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.

... You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm talking to Andy Beckett about some of the connections between Pinochet's Chile,

Nazi Germany and Thatcher's Britain. Andy Beckett is a guardian columnist and the author of several books, including Pinochet and Piccadilly, Britain and Chile's Hidden History, which has just been

reissued. His recent piece for the LRB, which we're going to be talking about today, is a review

of 38

Londres Street on impunity Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands.

Hello, Andean, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. So 38 laundras was the

address in Santiago of a notorious torture site of the Pinochet regime.

The Nazi of Philip Zanz's subtitle is Valta Ralph.

Maybe you could tell us to start with who he was, how he ended up in Chile,

and what his connection was the Pinnishay's regime of torture.

So Ralph was a colonel in the SS during the Second World War,

and he played a kind of notorious part in the Holocaust.

He helped to design and oversee a program that gassed people in vans,

...