You're listening to the LLB podcast. I'm Malin Hay.

This week I'm joined by not one but two contributing editors to the paper, both of whom will be well known to regular listeners of the podcast.

Tom Crewe has worked at the LRB since 2015, during which time he's written 45 pieces for the paper on politics, history, literature and art, as well as a novel, The New Life, which won the 2023 Allwell Prize for political fiction.

James Butler came to the LRB from Novara, the media organisation he co-founded in 2012, and he's written for us since 2016, mostly on politics, but also on Italo Calvino,

exorcisms, the Bible, and much more. And he presents the LLB's fortnightly on politics

podcast. But we're not here to talk politics today, or at least we're not here to talk party

politics, but rather to discuss James and Tom's pieces in the most recent issue of the LRB.

To my mind, they speak to one another and raise interesting questions about each other,

even though the subject matter and time periods they discuss are rather different.

The first, by Tom, discusses a recent exhibition of the work of the French Impressionist painter Gustave Kaibaut.

The exhibition's title, Kaibot Painting Men, is also the work of the French impressionist painter Gustave Kaibaut. The exhibition's title,

Kaibot, Painting Men, is also the title of the catalogue, edited by Scott Allen, Gloria Groom and Paul Perrin. But it was changed during the exhibition's run to Gustave Kaibot

painting his world, a change which I'm sure we'll touch on during our discussion.

It's also a review of the book

Kaibot, Painting as a Serious Game by Amory Chardot. James's piece is a review of Noel Malcolm's

new history book, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, Male, Male Sexual Relations 1400 to

1750. The reason I think these two pieces work so well together is because they both grapple

provocatively with the question of queer identity in pre-20th century Europe, and particularly

with the types of male-male interactions, relationships and desires that now come under the umbrella

of gay relations. It's a matter of historical debate, to what extent there

even was such an identity before the modern age. And both of these pieces have a lot of interesting

things to say about the ways we as modern interpreters, and particularly as in both Tom's and

...