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.

For my entire adult life, migration has been a central and perhaps obsessively central issue in British politics.

It has driven some of the most consequential changes in the country, including Brexit and the rise of Nigel Farage's reform.

Both Labour and Conservatives spasmodically attempt to outdo each other on ostentatious cruelty to asylum seekers and migrants.

The famous Labour controls on

immigration mugs being a case in point. Towards the end of Rishi Sunak's tenure,

his government was beset by the small boats crisis, migrants making the channel

crossing in dinghies and typically claiming asylum on arrival. This intensely

dangerous method of crossing, which bears some parallels with

the risks taken by migrants crossing into Europe using sea routes, often relying on rescue

by coast cards or volunteers, that rescue, of course, doesn't always arrive. When Labour came

into power, they vowed to smash the gangs, they say are responsible for the small boat's

crisis. But the numbers haven't yet changed substantially. Meanwhile, asylum and illegal migration, and particularly asylum

hotels, have become flashpoints for local grievance and sporadic violence. As is often

...