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The Great Political Fictions: The Handmaid’s Tale
Season 2 Episode 77
For the final episode in the current series, David discusses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), her unforgettable dystopian vision of a fu…
1 year, 6 months ago
The Great Political Fictions: Midnight’s Children
Season 2 Episode 76
In the penultimate episode of the current part of our Fictions series, David explores Salman Rushdie’s 1981 masterpiece Midnight’s Children, the grea…
1 year, 6 months ago
The Great Political Fictions: Atlas Shrugged
Season 2 Episode 75
In this episode David discusses Ayn Rand’s insanely long and insanely influential Atlas Shrugged (1957), the bible of free-market entrepreneurialism …
1 year, 6 months ago
The Great Political Fictions: Mother Courage and Her Children
Season 2 Episode 74
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…
1 year, 7 months ago
The Great Political Fictions: The Time Machine
Season 2 Episode 73
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 …
1 year, 7 months ago
The Great Political Fictions: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Season 2 Episode 72
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 Rober…
1 year, 7 months ago
The Great Political Fictions: Phineas Redux
Season 2 Episode 71
This week's great political novel is Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux (1874), his lightly and luridly fictionalised account of parliamentary polarisa…
1 year, 7 months ago
The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 2)
Season 2 Episode 70
This second episode about George Eliot’s masterpiece explores questions of politics and religion, reputation and deception, truth and public opinion.…
1 year, 7 months ago
The Great Political Fictions: Middlemarch (part 1)
Season 2 Episode 69
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 episo…
1 year, 7 months ago
The History of Bad Ideas: Mesmerism
Season 5 Episode 68
For our last episode in this series David is joined by Helen Lewis to discuss Mesmerism – aka animal magnetism – an eighteenth-century method of hypn…
1 year, 7 months ago