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.

Thank you. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and this week I'm joined by Jackson Lears, Professor of History at Rutgers University and editor-in-chief of Reratan Quarterly, whose most recent book is

Animal Spirits, The American Pursuit of Vitality, from Camp Meeting to Wall Street. He has a piece

in the current issue of the LRB on President Ronald Reagan. It's a review of Reagan,

His Life and Legend by Max Boot. Hello, Jackson, and thank you very much for speaking

with me today. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. So you begin your piece with

Reagan's death, nearly 20 years ago now, more than 20 years ago even, in 2004 at the age of 93, when the economist,

as you say, remembered him on its cover with some hyperbole or maybe just wild inaccuracy

as the man who beat communism. There are people whose legends begin when their lives end,

but with Reagan, the legend seems to have been there all along.

And to a large extent, it was a legend that he created himself.

I think that's actually correct. He learned how to do it in the Hollywood of the 1930s and

1940s. He inhaled that atmosphere. It was the America that he believed actually existed, the one that was being presented

in Frank Capra movies and the like in the 1930s and the 1940s, the upbeat response to the

...