Past Present Future

In today’s Great Political Fiction David explores Salman Rushdie’s 1981 masterpiece Midnight’s Children, the great novel about the life and death of Indian democracy. How can one boy stand in for the whole of India? How can a nation as diverse as India ever have a single politics? And how is a jar of pickle the answer to these questions? Plus, how does Rushdie’s story read today, in the age of Mod...

In today’s episode David discusses Ayn Rand’s insanely long and insanely influential Atlas Shrugged (1957), the bible of free-market entrepreneurialism and source book to this day for vicious anti-socialist polemics. Why is this novel so adored by Silicon Valley tech titans? How can something so bad have so much lasting power? And what did Rand have against her arch-villain Robert Oppenheimer? Tom...

Our ninth Great Political Fiction is Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play, written in 1939 at the start of one terrible European war but set in the time of another: the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century. How did Brecht think a three-hundred-year gap could help us to understand our own capacity for violence and cruelty? Why did he make Mother Courage such an unlovable character? Why do we fee...

Our eighth Great Political Fiction is H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) which isn’t just a book about time travel. It’s also full of late-19th century fear and paranoia about what evolution and progress might do to human beings in the long run. Why will the class struggle turn into savagery and human sacrifice? Who will end up on top? And how will the world ultimately end? Tomorrow: Bertolt Bre...

Today’s Great Political Fiction is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) - a story that it’s easy to know without really knowing it at all. David explores all the ways that Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale confounds our expectations about good and evil. What does Dr Jekyll really want? What are all the men in the book trying to hide? And what has any of this got to do with Q-Anon and Hillary Clinton? Tomorrow...

The sixth Great Political Fiction in our summer re-release is Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874), his lightly and luridly fictionalised account of parliamentary polarisation in the age of Gladstone and Disraeli. A tale of political and personal melodrama, it explores what happens when political parties steal each other’s clothes and politicians find themselves hung out to dry by their colleag...

This second episode about George Eliot’s masterpiece explores questions of politics and religion, reputation and deception, truth and public opinion. What is the relationship between personal power and faith in a higher power? Is it ever possible to escape from the gossip of your friends once it turns against you? Who can rescue the ambitious when their ambitions are their undoing? Tomorrow: Antho...

Today’s Great Political Fiction is George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), which has so much going on that it needs two episodes to unpack it. In this episode David discusses the significance of the book being set in 1829-32 and the reasons why Nietzsche was so wrong to characterise it as a moralistic tale. Plus he explains why a book about personal relationships is also a deeply political novel. Also...

Our fourth 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? Tomorrow: Geor...

Our third Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots – in a world of men. Schiller imagines a meeting between them that never took place and unpicks its fearsome consequences. Why does it do such damage to them both? How does the powerless Mary mainta...

Today’s episode on the Great Political Fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above all a coruscating reflection on the failures of human perspective and self-knowledge. Why do we find it so hard to see ourselves for who we really are? What makes us so vulnerable to mindless feuds and wild con...

In the first episode of the summer daily re-release of our series on the Great Political Fictions, David talks about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608-9), the last of his tragedies and perhaps his most politically contentious play. Why has Coriolanus been subject to so many wildly different political interpretations? Is pride really the tragic flaw of the military monster at its heart? What does it s...

What If… The Vietnam War Had Ended in 1964? For our latest counterfactual David talks to historian Thant Myint-U about his grandfather U Thant, UN Secretary General for most of the 1960s and the man who might have ended the Vietnam War before it really got started. How close did U Thant get to bringing LBJ and the Vietcong to the negotiating table in 1964? What ultimately scuppered his chances? An...

Today’s episode explores one of the big counterfactuals of twentieth-century American politics: David talks to historian Benn Steil about how close the ultraliberal Henry Wallace came to being FDR’s running mate in 1944 and successor as president in 1945. How near did Wallace get to making it onto the ticket at the 1944 Democratic National Convention? Who or what stopped him? What would his presid...

For our second episode on big historical counterfactuals, David talks to world historian Ayse Zarakol about how the East might well have risen to global dominance before the West. What if the key revolutions of the modern world – political and industrial – had happened in Asia first? What if there had been an Iranian Napoleon? And how much of our understanding of modern history is based on the bia...

To kick off our new series on counterfactual histories David talks to the geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about whether ‘What Ifs’ make sense in science. If one person doesn’t make the big discovery, will someone else do it? Are scientific breakthroughs the product of genius or of wealth and power? And how might the world have been a completely different place if the Haber-Bosch proc...

Something different for our last episode on the Great Political Fictions as this time David talks to the person who wrote it: Tim Rice, the lyricist of the epic musical about the life of Eva Peron, Evita (co-written with Andrew Lloyd-Webber). Where did the idea for such an unlikely subject come from? Why has it struck a chord with politicians from Thatcher to Trump? What does it say about the rela...

David talks to the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis about Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), one of the most widely read and best-loved novels of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first century increasingly one of the most controversial. Is the book an attack on or an apology for Southern racism? How does its view of race relate to the picture it paints of class and caste in 1930s...

The writer and political philosopher Lea Ypi talks about the impact on her of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884), which she first read when she was eight – thinking it was a children’s book (it isn’t!) – and has been returning to ever since. A play about family and betrayal, idealism and disappointment, temptation and self-destruction, is it also a parable about the illusions of politics? And how...

David talks to Mark Ford and Seamus Perry, hosts of the LRB’s Close Readings poetry podcast, about what makes a great political poem. Can great poetry be ideological? How much does context matter? And is it possible to tell political truths in verse? From Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ to Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ to Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’: a conversation about political conviction and poetic ambiguity. To fi...

This week we check back in with Gary Gerstle to discuss what’s been happening in American politics after a tumultuous week. What does it say about Trump’s electoral strategy that he picked J.D. Vance as his running mate? How would the Republican party have coped if the assassin’s bullet hadn’t missed? Who might replace Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and how? Plus, what fate lies in stor...

Our series concludes with a musical: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular and increasingly controversial Hamilton (2015). What does it get right and what does it get wrong about America’s founding fathers? How fair is it to judge a Broadway musical by the standards of academic history? And why does a product of the Obama era still resonate so powerfully in the age of Trump and Biden? The latest edi...

The penultimate episode in our fictions series is about Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife (2008), which re-imagines the life of First Lady Laura Bush. One of the great novels about the intimacy of power and the accidents of politics, it sticks to the historical record while radically retelling it. What does the standard version leave out about the Bush presidency? How does an ordinary life become...

Our political fictions series returns with Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), which is set between Thatcher’s two dominant general election victories of 1983 and 1987. A novel about the intersection between gay life and Tory life, high politics and low conduct, beauty and betrayal, it explores the price of power and the risks of liberation. It also contains perhaps the greatest of all...

To wrap up our series David and Robert attempt some instant history on the election result that’s just happened: in some ways predictable, in others utterly remarkable. What does such a big win for Labour on such a relatively small vote mean? What’s happening in Scotland? Where next for the Tories? And is the UK now an outlier in a world of increasing political turmoil, or is the turmoil just unde...