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, a new strand of the LRB podcast.

I'm James Butler, a contributing editor here at the London Review of Books.

The Conservative Party is one of the oldest and most successful political parties in the world.

It has often considered itself and been considered by much of the press and the establishment,

the natural party of government, so much so

that it is inclined to a collective nervous breakdown when out of power. However, modified and adapted

by Tony Blair, we still live in a political framework fundamentally sat down by the last great

Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In its near two centuries of existence, the party has

survived through sometimes protean adaptability and a certain ruthlessness about electoral liabilities. It has,

at times been split bitterly on questions of free trade and, more recently, Europe. Yet it

always seems to have recovered its strength. Nobody in British politics ever made any money

by betting on the death of the Conservative Party.

And yet, the succession of prime ministers in the party's last years in number 10

...