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
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The Time Machine
Our eighth Great Political Fiction is H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) which isn’t just a book about time travel. It’s also full of late-19th century fear and paranoia about what evolution and pro...
25 Aug 202457min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
Today’s Great Political Fiction is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) - a story that it’s easy to know without really knowing it at all. David explores all the ways that Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale confou...
24 Aug 202452min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Phineas Redux
The sixth Great Political Fiction in our summer re-release is Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874), his lightly and luridly fictionalised account of parliamentary polarisation in the age of Gladsto...
23 Aug 202455min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Middlemarch Part 2
This second episode about George Eliot’s masterpiece explores questions of politics and religion, reputation and deception, truth and public opinion. What is the relationship between personal power an...
22 Aug 202452min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Middlemarch Part 1
Today’s Great Political Fiction is George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), which has so much going on that it needs two episodes to unpack it. In this episode David discusses the significance of the book b...
22 Aug 202451min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Fathers and Sons
Our fourth Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict. How did Turgenev manage to write ...
21 Aug 202455min
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Mary Stuart
Our third Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scot...
20 Aug 202456min
