Hello, I'm Thomas Jones, host of the LRB podcast, and before we begin today's episode,

I'd like to tell you about Bluettes, a play opening next month at the Royal Court Theatre in London,

starring Ben Wishaw, Emma Darcy and Kayla Michael.

Based on Maggie Nelson's book, Bluettes is a meditation on love and grief,

a story about depression and desire, pleasure and pain,

and a person obsessed with the colour blue.

It's adapted for the stage by Margaret Perry

and directed by Katie Mitchell,

and it runs at the Royal Court

from the 17th of May to the 29th of June.

Click on the link in the description to book tickets.

Music Click on the link in the description to book tickets. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm joined today by my colleague Tom Crewe, a contributing editor at the LRB, whose first novel, The New Life, now out in paperback, won the 2023 All-World Prize for Political Fiction and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

He wrote recently in the LRB about the last two men to be executed for sodomy in Britain,

and the piece is a review of James and John,

a true story of prejudice and murder by Chris Bryant.

Hello, Tom, and thank you very much for talking with me today.

It's great to be here.

So, I suppose, first question, who were James and John?

Who were James Pratt and John Smith? And how did they come to be put on trial and executed for doing

what presumably thousands of men were doing every day? Well, they were both very humble men. They

had both been employed as servants at the time of their arrest.

James Pratt was a servant and John Smith was a labourer, though in fact they were both out of work.

...