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. Consequences, real and

lasting consequences, are pretty rare in British politics, but the long-deserved

and long-anticipated fall of Peter Mandelson, a story which has dominated the political news,

does look like someone actually getting at least a fraction of the comeuppance that he so richly

deserves. You will, of course, doubtless be familiar with the context. The US government

released a vast new tranche of files, 3 million or so of them relating to Jeffrey Epstein,

the financier, paedophile, abuser and sex trafficker. Much of that archive is still yet to really

be examined in great detail and there is more yet unseen.

But what it reveals very clearly is a vast, squalid and sordid influence network

in which wealthy and powerful men pathetically attempt to ingratiate themselves before Epstein's vast wealth,

find ways to advance their private agendas and gratify themselves with coerced and trafficked

women and girls. Peter Mandelson was close to Epstein and it was a relationship that persisted

while he was Lord President of the Council and First Secretary of State in Gordon Brown's government,

that is de facto deputy prime minister. And he persisted in that friendship even after

...