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PODCAST

Past Present Future

Past 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.

history politics

All Episodes

52:32

Thinking About Thinking Machines: Metropolis

Past Present Future ·

2024/09/22

For the first episode in our new series on the history of thinking about thinking machines, David talks to philosopher Shannon Vallor about Fritz Lang’sMetropolis(1927).The last great silent film is the most futuristic: a vision of robots and artificial life, it is also about where the human heart fits into an increasingly mechanised world.Is it prophetic?Is it monstrous?And who are the winners and losers when war is declared on the machines?To hear a bonus episode on Mary Shelley’sFrankensteinto

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57:31

What if… Scotland Had Voted for Independence?

Past Present Future ·

2024/09/19

For our last episode in this series of historical counterfactuals, David talks to the historian Ben Jackson about what might have happened if the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum had gone the other way.How close was the vote and what could have swung it differently?Were the dark warnings about the consequences of independence likely to have been borne out?And what would an independent Scotland mean for the world today?To hear the second part of David’s conversation with Chris Clark about the

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53:43

What if… The Berlin Wall Hadn’t Fallen?

Past Present Future ·

2024/09/15

Our counterfactuals series moves forward to 1989: David talks to Lea Ypi about what might have happened if the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen when it did.Was the night it came down really just one big accident?How long could the East German regime have lasted?And what does the fate of non-European communist states tell us about how it could have gone very differently?To hear the second part of David’s conversation with Chris Clark about the fateful origins of the First World War sign up now to PPF+ and

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56:08

What if… The 1919 Paris Peace Conference Had Actually...

Past Present Future ·

2024/09/12

David talks to historian Margaret MacMillan, author of the prize-winningPeacemakers, about whether the 1919 Paris Peace Conference deserves its reputation as a missed opportunity and the harbinger of another war.Could the peace have been fairer to the Germans?Could the League of Nations have been given real teeth?Could the Bolsheviks have been involved?Or did the peacemakers make the best of a bad job?To hear the second part of David’s conversation with Chris Clark about the fateful origins of the

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56:02

What If… The Russian Revolution Hadn’t Been Bolshevik?

Past Present Future ·

2024/09/08

Today’s episode is another big early twentieth-century counterfactual: David talks to the historian of Russia Edward Acton about how the Russian Revolution might have unfolded if the Left SRs and not the Bolsheviks had come out on top.Could Lenin have been sidelined?Might the Terror have been avoided?And what would it have meant to the wider world if revolutionary socialism had been liberated from Marxist communism?To hear the second part of David’s conversation with Chris Clark about the fateful

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52:14

What If… Franz Ferdinand Had Survived Sarajevo?

Past Present Future ·

2024/09/05

We return to our series on historical counterfactuals with the big one: how might WWI have been avoided?David talks to Chris Clark, author ofThe Sleepwalkers, the definitive history of the July crisis of 1914, to explore how it might have turned out differently.What would have happened if Franz Ferdinand had survived the assassination attempt in Sarajevo?Why did his death spark the greatest European conflict of them all?To hear the second part of this conversation – where David and Chris discuss how

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55:12

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Hamilton

Past Present Future ·

2024/09/01

Our Great Political Fictions re-release concludes with a musical: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular and increasingly controversialHamilton(2015).What does it get right and what does it get wrong about America’s founding fathers?How fair is it to judge a Broadway musical by the standards of academic history?And why does a product of the Obama era still resonate so powerfully in the age of Trump and Biden? Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also

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53:47

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: American Wife

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/31

The penultimate episode in our Great Political Fictions re-release is about Curtis Sittenfeld’sAmerican Wife(2008), which re-imagines the life of First Lady Laura Bush.One of the great novels about the intimacy of power and the accidents of politics, it sticks to the historical record while radically retelling it.What does the standard version leave out about the Bush presidency?How does an ordinary life become an extraordinary one?And where is the line between fact and fiction?Tomorrow: Lin-Manuel

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52:29

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The Line of...

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/30

Today’s Great Political Fiction is Alan Hollinghurst’sThe Line of Beauty(2004), which is set between Thatcher’s two dominant general election victories of 1983 and 1987.A novel about the intersection between gay life and Tory life, high politics and low conduct, beauty and betrayal, it explores the price of power and the risks of liberation.It also contains perhaps the greatest of all fictional portrayals of a real-life prime minster: Thatcher dancing the night away.Tomorrow: Curtis Sittingfield’s

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52:05

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The...

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/29

For the twelfth episode in our Great Political Fictions re-release, David discusses Margaret Atwood’s TheHandmaid’sTale(1985), her unforgettable dystopian vision of a future American patriarchy.Where is Gilead?When is Gilead?How did it happen?How can it be stopped?From puritanism and slavery to Iran and Romania, from demography and racism to Playboy and Scrabble, this novel takes the familiar and the known and makes them hauntingly and terrifyingly new.Tomorrow: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of

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52:38

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Midnight’s...

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/28

In today’s Great Political Fiction David explores Salman Rushdie’s 1981 masterpiece Midnight’s Children, the great novel about the life and death of Indian democracy.How can one boy stand in for the whole of India?How can a nation as diverse as India ever have a single politics?And how is a jar of pickle the answer to these questions?Plus, how does Rushdie’s story read today, in the age of Modi?Tomorrow: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s TaleFind out more about Past Present Future on our new website

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57:45

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Atlas Shrugged

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/27

In today’s episode David discusses Ayn Rand’s insanely long and insanely influentialAtlasShrugged(1957), the bible of free-market entrepreneurialism and source book to this day for vicious anti-socialist polemics.Why is this novel so adored by Silicon Valley tech titans?How can something so bad have so much lasting power?And what did Rand have against her arch-villain Robert Oppenheimer?Tomorrow: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s ChildrenFind out more about Past Present Future on our new website

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52:59

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Mother...

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/26

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 17thcentury.How did Brecht think a three-hundred-year gap could help us to understand our own capacity for violence and cruelty?Why did he make Mother Courage such an unlovable character?Why do we feel for her plight anyway?And what can we do about it?Tomorrow: Ayn Rand’s Atlas ShruggedFind out more about

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55:03

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: The Time Machine

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/25

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-19thcentury fear and paranoia about what evolution and progress might do to human beings in the long run.Why will the class struggle turn into savagery and human sacrifice?Who will end up on top?And how will the world ultimately end?Tomorrow: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage & Her ChildrenFind out more about Past Present Future on our new website

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50:11

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Dr Jekyll &...

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/24

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.Davidexplores 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 MachineFind out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com

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53:10

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Phineas Redux

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/23

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

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49:47

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Middlemarch...

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/22

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 ReduxFind out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where

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48:46

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Middlemarch...

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/22

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 2Tomorrow: Anthony Trollope’s Phineas ReduxFind out more about Past Present Future

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52:58

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Fathers and Sons

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/21

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 & 2Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website

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53:50

Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Mary Stuart

Past Present Future ·

2024/08/20

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

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272 results

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