Hello, I'm James Wood, and this year on the LRB's Close Reading's podcast, I'm asking,

Who's Afraid of Realism? I'll be taking a range of great novels and short stories,

from Flobe's Madame Bovary and Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, up to more recent works

by Amit Chowdhury and Gwendolyn Riley. And I'll be examining what makes and makes

for the real. How does realism produce its effects? What's the difference between artifice

and artificiality? And who is and has been afraid of realism and why? The series starts with

two episodes on Madame Bovary, which you can listen to right now,

and in the third episode I'll be talking to Adam Thurlwell about Dostoevsky. You can find a link in

the description or search close readings wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to the LRB podcast, I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to John

Galaher about how news would spread

through Europe in the early modern period. John Galaher is a historian of language, education,

and migration at Leeds University, though he's currently in Addis Ababa, learning Amharic.

His piece in the latest issue of the LRB is a review of two books, Postal Intelligence, the Tassi's

Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Medura, and The Great

Exchange, Making the News in Early Modern Europe by Jod Raymond Wren. Hello, John, and thank you so

much for joining me. Hi, Tom, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So here we are,

thousands of miles apart, but having a conversation more or less as if we were in the same room,

and people all around the world will be able to listen to us within seconds of this podcast episode being uploaded. And that speed of communication essentially instantaneous

is something we mostly take for granted these

days, for better or worse, but once upon a time, of course, and in the period you write about

in your piece, information, as you put it, could move no faster than the bodies that carried it,

and those bodies being mostly people on horseback. So how fast was that? So you've got, I think, about as fast as you can ride a horse for about two hours before

...