All Episodes
Public — 160 episodes
Why is Google releasing millions of infected mosquitoes?
The Jackpod: Mindless
Little Happier: A Valuable Lesson in Happiness from the 2014 London Tube Strike
Myths to nourish your life: poetry with Ian McMillan and Angie Hobbs, Rishi Dastidar, Bradley Taylor, Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
Douglas Stuart
The Great Political Fictions: The Years
Harry Kane
How To Write In Meter 101
Satire and Gulliver's Travels
America’s Orwell
Can sport survive AI?
Ducks in the sea?
Why do we fixate on the human face?
Madam War Criminal: 'Serbia's Iron lady' unrepentant at 95
The inspiration for Chekhov's Three Sisters
Andrew Hunter Murray: How to Write Fiction Incredibly Well | How I Write
Picasso and the Surrealist summer
The Great Political Fictions: The Human Factor
Anouchka Grose & Katherine Angel: The Revolution Will be Internalised
Brian Epstein & the Beatles - what he did and what he hid
Little Happier: A Skyscraper Crisis Holds a Valuable (and True) Lesson
The Fearsome Ruler of Catholic Ireland: John Charles McQuaid (Part 2)
Andrea Bajani Reads “Constellation”
Maggie O'Farrell
Best Of: Novelist Maggie O’Farrell / A personal history of the N-Word
PEL Presents Closereads: Horkheimer and Adorno on The Odyssey (Part One)
Wealth
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on Mattering
The creation of Inspector Montalbano
Rosebud in NYC - Fran Lebowitz
The Pursuit of Happiness with Death, Sex and Money
Can mosquitoes get drunk?
Joseph Roth
Zena Hitz: Gulliver's Travels and the Failures of Human Understanding
Beloved by Toni Morrison - rerun
Ian Bremmer on the Risks America Poses to the World
The first Irish language television channel
Cleopatra picked by Kate Williams
Maggie O'Farrell
466: Margaret Drabble in conversation with Charlotte Metcalf
The Jackpod: Catastrophe-proofing AI
Jamil Jan Kochai Reads “The Twice-Widowed Khala Helai”
Han Ong Reads Lyudmila Ulitskaya
Little Happier: The Hard Lesson I Learned from My Daughter’s Tattoo
The Fearsome Ruler of Catholic Ireland: John Charles McQuaid (Part 1)
The Verb at the Hay Festival
Taiye Selasi Reads “Firstborn Immigrant Daughter”
Aftershock: Patrick Cockburn, Laleh Khalili & Tom Stevenson
Book Club: Let's Talk About 'Transcription,' by Ben Lerner
How Daniel Lanois made those adventurous records with Dylan, U2 and Willie Nelson
Will Self
Why is popcorn a cinema snack?
Pedro Sanchez, Spain's defiant PM
Coolness
Is philosophy becoming irrelevant? | Mary Midgley
Yuval Noah Harari on Donald Trump’s Core Delusion
Nick Lowe’s miracle payday, Rock feuds and a giant inflatable Jarvis
The Jackpod: Bearing his pain silently
Mythmaking at Hay: from Medea to Rasputin
Little Happier: When We Give More to Ourselves, We Can Ask More from Ourselves
Dark nights of the Soul, Brian Bilston, JH Prynne, Daljit Nagra, William Blake and Martha Sprackland
Deborah Levy
Jeanette Winterson: One Aladdin, Two Lamps
What was the Dalkey Atmospheric Railway?
Tony Lee Moral, "A Century of Hitchcock: The Man, the Myths, the Legacy" (UP of Kentucky, 2026)
How do football commentators remember players?
The World of Words: editing, typography and print
Rob Burley on the BBC’s Culture Wars: Trans Coverage and Due Impartiality
Lea Ypi: Dignity, Fiction, and the Lives History Erases
Tom Segura: How to Tell Jokes | How I Write
The Damned at 50 and the memories (and regrets) of Rat Scabies
Roddy Doyle on a lifetime of writing the characters of Dublin
The Last Days of Stephen Colbert's 'Late Show'
143: Winnicott: Creativity and Subjectivity, Part I
Stressed? Try one of these quick resets
Ep. 390: Diderot Debates a Cynic (Part Two)
Chang-rae Lee Reads “Standings”
Emily Thornberry
Lynne Tillman & Brian Dillon: Thrilled to Death
Remembering symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas
‘The Book Review’ Podcast Turns 20
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum Reads Joan Silber
Jeremy Corbyn
Why has my bagel got a hole in it?
Shelter and Storm: Arundhati Roy on Writing Her Mother
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on The Mattering Instinct
Peter Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment
George Herbert
56: Danielle McLaughlin
Ep. 390: Diderot Debates a Cynic (Part One)
Behind the News: Elon’s World w/ Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff
The case for thinking like a child
A Little Happier: Do You Agree: Pregnancy and Volcanoes Seem Anachronistic
Sarah Perry & Amy Key: Death of an Ordinary Man
Kvetched in Stone: The Art of Epigram Pt. 1
Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Reads “Process of Elimination”
How to Stop Fighting with Your Family About Clutter
Patricia Lockwood & Joe Dunthorne: Will There Ever Be Another You
Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle
How to build your AI agent
The Pope and the President
What colour is his ball?
David Szalay
George Saunders, “Vigil,” 2026
Slavoj Žižek on quantum history and the end of the past
Feeling drained? Here's how to lighten your mental load
Robert Harrison on Death, Logos, and Technology
A Little Happier: Don’t Look Before You Take That Bite
Andy Kershaw & Dylan’s jar of jam plus the things people do to get gigs
How to fight burnout
Thomas McGuane Reads “Ordinary Wear and Tear”
In Ireland, why do we find it so hard to make progress on infrastructure?
Ian Patterson & Ali Smith: Books – A Manifesto
The Time Loop Book Series You Should Be Reading
American democracy's structural flaw
Extended Families
Why is the luggage all over the place?
Dadaism
Kant and religion
Ben Lerner on Transcription
Stephen Grosz & Helen MacDonald: Love’s Labour
456: Sebastian Faulks at the Oldie Literary Lunch
Poetry Anthologies
Discipline
How they ruined philosophy | Babette Babich, Genia Schönbaumsfeld, and Christoph Schuringa
Roddy Doyle: Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald - rerun
A Little Happier: How I Found My Way to a Beautiful Piece of Music
Orbán's defeat is not a liberal victory
The Jackpod: Democracy by lottery
Challenges and solutions
Douglas Stuart Reads "A Private View"
Orwell’s War: The Nightmare (1938-39)
Viktor Orbán
Fareed Zakaria on the Moral Cost of Trump’s War
Spotting the psychopaths, sadists and narcissists in our lives and how to get rid of them
Give your to-do list a makeover
Daniel Defoe, writer and spy
Patrick Radden Keefe: How to Write Captivating Stories | How I Write
Closer Look: Levinas, On Escape
What it takes to get a book published
The Jackpod: Dad Gummit!
Catherine Lacey Reads "Rate Your Happiness"
The Jackpod: Naked to our enemy
Cassandra Neyenesch Reads "Enough for Now"
Episode 161- Mason Currey on Making Art and Making a Living
Souvankham Thammavongsa Reads "Floating"
Richard E Grant
Mary Gaitskill Reads “Something Familiar”
Valeria Luiselli Reads "Predictions and Presentiments"
Allegra Goodman Reads "Deal-Breaker"
Nell Zink Reads "The Welfare State"
Sir David Hare
Melvyn Bragg
Simon Armitage, The Poet Laureate
Pam Ayres
Sir Michael Palin
Rory Sutherland
Maggie O'Farrell, writer
Rory Sutherland with Katy Brand