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.

Hello, you're listening to On Politics on the LRB podcast. I am James Butler, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

Who runs Britain? In a much-talked about intervention just before Labour Party conference, the mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, suggested the answer was the bond markets.

And it's not hard to see his point,

not least because the response to most ambitious social democratic politics is that the markets,

like an ill-tempered god, won't like it. And however reasonable one finds Liz Truss, and I do,

her spectacular crash-out from government was catalyzed by a bond market reaction to her budget plans. Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves's answer to Burnham is simply that the bond markets aren't

going anywhere and the government must do all it can to retain their confidence. So they certainly

sound powerful. And in the background is a difficult picture. The upward creep of UK borrowing costs

and the sporadic mini-crisies that seem to afflict the country's economy. Our debt to GDP ratio

hovers around 100%. Inflation has bitten sharply, I think, for all of us over the last few years.

The government is pretty strongly hemmed in by fiscal rules that it's adopted for itself,

and it fears changing them because it fears that they will act as a market signal. The British economy,

and especially real wages, seem to me like they've been basically dead in the water for more or less

...