The Great Political Fictions: Phineas Redux
This week's great political novel 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 o...
30 Touko 202456min
The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 2)
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 an...
26 Touko 202453min
The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 1)
Our series on the great political novels and plays resumes with George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), which has so much going on that it needs two episodes to unpack it. In this episode David discusses t...
23 Touko 202454min
The History of Bad Ideas: Mesmerism
For our last episode in this series David is joined by Helen Lewis to discuss Mesmerism – aka animal magnetism – an eighteenth-century method of hypnosis for which great medical benefits were claimed....
19 Touko 202455min
The History of Bad Ideas: The Death of the Author
For our penultimate episode in this series David talks to Kathleen Stock about Roland Barthes’s idea of the Death of the Author (1967). Once very fashionable, the notion that readers not writers are t...
16 Touko 202451min
The History of Bad Ideas: Anti-Suffragettes
In this episode of our series on the lingering hold of bad ideas David talks to the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis about the arguments made at the turn of the last century against giving the vote ...
12 Touko 202456min
The History of Bad Ideas: Taxonomy
For the latest episode in our series about the hold of bad ideas, we welcome back the geneticist Adam Rutherford to talk about Linnaean taxonomy, a seemingly innocuous scheme of classification that ha...
9 Touko 202449min
The History of Bad Ideas: Antisemitism
Today’s bad idea is one with a very long history: David talks to the historian Christopher Clark about antisemitism and the reasons for its endless recurrence. What has made discrimination against the...
5 Touko 202452min
