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.

We must build our hard power because that is the currency of the age.

We must be able to deter aggression.

And yes, if necessary, we must be ready to fight.

So said Kirstama in his speech to the Munich Security Conference on the 14th of February.

A happy Valentine's Day for BIA systems, perhaps.

He was followed the next day by British and German chiefs of defence making

the same argument in an editorial in The Guardian. They're not alone in that conviction. Not long

after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Olaf Schultz declared the moment a Zeiten vendor, a monumental

turning point in international affairs.

In this reading, which I think also underlay Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's recent

speech declaring the end of the liberal world order, Russia's exertion against Europe, the rise

of Chinese power and the instability of the American Empire entails the return of a more

militarised, conflict-prone and zero-sum world.

...