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. So, You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm joined this

week by Daniel Trilling. He's

the author of Lights in the Distance, Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe, and Bloody, Nasty People,

The Rise of Britain's Far Right. And he has a piece in the latest issue of the LRB on the global

resurgence of right-wing nationalism. It's a review of disaster nationalism, the downfall of liberal

civilization by Richard Seymour. Hello, Daniel, and thank you so much for talking with me today.

Hi, Tom, thanks for inviting me. The headline on the piece, I know that we put the headline on,

but the headline on the piece is, is this fascism? I suppose before answering that question,

we have to ask what is fascism.

And you quote the historian in Kershaw, Hitler's biographer, to the effect that trying to define fascism is like trying to nail jelly to a wall, but we still have to try.

So what are some of the different possible answers to the question, what is fascism?

Yeah, I mean, that is the question that I wanted to

frame the piece for reasons that I hope are obvious when you read it. But maybe it's worth just

explaining how I came to be asking that question and writing that piece, because for me,

it was, you know, trying to analyse what's happening politically at the moment is obviously

important, but I have been writing about far right politics for more than 15 years now. So I

...