What If… The Vietnam War Had Ended in 1964?
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 w...
18 Aug 202459min
What If… Wallace not Truman Had Become US President in 1945?
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 r...
15 Aug 20241h 1min
What If… The French Revolution Had Happened in China?
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 revo...
11 Aug 202455min
What If… Science Counterfactuals w/ Adam Rutherford
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 b...
8 Aug 202459min
The Great Political Fictions: Tim Rice on Evita
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, Ev...
4 Aug 202451min
The Great Political Fictions: Helen Lewis on To Kill A Mockingbird
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-fir...
1 Aug 20241h 2min
The Great Political Fictions: Lea Ypi on The Wild Duck
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...
28 Jul 20241h 1min
The Great Political Poems
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...
25 Jul 202456min
