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
This week David asks Mary Beard what the Roman Empire can tell us about the nature of unaccountable power, then and now. How did Roman emperors rule when they had so little knowledge of the lives of their subjects? Can absolute personal power ever escape the limits of biology, from sex to death? And who are the modern-day equivalent of the Caesars: democratic populists or tech titans?
Mary Beard’s new book is Emperor of Rome
Read or listen to Mary Beard’s LRB lecture on Women in Power
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This week David talks to the novelist Zadie Smith about Charles Dickens: what he means to her, why we still read him, and what’s missing from the Dickensian view of the world. It’s a conversation about other writers as well – Turgenev, George Orwell and Toni Morrison – and about whether fiction shows us how to live or rather helps us to see the ways in which the truth about how we live is hidden from view.
Zadie Smith’s new novel is The Fraud, available now.
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This week’s episode in our series on the great political essays is about David Foster Wallace’s ‘Up, Simba!’, which describes his experiences following the doomed campaign of John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. Wallace believed that McCain’s distinctive political style revealed some hard truths about American democracy. Was he right? What did he miss? And how do those truths look now in the age of Trump?
More on David Foster Wallace from the LRB:
Jenny Turner on Wallace and his moment
‘The risk Wallace takes is to guess he is not the only "obscenely well-educated", curiously lost and empty white boy out there; that his sadness is also the experience of a whole historical moment.’
Patricia Lockwood on Wallace and his influence
‘It was the essayists who were left to cope with his almost radioactive influence. He produced a great deal of excellent writing, the majority of it not his own.’
Dale Peck’s notorious takedown of Infinite Jest
‘If nothing else, the success of Infinite Jest is proof that the Great American Hype machine can still work wonders.’
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This week David talks to novelists Adam Biles and John Lanchester about the timeless appeal of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Why has it retained its hold far longer than other political allegories? Do readers need to know about the Russian history it describes? What makes the animals so relatable? Plus we discuss other favourite political allegories, from The Wizard of Oz to WALL-E.
Adam Biles’s new novel – inspired by Animal Farm – is Beasts of England, available now.
Read John Lanchester in the current issue of the LRB.
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This week is the fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile that ended the life of Salvador Allende and marked the temporary death of Chilean democracy. We talk to the politician and economist Andrés Velasco and the writer and translator Lorna Scott Fox about their memories of the coup and their understanding of its significance today. What does it say about the unfulfilled promise and ongoing fragility of democratic politics, in Chile and beyond?
More from the LRB:
Lorna Scott Fox on the feminisation of Chile:
‘I doubt any of the men in a cabinet meeting are worrying about whether there is loo paper at home, as I do.’
Greg Grandin on Allende in power:
‘Allende was a pacifist, a democrat and a socialist by conviction not convenience.’
Michael Wood on Neruda and death:
‘The dead are never entirely dead in Neruda’s poems, forgetting and remembering are always entangled.’
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This week Lea Ypi joins David to talk about some of the ideas in his new book, The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs. They discuss how to think about the power of the state in the modern world: Can it be changed? Can it be controlled? Can it be anything other than capitalist? Plus, how will AI alter the relationship between human beings and the corporate machines that rule our world?
To order the Handover and support independent bookshops, please use the code HANDOVER at checkout here.
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In this bonus episode David answers some of your questions about our series on the great political essays and essayists, from Montaigne to Joan Didion. Can great political thinkers also be committed members of political parties? Which of these writers would make a good prime minister? And where are the great essays being written today? With PPF producer Ben Walker posing the questions.
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For the last episode in our summer season on the great twentieth-century essays and essayists, David discusses Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to the Manson murders, Didion offers a series of snapshots of a society coming apart in ways no one seemed to understand. But what was true, what was imagined, and where did the real sickness lie?
More on Joan Didion from the LRB archive:
Thomas Powers on Didion and California:
'The thing that California taught her to fear most was snakes, especially rattlesnakes...This gets close to Didion's core anxiety: watching for something that could be anywhere, was easily overlooked, could kill you or a child playing in the garden – just like that.'
Mary-Kay Wilmers on Didion and memory:
'Reassurance is something Didion doesn't need. She is talking to herself, weighing up the past, going over old stories, keeping herself company. Staging herself.'
Martin Amis on Didion's style:
'The Californian emptiness arrives and Miss Didion attempts to evolve a style, or manner, to answer to it. Here comes divorces, breakdowns, suicide bids, spliced-up paragraphs, 40-word chapters and italicised wedges of prose that used to be called "fractured".'
Patricia Lockwood on reading Didion now:
'To revisit Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album is to read an old up-to-the-minute relevance renewed. Inside these essays the coming revolution feels neither terrifying nor exhilarating but familiar – if you are a reader of Joan Didion, you have been studying it all your life.'
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This episode in our history of the great essays and great essayists is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about art, criticism and the avant-garde can be applied to contemporary politics and can even explain the monstrous appeal of Donald Trump.
Sontag in the LRB:
Terry Castle on Sontag and friendship
‘At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge – or possibly Stalin and Malenkov.’
James Wolcott on Sontag and polemics
‘The upside of Sontag’s downside was that her ire was generated by the same power supply that electrified her battle for principles that others only espoused.’
Mark Grief on Sontag and identity
‘One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Sontag’s persona was not personal. It was superior.’
Joanna Biggs on Sontag and Paris
‘Paris let her say no to an academic life, but not to a life of ideas. The best thinking was done in cafes, or in bed, or at the movies, not in libraries.’
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This week David discusses James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war. What happens when North and South collide?
More on Baldwin from the LRB:
Michael Wood on Baldwin and power
‘James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the way that women have been used as mirrors by men.’
Colm Toibin on reading Baldwin
‘James Baldwin’s legacy is both powerful and fluid, allowing it to fit whatever category each reader requires, allowing it to influence each reader in a way that tells us as much about the reader as it does about Baldwin.’
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