she built during her lifetime has only grown since her death, as has recognition of her work as ‘serious’ literature. …

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Sovereignty of Good' by Iris Murdoch 13:55

2M ago13:55

13:55

Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clearly and justly she comes to accept and even appreciate the younger woman. For Iris Murdoch this is an example of moral labour, the struggle to achieve virtue that is understood intu…

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Novel Approaches: ‘Kidnapped’ by Robert Louis Stevenson 17:06

2M ago17:06

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Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped began life serialised in a children’s magazine, but its sophistication and depth won the lifelong admiration of Henry James. Set in the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite rising, Kidnapped follows young lowlander David Balfour’s flight across the Highlands with the rebel Alan Breck Stewart. In Stevenson’s hands, a str…

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Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Auden, Arnold and Schuyler 15:01

2M ago15:01

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When poets elegise other poets, the results are often more about self-scrutiny and analysis of the nature of poetry than about grief. Matthew Arnold commented on his elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Thyrsis’ (1865), that ‘one has the feeling that not enough is said about Clough in it.’ In his elegy for W.B. Yeats (1939), Auden insists that ‘poetry ma…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter 14:59

2M ago14:59

14:59

J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter were friends and co-conspirators in their witness to the postwar world and the liberation movements of the 1960s. Both were scathing in their antipathy towards the polite novels of manners and empire that still dominated English readers’ appreciation and expectations. Pioneers in the liminal spaces between literary an…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Fall' by Albert Camus 15:49

2M ago15:49

15:49

Never trust anyone who tries to be ethically pure. This is the message of Albert Camus’s short novel La Chute (The Fall), in which a retired French lawyer tells a stranger in a bar in Amsterdam about a series of incidents that led to a profound personal crisis. The self-described ‘judge-penitent’ had once thought himself to be morally irreproachabl…

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Novel Approaches: ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ by Henry James 14:38

3M ago14:38

14:38

In The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James borrows from Eliot, Austen, folktales and potboilers, but ‘the thing that he took from nowhere was Isabel Archer’. James transformed the 19th-century novel through his evocation of Isabel, a woman who wants and suffers in a profoundly new (and American) way. Deborah Friedell and Colm Toíbín join Tom to discuss…

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Love and Death: 'Surge' by Jay Bernard and 'In Nearby Bushes' by Kei Miller 16:07

3M ago16:07

16:07

Jay Bernard’s 'Surge' and Kei Miller’s 'In Nearby Bushes', both published in 2019, address acts of violence whose victims were not directly known to the writers: in Surge, the deaths of thirteen Black teenagers in the New Cross Fire of 1981; in Miller’s poem, a series of rapes and murders in Jamaica. Both can be seen as collective elegies, interlea…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington 16:31

3M ago16:31

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Leonora Carrington was a prodigious artist closely associated with major surrealists of the 1930s. Though only sporadically in print until recently, her writing has helped cement her cult status, not least The Hearing Trumpet (1974). Before her family consign her to an old-age facility, nonagenarian Marian Leatherby is gifted a hearing trumpet with…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Ethics of Ambiguity' by Simone de Beauvoir 15:44

3M ago15:44

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At the heart of human existence is a tragic ambiguity: the fact that we experience ourselves both as subject and object, internal and external, at the same time, and can never fully inhabit either state. In her 1947 book, Simone de Beauvoir addresses the ethical implications of this uncertainty and the ‘agonising evidence of freedom’ it presents, a…

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Novel Approaches: ‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope 17:07

4M ago17:07

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Trollope enthusiasts Tom Crewe and Dinah Birch say they could have chosen any one of his 47 novels for this episode, so it’s no wonder Elizabeth Bowen called him ‘the most sheerly able of the Victorian novelists’. They settled on The Last Chronicle of Barset: a model example of Anthony Trollope’s gift for comedy, pathos, social commentary and maste…

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Love and Death: ‘Poems of 1912-13’ by Thomas Hardy 14:13

4M ago14:13

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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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Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges 13:55

4M ago13:55

13:55

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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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions' by Jean-Paul Sartre 16:07

4M ago16:07

16:07

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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Novel Approaches: 'Our Mutual Friend' by Charles Dickens 18:12

5M ago18:12

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'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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Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson 14:32

5M ago14:32

14:32

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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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley 33:15

5M ago33:15

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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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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Thing' by Martin Heidegger 16:16

5M ago16:16

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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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Novel Approaches: ‘The Mill on the Floss’ by George Eliot 17:34

6M ago17:34

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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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Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more 12:54

6M ago12:54

12:54

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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Fiction and the Fantastic: Mikhail Bulgakov and James Hogg 32:58

6M ago32:58

32:58

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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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Will to Believe' by William James 18:14

6M ago18:14

18:14

Most of what we believe we believe on faith, even those beliefs we hold to be based on scientific fact. This assertion lies at the heart of William James’s essay ‘The Will to Believe’, originally delivered as a lecture and intended not so much as a defence of religion as an attack on anti-religion. James’s target was the ‘rugged and manly school of…

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Novel Approaches: 'Aurora Leigh' by Elizabeth Barrett Browning 18:40

6M ago18:40

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‘I want to write a poem of a new class — a Don Juan, without the mockery and impurity,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote to a friend in 1844, ‘and admitting of as much philosophical dreaming and digression (which is in fact a characteristic of the age) as I like to use.’ The poem she had in mind turned out to be her verse novel, Aurora Leigh, publi…

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Love and Death: 'In Memoriam' by Tennyson 13:13

7M ago13:13

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Tennyson described 'In Memoriam' as ‘rather the cry of the whole human race than mine’, and the poem achieved widespread acclaim as soon as it was published in 1850, cited by Queen Victoria as her habitual reading after the death of Prince Albert. Its subject is the death in 1833 of Tennyson’s friend Arthur Hallam at the age of 22, and in its 131 s…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen 15:50

7M ago15:50

15:50

‘With Potocki,’ Italo Calvino wrote, ‘we can understand that the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together.’ The gothic is a central seam of the fantastic, and in this episode Marina and Adam turn to two writers in that mode who lived over a hundred years ap…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Schopenhauer as Educator' by Friedrich Nietzsche 30:26

7M ago30:26

30:26

For Nietzsche, Schopenhauer’s genius lay not in his ideas but in his heroic indifference, a thinker whose value to the world is as a liberator rather than a teacher, who shows us what philosophy is really for: to forget what we already know. ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ was written in 1874, when Nietzsche was 30, and was published in a collection wit…

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Novel Approaches: ‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell 25:49

7M ago25:49

25:49

In North and South (1855), Margaret Hale is uprooted from her sleepy New Forest town and must adapt to life in the industrial north. Through her relationships with mill workers and a slow-burn romance with the self-made capitalist John Thornton, she is forced to reassess her assumptions about justice and propriety. At the heart of the novel are a s…

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Love and Death: Self-Elegies by Plath, Larkin, Hardy and more 14:50

8M ago14:50

14:50

Philip Larkin was terrified of death from an early age; Thomas Hardy contemplated what the neighbours would say after he had gone; and Sylvia Plath imagined her own death in vivid and controversial ways. The genre of self-elegy, in which poets have reflected on their own passing, is a small but eloquent one in the history of English poetry. In this…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Franz Kafka 16:51

8M ago16:51

16:51

In the stories of Franz Kafka we find the fantastical wearing the most ordinary, realist dress. Though haunted by abjection and failure, Kafka has come to embody the power and potential of literary imagination in the 20th century as it confronts the nightmares of modernity. In this episode, Marina Warner is joined by Adam Thirlwell to discuss the w…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'My Station and Its Duties' by F.H. Bradley 15:29

8M ago15:29

15:29

T.S. Eliot claimed that he learned his prose style from reading F.H. Bradley, and the poet wrote his PhD on the English philosopher at Harvard. Bradley’s life was remarkably unremarkable, as he spent his entire career as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, where his only obligation was not to get married. Yet in over fifty years of slow, meticulous…

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Novel Approaches: 'Vanity Fair' by William Makepeace Thackeray 33:37

8M ago33:37

33:37

Thackeray's comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout the book, not least in the proliferation of hapless characters called George, yet he also draws heavily on his childhood experiences to unfold a complex…

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Love and Death: Elegies for Poets by Berryman, Lowell and Bishop 12:56

9M ago12:56

12:56

The confessional poets of the mid-20th century considered themselves a ‘doomed’ generation, with a cohesive identity and destiny. Their intertwining personal lives were laid bare in their work, and Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Elizabeth Bishop returned repeatedly to the elegy to commemorate old friends and settle old scores.In this episode, Mar…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll 16:26

9M ago16:26

16:26

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange books, a testament to their author’s defiant unconventionality. Through them, Lewis Carroll transformed popular culture, our everyday idioms and our ideas of childhood and the fantastic, and they remain enormously popular. Anna Della Subin joins Marina Warner to explore the …

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Autobiography' by John Stuart Mill 14:58

9M ago14:58

14:58

Mill’s 'Autobiography' was considered too shocking to publish while he was alive. Behind his musings on many of the philosophical and political preoccupations of his time lie the confessions of a deeply repressed man who knows that he’s deeply repressed, coming to terms with the uncompromising educational experiment his father subjected him to as a…

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Novel Approaches: ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë 27:23

9M ago27:23

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When Wuthering Heights was published in December 1847, many readers didn’t know what to make of it: one reviewer called it ‘a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors’. In this episode of ‘Novel Approaches’, Patricia Lockwood and David Trotter join Thomas Jones to explore Emily Brontë’s ‘completely amoral’ novel. As well as questions of H…

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Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray 16:06

9M ago16:06

16:06

Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino 16:20

10M ago16:20

16:20

Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities is a hypnagogic reimagining of Marco Polo’s time in the court of Kublai Khan. Polo describes 55 impossible places – cities made of plumbing, free-floating, overwhelmed by rubbish, buried underground – that reveal something true about every city. Marina and Anna Della read Invisible Cities alongside the Trave…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'Circles' and other essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson 15:55

10M ago15:55

15:55

Circular reasoning is normally condemned by philosophers, but in his 1841 essay ‘Circles’, Emerson proposes that not getting anywhere is precisely what we need to do to find out where we already are. In this episode, Jonathan and James consider Emerson’s use of the circle to demonstrate an idealistic philosophy rooted in the natural world, in which…

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Novel Approaches: 'Crotchet Castle' by Thomas Love Peacock 36:57

10M ago36:57

36:57

Thomas Love Peacock didn’t want to write novels, at least not in the form they had taken in the first half of the 19th century. In Crotchet Castle he rejects the expectation that novelists should reveal the interiority of their characters, instead favouring the testing of opinions and ideas. His ‘novel of talk’, published in 1831, appears largely l…

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Love and Death: Elegies for children by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop 14:22

10M ago14:22

14:22

This episode looks at four poems whose subject would seem to lie beyond words: the death of a child. A defining feature of elegy is the struggle between poetic eloquence and inarticulate grief, and in these works by Ben Jonson, Anne Bradstreet, Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop we find that tension at its most acute. Mark and Seamus consider the w…

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Fiction and the Fantastic: ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift 16:26

11M ago16:26

16:26

Jonathan Swift’s 1726 tale of Houyhnhnms, Yahoos, Lilliputians and Struldbruggs is normally seen as a satire. But what if it’s read as fantasy, and all its contradictions, inversions and reversals as an echo of the traditional starting point of Arabic fairytale: ‘It was and it was not’? In this episode Marina and Anna Della discuss Gulliver’s Trave…

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Conversations in Philosophy: 'The Essence of Christianity' by Ludwig Feuerbach 11:14

11M ago11:14

11:14

In The Essence of Christianity (1841) Feuerbach works through the theological crisis of his age to articulate the central, radical idea of 19th-century atheism: that the religion of God is really the religion of humanity. In this episode, Jonathan and James discuss the ways in which the book applies this thought to various aspects of Christian doct…

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Novel Approaches: ‘Mansfield Park’ by Jane Austen 32:38

11M ago32:38

32:38

On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel is also a shrewd study of speculation, ‘improvement’ and the transformative power of money. In the first episode of Novel Approaches, Colin Burrow…