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 Juni 202458min
The Great Political Fictions: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is a story that it’s easy to know without really knowing it at all. This week’s episode explores all the ways that Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale confounds our expectations...
2 Juni 202453min
The Great Political Fictions: Phineas Redux
This week's great political novel is Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874), his lightly and luridly fictionalised account of parliamentary polarisation in the age of Gladstone and Disraeli. A tale o...
30 Maj 202456min
The Great Political Fictions: 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...
26 Maj 202453min
The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 1)
Our series on the great political novels and plays resumes with George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), which has so much going on that it needs two episodes to unpack it. In this episode David discusses t...
23 Maj 202454min
The History of Bad Ideas: Mesmerism
For our last episode in this series David is joined by Helen Lewis to discuss Mesmerism – aka animal magnetism – an eighteenth-century method of hypnosis for which great medical benefits were claimed....
19 Maj 202455min
The History of Bad Ideas: The Death of the Author
For our penultimate episode in this series David talks to Kathleen Stock about Roland Barthes’s idea of the Death of the Author (1967). Once very fashionable, the notion that readers not writers are t...
16 Maj 202451min
The History of Bad Ideas: Anti-Suffragettes
In this episode of our series on the lingering hold of bad ideas David talks to the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis about the arguments made at the turn of the last century against giving the vote ...
12 Maj 202456min
