This episode is sponsored by the new Color Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,

which looks at the way scientific breakthroughs in the Victorian period enabled dramatic changes in the use of colour,

in fashion, painting and other objects.

You can hear one of the exhibition's curators, Charlotte Rieberon, a professor of 19th century British literature at the Sorbonne,

explaining more about the exhibition and some of the objects and ideas it explores

in a special mini-episode in our podcast feed.

Music You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

Later in this episode, I'll be asking John Lancaster about his first encounters with the LRB as a reader of the paper.

But before that, I'm joined by Patricia Lockwood,

poet, novelist, memoirist, and contributing editor at the LRB,

who has written the diary in the latest issue of the paper about meeting the Pope.

In June this year, she was one of 200 or so artists invited to an audience with Pope Francis in the Sistine Chapel to mark the 50th anniversary of

the inauguration of the Vatican Museum's collection of modern art. In her LRB diary, she describes the

encounter and also her adventures in Rome before and afterwards, with her friend Hope, who she

refers to in the piece as her lady's companion. Column Tabine, writing in the LRB in 2021,

looked back over Jorge Mario Bergolyo's career as a Jesuit priest in Argentina

during the dictatorship as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires

and as Pope Francis,

and described him as always hard to pin down on any matter.

Patricia Lockwood didn't pin the Pope down,

though she did hold on to his hands

for longer than he perhaps wanted. Hello, Patricia, and thank you very much for joining me today

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