Hello and welcome to the LRB podcast, I'm Thomas Jones.

Regular listeners may be expecting to hear Alan Bennett reading his

diary for the year. I'm sorry to say that isn't to be since, for the first time, since 1982,

the LRB is not carrying extracts from Alan Bennett's diary this year. He says that his life is so dull,

he won't inflict it on readers. If it suddenly gets more interesting, he promises

he'll let us know. So instead, today we're going to continue our series talking to some of our

contributors about their favourite pieces by other writers from the LRB Archive. To start with,

we'll be hearing from Tom Crewe, Patricia Lockwood and Deborah Friedel. And then in the second half,

you can listen back to three conversations we run at the end of previous episodes with John Lancaster, Rosemary Hill, and Column

Tabine, who, as it happens, chooses a piece by Alan Bennett. But first, here's Tom Crewe.

So Tom, how did you first encounter the London Review of Books?

Well, I was at university, and I had a friend who had a, I'm sorry to say, a large, very large stack of unopened London Review of Books on her chair.

And perhaps some readers are familiar with this experience. I hope not. But there was

this pile and she said, oh, God, I can't get around to reading these. But it is great. It's a great

magazine, but I can't get around to reading them? And so I said, oh, can I take some of them off your

hands? And I did. And I remember sitting and reading them in bed and being sort of

astounded by the quality of it and the quality in both senses, the quality of the writing, but also

the quality of the magazine, the fact that it said different things in different ways and

covered different subjects from what I was used to reading

at the time, certainly in much more depth and with much more zest than the newspapers.

So I was immediately attracted by that form, the essay form as it was practiced in the LRB,

and I was a reader from then on, and that's about 15 years ago.

...