Stay ConnectedPast Present Future is a bi-weekly History of Ideas podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter.
Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future.
New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday.
Copyright: © Past Present Future
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 confounds our expectations about good and evil. What does Dr Jekyll really want? What are all the men in the book trying to hide? And what has any of this got to do with Q-Anon and Hillary Clinton?
Tomorrow: H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine
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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 Gladstone and Disraeli. A tale of political and personal melodrama, it explores what happens when political parties steal each other’s clothes and politicians find themselves hung out to dry by their colleagues. A story of integrity and hypocrisy and how hard it is to tell them apart.
Tomorrow: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
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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 and faith in a higher power? Is it ever possible to escape from the gossip of your friends once it turns against you? Who can rescue the ambitious when their ambitions are their undoing?
Tomorrow: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux
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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 being set in 1829-32 and the reasons why Nietzsche was so wrong to characterise it as a moralistic tale. Plus he explains why a book about personal relationships is also a deeply political novel.
Also today: Middlemarch Part 2
Tomorrow: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux
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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 a wistful novel about nihilism? What made Russian politics in the early 1860s so chock-full of frustration? Why did Turgenev’s book infuriate his contemporaries – including Dostoyevsky?
Tomorrow: George Eliot’s Middlemarch Parts 1 & 2
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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 Scots – in a world of men. Schiller imagines a meeting between them that never took place and unpicks its fearsome consequences. Why does it do such damage to them both? How does the powerless Mary maintain her hold over the imperious Elizabeth? Who suffers most in the end and what is that suffering really worth?
Tomorrow: Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons
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Today’s episode on the Great Political Fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above all a coruscating reflection on the failures of human perspective and self-knowledge. Why do we find it so hard to see ourselves for who we really are? What makes us so vulnerable to mindless feuds and wild conspiracy theories? And what could we learn from the talking horses?
Tomorrow: Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart
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In the first episode of the summer daily re-release of our series on the Great Political Fictions, David talks about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608-9), the last of his tragedies and perhaps his most politically contentious play. Why has Coriolanus been subject to so many wildly different political interpretations? Is pride really the tragic flaw of the military monster at its heart? What does it say about the struggle between elite power and popular resistance and about the limits of political argument?
Tomorrow: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
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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 who might have ended the Vietnam War before it really got started. How close did U Thant get to bringing LBJ and the Vietcong to the negotiating table in 1964? What ultimately scuppered his chances? And how differently might the Cold War have turned out if he had succeeded?
Sign up now to PPF+ to get ad-free listening and all our bonus episodes: available now a new bonus on Michel Houellebecq’s explosive political fiction Submission www.ppfideas.com
Coming soon: More What Ifs… on WWI, the Russian Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
Up next: Fifteen Fiction for Summer from Coriolanus to Hamilton
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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 running mate in 1944 and successor as president in 1945. How near did Wallace get to making it onto the ticket at the 1944 Democratic National Convention? Who or what stopped him? What would his presidency have meant for the Cold War and the nuclear arms race? Was getting President Truman instead a missed opportunity or a lucky escape?
Sign up now to PPF+ to get ad-free listening and all our bonus episodes: coming very soon a new bonus on Michel Houellebecq’s explosive political fiction Submission www.ppfideas.com
Next time: What if… the Vietnam War had ended in 1964?
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