‘OK, that’s that. It’s over now,’ Björn Ulvaeus thought after Abba broke up in 1982. ‘But,’ as Chal Ravens writes in the latest LRB, ‘Björn’s zeitgeist detector was, as usual, on the blink.’ By the late 1990s, Abba ‘were basically tap water’. In the latest episode of the LRB podcast, Chal joins Thomas Jones to discuss the foursome’s rise to global domination from distinctly Swedish origins, and whether the arc of history bends towards disco.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/abbamaniapod

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Get a copy of the new edition of Pellegrino Artusi’s groundbreaking cookbook from Toronto Univer​​​​​​​sity Press: https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802086570

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Neal Ascherson has worked as a journalist for more than six decades, reporting from Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, its successor states and elsewhere. He has also written more than a hundred pieces for the London Review of Books, from its seventh issue (in February 1980) to its most recent. In this episode of the LRB podcast, Ascherson talks to Thomas Jones about his recent piece on the journalist Claud Cockburn and about his own life and career, from his time as propaganda secretary for the Uganda National Congress to the moment he witnessed preparations for the kidnapping of Mikhail Gorbachev in Crimea but ‘missed the scoop of a lifetime’.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/aschersonpod

Listen to Neal Ascherson deliver the 2012 LRB Winter Lecture: https://lrb.me/aschersonwl

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This week on the LRB Podcast, a free episode from one of our Close Readings series. For their final conversation Among the Ancients, Emily Wilson and Thomas Jones turn to the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Said by Machiavelli to be the last of the ‘five good emperors’ who ruled Rome for most of the second century CE, Marcus oversaw devastating wars on the frontiers, a deadly plague and economic turmoil. The writings known in English as The Meditations, and in Latin as ‘to himself’, were composed in Greek in the last decade of Marcus’ life. They reveal his preoccupation with illness, growing old, death and posthumous reputation, as he urges himself not to be troubled by such transient things.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Mary Beard: Was he quite ordinary?

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n14/mary-beard/was-he-quite-ordinary

Emily Wilson: I have gorgeous hair

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n11/emily-wilson/i-have-gorgeous-hair

Shadi Bartsch: Dying to Make a Point

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n22/shadi-bartsch/dying-to-make-a-point

M.F. Burnyeat: Excuses for Madness

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v24/n20/m.f.-burnyeat/excuses-for-madness

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