This week, Fintan O'Toole assesses what makes Labour leader Keir Starmer tick; and Linda Kinstler on the Ukrainian writer, musician and activist Serhiy Zhadan's chronicles of life during wartime. Plus John Kinsella reads his new poem, 'Rooks'.

'Keir Starmer: The Biography', by Tom Baldwin

'Rooks', by John Kinsella

'How Fire Descends: New and Selected Poems', by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Virlana Tkacz and Wanda Phipps

'Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches from the Ukrainian Front', by Serhiy Zhadan, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler

Produced by Charlotte Pardy

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This week’s Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict. How did Turgenev manage to write a wistful novel about nihilism? What made Russian politics in the early 1860s so chock-full of frustration? Why did Turgenev’s book infuriate his contemporaries – including Dostoyevsky?

More from the LRB:

Pankaj Mishra on the disillusionment of Alexander Herzen 

'"Emancipation", he concluded, "has finally proved to be as insolvent as redemption".'

Julian Barnes on Turgenev and Flaubert 

‘When the two of them meet, they are already presenting themselves as elderly men in their early forties (Turgenev asserts that after 40 the basis of life is renunciation).’

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