Past Present Future

For today’s great political film David discusses Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) with the Italian historian of ideas Lucia Rubinelli. How did a communist aristocrat from Milan come to make a fil...

31 Okt 202456min

Today’s great political film is John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece of Cold War paranoia The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which came out the week of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s a 1960s movie about 195...

27 Okt 20241h 2min

In today’s episode David discusses Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), a great patriotic anti-war film made in the depths of WWII. Why did Churchill wan...

24 Okt 202453min

Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is many people’s favourite film of all time, including Donald Trump’s. Why does Trump love it so? What does he get right and what does he get wrong about the traject...

20 Okt 202455min

Today’s great political film is Frank Capra’s Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), a much-loved tale of the little guy taking on the corrupt establishment. But there’s far more to it than that, includi...

17 Okt 202455min

For the first episode in our new series David explores Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), a great anti-war film that is also a melancholy meditation on friendship between enemies, love across bo...

13 Okt 202453min

David talks to author Michael Lewis about SBF and EA: about the man he got to know before, during and after his spectacular fall and about the philosophy with which he was associated. What did Sam Ban...

10 Okt 202459min

David checks in with Gary Gerstle one more time before November to explore where things now stand with the US presidential election. In a conversation recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Walz/V...

6 Okt 202458min