Origin Story

Hello and welcome to season 10 of Origin Story. This week we conclude the story of Rupert Murdoch, the media titan people love to hate. After a brush with bankruptcy in 1990, Murdoch came roaring back with a new focus on television around the world. In 1996, he launched Fox News under the baleful command of Roger Ailes, which became a key driver of the polarisation of America. For a period, his ce...

Hello and welcome to season 10 of Origin Story. Thanks for listening and supporting our work. We kick off with the world-shaking, century-spanning story of Rupert Murdoch. No single person has ever dominated, and changed, the media landscape like Murdoch. Starting out with an inheritance of a single newspaper in Australia, within three decades he had built a global media empire through his relentl...

Hello Origin Story listeners. We’re launching season 10 in the second half of October and to mark that milestone we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our old episodes under the name Origin Story Revisted. Somehow we’ve recorded over 150 episodes so we’ve chosen four of our favourites to reissue with new introductions where we discuss making them and reflect on how subsequent events have c...

Hello Origin Story listeners. We’re launching season 10 in the second half of October and to mark that milestone we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our old episodes under the name Origin Story Revisted. Somehow we’ve recorded over 150 episodes so we’ve chosen four of our favourites to reissue with new introductions where we discuss making them and reflect on how subsequent events have c...

This week, while we research a two-parter on the history of libertarianism, we're revisiting the story of the political novelist Ayn Rand. In this episode from 2022 — the first time we chose to focus on an individual rather than an abstract idea — we explore how Rand's extreme views on the self versus the society inspired a whole school of thought but somewhat ruined her life. And we read some ver...

Hello Origin Story listeners. We’re launching season 10 in the second half of October and to mark that milestone we thought it would be fun to revisit some of our old episodes under the name Origin Story Revisited. Somehow we’ve recorded over 150 episodes so we’ve chosen four of our favourites to reissue with new introductions where we discuss making them and reflect on how subsequent events have...

This week we dive into the life and ideas of John Rawls, the most celebrated liberal philosopher of the post-war period. Even in his own lifetime he was compared to Plato and Hobbes, becoming the only figure of our era to enter the canon of Western thought alongside the greatest figures in the philosophical tradition.  Rawls' work was a deadly surgical attack on neoliberalism and a rigorous d...

Hello listeners. This week’s episode is an audio recording of our live show at the Union Chapel in London on 1 September 2026. This time we did something different and made a live show out of a classic Origin Story narrative. It’s the story of how the Daily Telegraph’s deterioration from grey citadel of High Toryism to feral troll farm mirrors the cognitive decline of conservatism in Britain. In p...

Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Origin Story. This time we tell the story of Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988, the legislation that prohibited local councils from funding the “promotion” of homosexuality and cast a chilling shadow over the lives of gay men and lesbians in the UK for the next 15 years. How did it come about, what were the consequences, and is something similar ha...

Welcome to another bonus episode of Origin Story, where we look at the short and extraordinary life of the Duke of Buckingham (1592–1628). It's a bizarre, tragic tale which weaves together queer history, courtly romance, unending war and the early resistance of parliament against royal power.   More than anything, it is the story of the Favourite, that strange un...

Tickets are flying out of the door for Ian and Dorian’s biggest live show yet at the stunning Union Chapel in London’s sophisticated Islington on Tue 1 Sept. A spectacular Gothic Revival church on Upper Street, the Union Chapel is a breathtaking venue just a few moments’ stroll from Highbury & Islington Tube – and therefore close to Euston and King’s Cross for the Not-London crowd. As well as the...

Welcome to a bonus episode of Origin Story. For the first time, we’re revisiting an earlier episode to ask what we got right and what we got wrong about the subject. Just before the July 2024 election we profiled Labour’s PM-in-waiting Keir Starmer and made some cautiously optimistic guesses as to what his government might look like — the promise and the pitfalls. Well, it turned out to be mostly...

Welcome to the finale of season nine of Origin Story. We’re wrapping up the season by telling the thrilling, misunderstood story of the Luddites and how their name became an insult synonymous with ignorance, reaction and fear of progress. You can’t get much more Origin Story than that. It was November 1811 when textile workers in Nottinghamshire first began breaking machinery in the name of a myst...

Welcome to Origin Story. This week we’re doing something different: the history of paranormal investigations and what it says about the relationship between evidence and belief. In 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, New York claimed to be contacting the spirit world. Within a couple of years spiritualism was a popular craze on both sides of the Atlantic, with seances attracting luminaries from Queen...

Welcome to Origin Story and part two of the story of think tanks. Last time we traced the history of two very different varieties: the non-partisan centre for research and policy development and the handsomely-funded vehicle for a political ideology. Now we explain how they shape politics today. In the first half of the show we follow the partisan think tanks into the 21st century with the Koch ne...

Welcome to Origin Story. This week we explore the world of think tanks, a term that has developed two very different meanings. To many people, it suggests deceptively named and opaquely funded vehicles for the political agendas of right-wing billionaires — think Tufton Street. Yet most of the world’s leading think tanks still cleave to the original intention of producing conscientious research and...

Ever since the birth of evangelical Christianity in the 1730s, believers have disagreed over whether to dedicate themselves to changing society as well as converting individuals. For most of that time, the most activist American Protestants were politically progressive but that all changed in the 1970s thanks to two activist entrepreneurs: Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Falwell and Robertson tur...

Welcome to Origin Story, the show about why we are where we are. This week we begin the story of evangelical Christianity and its influence on politics. Starting in the 1730s, Protestants in colonial America replaced the dour strictures of the Puritans with an ecstatic, empowering new creed that promised salvation through conversion: the word evangelical means spreading the good news. Over the nex...

Welcome back to Origin Story and part two of the story of J.K. Rowling. In this episode we turn away from her life story towards her public statements and the information she is consuming. In 2020, Rowling publishes her first full-length statement about her gender-critical beliefs and it becomes her defining issue. We unpack some of the phrases she uses and the books she is reading and we explore...

Hello and welcome to Origin Story. This week we begin the story of J.K. Rowling and how the world’s most beloved author became its most divisive. How did she become obsessed with trans rights and how did her colossal wealth and celebrity shape the backlash? We’re telling two parallel stories. One is how Joanne Rowling transformed into J.K. Rowling. The first Harry Potter book comes out of dark tim...

Hello and welcome to the final part of the story of European union, in which we finally see the European Union come to pass — and run into trouble. The transition begins with Jacques Delors, a pragmatic idealist in the mould of Jean Monnet, orchestrating Europe’s great leap forward. As the Berlin Wall comes down (and so does Margaret Thatcher), the balance of power shifts from France to a reunited...

Welcome back to Origin Story and part two of the story of European union. Last time we left Europe in 1955, with Jean Monnet’s European Coal and Steel Community bringing European nations together without military force for the first time. We pick up the story with another game-changing Europhile, the Belgian politician Paul-Henri Spaak. He convenes the Messina Conference on the “common market”, wh...

Hello and welcome to season nine of Origin Story. After last season’s history of socialism, we’re returning to our usual format of taking on a completely different topic each time, and we’re starting with a big one. As we approach the 10th anniversary of the UK voting to leave the EU, we’re telling the three-part story of European union itself: not just the 33-year-old organisation — an incredible...

This week’s episode is an edited version of Origin Story Live at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre on Wednesday 15 April 2026. It was a thrill to take the stage in the former terrain of Origin Story regulars such as Jeremy Bentham and John Maynard Keynes. Thanks to everyone who came along or watched the live stream, and to the people who helped make it happen. In part one, Ian unravels Matt Goodwin’s st...

Hello and welcome to another bonus episode. It’s the centenary of the General Strike of May 1926, the most important industrial dispute in British history, but what really happened and did it really change Britain? One strange thing about the General Strike is that it happened when industrial relations, which had reached their fiery nadir before and after the First World War, seemed to be cooling...