Live Special: Jimmy Wales on the Lessons of Wikipedia
Today’s episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Cheltenham Science Festival: David talks to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about what we can learn from the astonishing success of an enc...
21 Jun 57min
The Great Political Fictions: HHhH
Our final great political fiction (for now!) is a meta-fiction and auto-fiction that is also a compelling work of historical reconstruction. Laurent Binet’s HHhH (2010) tells the story of Operation An...
17 Jun 58min
The Great Political Fictions: The Years
The penultimate great political fiction in this series is not strictly a fiction: it’s Annie Ernaux’s retelling of her own life in The Years (2008), thereby recapturing the story of France in the seco...
14 Jun 56min
The Great Political Fictions: The Human Factor
Today’s political fiction is a spy novel, a Cold War comedy and a meditation on the nature of good and evil: Graham Greene’s The Human Factor. Why has Greene so fallen out of fashion? What made the So...
10 Jun 1h
The Great Political Fictions: The Dispossessed
Today’s great political fiction is a path-breaking work of science fiction: David explores Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), which imagines a world without the need for government or coercive ...
7 Jun 1h 2min
The Great Political Fictions: The Golden Notebook Part 2 w/Catherine Taylor
In the second of two episodes about Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, David talks to critic and memoirist Catherine Taylor about the novel’s place in the history of feminism. Is its idea of ‘free w...
3 Jun 1h 1min
The Great Political Fictions: The Golden Notebook
In today’s episode David explores Doris Lessing’s bold and brilliant The Golden Notebook (1962), a book about female emancipation, political disillusionment and much, much more. Why did Lessing insist...
31 Mai 1h
The Great Political Fictions: Brave New World
For the first in a new set of episodes about some of the great political fictions of the past hundred years David explores Aldous Huxley’s much misunderstood dystopian masterpiece Brave New World (193...
27 Mai 1h 5min
