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.

Music You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast, I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm joined by David Trotter, who has a piece in the last issue of the LRB on golf. We're going to be talking about the history of golf, the role that fantasy

plays in the sport, and whether golf can be framed as a commentary on an era of rampant techno-narcissism.

David Trotter is an emeritus professor of English literature at Cambridge,

whose books include the uses of phobia, essays on literature and film, and brute meaning,

essays in materialist criticism from Dickens to Hitchcock, several of which were first published

in the LRB. Last time I spoke to him on the podcast, it was along with Patricia Lockwood,

and we were talking about Wuthering Heights for our close reading series novel approaches.

But it's just me and David today. Without wigs, Patricia was notoriously wearing a wig in that

podcast, a wig made for radio. Hello, David, and thank you very much for talking with me today.

Hello, hi.

You did suggest when we were talking about what to discuss on this episode

that if we were going to wear wigs,

they would probably have to be a Trump-style a comb over.

...