UK General Elections: 1979
Today’s pivotal UK election is the one that brought Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street in 1979. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about how she did it and how it could have turned out very dif...
30 Jun 20241h 2min
UK General Elections: 1945
In today’s episode on pivotal UK elections David talks to historian Robert Saunders about the first great Labour landslide of 1945 and how it changed Britain. Why did Churchill not get his expected re...
27 Jun 202458min
UK General Elections: 1906
The first episode in our new series with historian Robert Saunders on pivotal general elections is about the Tory disaster and Liberal triumph of 1906. David and Robert explore the reasons behind the ...
23 Jun 202456min
The Great Political Fictions: The Handmaid’s Tale
For the final episode in the current series, David discusses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), her unforgettable dystopian vision of a future American patriarchy. Where is Gilead? When i...
20 Jun 202455min
The Great Political Fictions: Midnight’s Children
In the penultimate episode of the current part of our Fictions series, David explores Salman Rushdie’s 1981 masterpiece Midnight’s Children, the great novel about the life and death of Indian democrac...
16 Jun 202456min
The Great Political Fictions: Atlas Shrugged
In this 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-social...
13 Jun 20241h 1min
The Great Political Fictions: Mother Courage and Her Children
Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play was 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 t...
9 Jun 202456min
The Great Political Fictions: The Time Machine
H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) 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 r...
6 Jun 202458min
