What If… Franz Ferdinand Had Survived Sarajevo?
We return to our series on historical counterfactuals with the big one: how might WWI have been avoided? David talks to Chris Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers, the definitive history of the July cris...
5 Sep 202454min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Hamilton
Our Great Political Fictions re-release concludes with a musical: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular and increasingly controversial Hamilton (2015). What does it get right and what does it get wrong ...
1 Sep 202457min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: American Wife
The penultimate episode in our Great Political Fictions re-release is about Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife (2008), which re-imagines the life of First Lady Laura Bush.One of the great novels about ...
31 Aug 202456min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The Line of Beauty
Today’s Great Political Fiction is Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004), which is set between Thatcher’s two dominant general election victories of 1983 and 1987. A novel about the intersecti...
30 Aug 202454min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The Handmaid’s Tale
For the twelfth episode in our Great Political Fictions re-release, David discusses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), her unforgettable dystopian vision of a future American patriarchy. Wh...
29 Aug 202454min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Midnight’s Children
In today’s Great Political Fiction David explores Salman Rushdie’s 1981 masterpiece Midnight’s Children, the great novel about the life and death of Indian democracy. How can one boy stand in for the ...
28 Aug 202455min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Atlas Shrugged
In today’s 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-soc...
27 Aug 20241h
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Mother Courage & Her Children
Our ninth Great Political Fiction is Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play, 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...
26 Aug 202455min
