Podcasts: some I listen to.

For general teaching podcasts, go to this page.

English & Reading

Approaching Shakespeare. Emma’s Smith’s podcasts of her Oxford University lectures on the plays. These form the basis of her superb book I Am Shakespeare.
backlisted.fm. Outstanding podcast from Unbound presented by John Mitchinson and Andy Miller. They (and guests) ‘give life to old books.’
Close Readings from the London Review of Books discusses 20th century poets, like Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney and Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Victorian literature’s only anti-modern proto-modernist queer-ecologist Jesuit priest.”
Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast might seem a surprising concept, but is truly engaging (such as his episode on ‘The Windhover’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins).
Freedom, Books, Flowers and the Moon. The Times Literary Supplement podcast has lots of rich discussions.
Guardian Books. Regularly excellent.
The Hamlet podcast: Conor Hanratty’s well-organised project produces ten-minute podcasts weekly as he goes through the entire play (he started in August 2017).
‘In Our Time’: the BBC Radio 4 programme also comes as a podcast (over 1000 episodes!). Here are the ones on Shakespeare.
Irish Times books. This drops roughly monthly. Good conversations with the likes of Danielle McLaughlin, Joseph O’Connor, Sinéad Gleeson and Sarah Davis-Goff.
Kamran Javadizadeh’s Close Readings are lengthy in-depth discussions with guests about individual poems, such as Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Voice’, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Shampoo’ and Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden.’
Lexicon Valley from Slate’s John McWhorter has been going quite a while, and has a massive archive of fascinating material about language.
Line by Line from Tom Sutcliffe is an excellent new (March 2021) podcast, with two guests discussing ‘blind’ pieces of writing. During the conversation Sutcliffe reveals the authors’ identities. The extracts are emailed on the podcast’s Substack.
London Review Bookshop. Readings, debates and talks from a wide variety of writers.
London Review of Books. Sibling of the above.
More than Words comes from the language learning company Rosetta Stone. Led by Alex Rawlings, it has consistently interesting guests (also on YouTube).
Podcast24 from Edmond Behan is new, and for English teachers.
Poetry Unbound. A promising start to this new series from On Being: Twice a week Pádraig Ó Tuama sources and talks about a poem.
The Rest is History from Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland is top-class (and they’re prolific), and provides superb hinterland for lots of English matters, from Macbeth to Ian Fleming.
Shakespeare’s Restless World. Anything Neil McGregor does is superb, and this (now finished) series, which is also a book, is terrific on the culture that produced the great author.
The Shakespeare Sessions from the BBC are terrific, including full-length productions.
Shakespeare Unlimited from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Well over 100 recordings on all sorts of topics.
Slightly Foxed is consistently interesting and wide-ranging.
Sold a Story by Emily Hanford is a very significant series, very well told: the dubious ways a disproven method of (not) teaching reading properly in the US has disadvantaged so many children over so many years.
theallusionist.org. Helen Zalztman’s excellent ‘adventures in language.’
Tiny in that Air from the Philip Larkin Society is new. Check out biographer James Booth’s thoughts about the poet.
Travels Through Time is excellent: guests choose one year to revisit, such as Katherine Rundell choosing 1601 in discussing her top-class book on John Donne, Super-Infinite.
Vintage Books. Another good mixture. A recent one was about a book I liked a lot, Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands.
New York Times Book Review. Every Friday evening.
Waterstones Podcast. For instance, this one with three interesting writers: Robert Macfarlane, Rebecca Solnit, Shane O’Mara on ‘Outside’ (YouTube).

Thinking

Akimbo with Seth Godin. Few people hit the nail on the head so succinctly as Godin in his blog, and these podcasts have plenty more food for thought. For instance, ‘Juggling and Bicycles’ (‘The best way we learn is rarely the best way to perform’).
Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish. Farnam Street is packed with good things that will make you think, and this podcast series of interviews has many of them.
Krista Tippett’s On Being is just superb: deep conversations with distinguished thinkers, like Daniel Kahneman, Atul Gawande and Marilyanne Robinson. “What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And who will we be to each other?”