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lrb.me/now. That's lrb.me/now. This

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episode is sponsored by the new

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Colour Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum

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in Oxford, which looks at the way

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scientific breakthroughs in the Victorian period enabled

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dramatic changes in the use of colour,

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in fashion, painting and other objects.

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You can hear one of the exhibition's

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curators, Charlotte Rieberong, a professor of 19th

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century British literature at the Sorbonne, explaining

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more about the exhibition and some of

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the objects and ideas it explores in

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a special mini-episode in our podcast feed.

1:06

You're listening to the London Review of Books

1:08

podcast, I'm Thomas Jones. Later in this episode,

1:11

I'll be asking John Lanchester about his first

1:13

encounters with the LRB as a reader of

1:15

the paper. But before that, I'm joined by

1:17

Patricia Lockwood, poet, novelist, memoirist and contributing editor

1:20

at the LRB, who has written the diary

1:22

in the latest issue of the paper about

1:24

meeting the Pope. In June

1:26

this year, she was one of 200 or

1:28

so artists invited to an audience with

1:30

Pope Francis in the Sistine Chapel to

1:32

mark the 50th anniversary of the inauguration

1:35

of the Vatican Museum's collection of modern

1:37

art. In her LRB diary,

1:39

she describes the encounter and also her adventures

1:41

in Rome before and afterwards, with her friend

1:43

Hope, who she refers to in the piece

1:46

as her lady's companion. Colin

1:48

Tobin, writing in the LRB in 2021,

1:50

looked back over Jorge Mario Bergoglio's career

1:52

as a Jesuit priest in Argentina during

1:54

the dictatorship as Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos

1:56

Aires and as Pope Francis and described

1:58

the LRB as a described him as

2:00

always hard to pin down on any

2:02

matter. Patricia Lockwood didn't

2:05

pin the Pope down, though she did hold

2:07

on to his hands for longer than he

2:09

perhaps wanted. Hello Patricia and thank you

2:11

very much for joining me today on the

2:13

podcast. Yes, thank you for having me. And

2:16

thanks also I guess to the Pope for

2:18

having me. It was the main thing. I

2:22

was tempted to

2:24

go the full Alan Partridge and refer

2:26

to the LRB Pope cast. I

2:29

didn't even it didn't even occur to me. There were

2:31

so many puns that I could have made so many

2:33

jokes that were not available to me at that time.

2:35

I am a little

2:38

concerned. So my lady's companion

2:40

hope that is a student and that's

2:42

not her real name. So I'm definitely going to

2:44

reveal her identity pretty soon here. But

2:46

I'll take it as far as I can just

2:49

like mentally rhyming hope and

2:51

Pope. Like the route

2:53

I'm going to take in order to

2:55

not reveal her her very dangerous identity.

2:58

Her face appeared on on your Twitter feed. I think didn't

3:00

you post a selfie of the two of you or was

3:02

that not really her? Yes, no, it was

3:04

her. That was very much her. She was there not

3:07

just as a lady's companion to save my life, but

3:10

as a documentarian. She was the

3:12

one I think I maybe took 10 pictures the

3:14

entire time I was in Rome because I just

3:16

kept pointing at things and being like, Hope, get

3:19

that get that over there. That's good. She's much

3:21

more obviously artistic. She she really

3:26

belonged in the Sistine Chapel, whereas I have

3:28

no idea what I was doing there. So

3:31

we should probably get to get

3:34

to what you were doing there. But I thought

3:36

there's a I mean, you mentioned in your in

3:38

your memoir pre-study, you you wrote that Pope Francis

3:40

is proving to be a figure worthy of some

3:43

study. And on the day that

3:45

book was published, you tweeted it looks like we've

3:47

got a stunning blurb from the big guy himself.

3:49

No Pope Francis. Did

3:52

you ever think when you were writing those sentences that

3:54

one day you would meet him and hold

3:57

his hand? Hold his hand grip

3:59

his hands. really, so he had

4:01

to wrench it away. No, and in fact,

4:03

I didn't even remember writing those

4:06

lines. It's quite funny. I feel

4:09

very safe knowing that Pope

4:11

Francis himself has not read

4:13

pre-steady. This is all in the recommendation

4:15

of Bishop Ty, who

4:18

invited me, and who is

4:21

a fan and has an excellent sense of

4:23

humor. But yeah, I'm very safe in knowing

4:25

that, like, he himself has not touched

4:27

a copy of this book, has not seen it, does

4:30

not know who I am, thinks of me

4:32

as simply a sweet pregnant woman that he

4:34

met in the Sistine Chapel, who wouldn't let

4:36

go of his hands. But yeah, he is

4:38

interesting. I think I

4:40

may be primarily interested in him as

4:43

a humorist, right? That's

4:45

where he gets me. I don't

4:47

stay very attuned to Pope things.

4:49

I'm not directly on the Pope

4:51

feed, I should say. It feels

4:54

very familial to me, right? You don't

4:56

exactly want to know what your uncles

4:58

are up to, but there are

5:00

certain things that make their way through. So, you know,

5:03

I'm not reading his encyclicals, but if

5:05

he does something funny, then I know

5:08

about it. Okay, the

5:10

Pope jokes. But his immediate

5:12

predecessor, Benedict, is a saint. Shall

5:15

we? Direct

5:19

involvement in your father's

5:22

becoming a country. Yes. So he's,

5:24

yeah,