Past Present Future

In the penultimate episode of the current part of our Fictions series, 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?Next time: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s TaleComing next week on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General ElectionsSign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com

In this episode David discusses Ayn Rand’s insanely long and insanely influential Atlas Shrugged (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?Next time: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s ChildrenComing soon on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General ElectionsSign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com

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’ War of the 17th century. 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?Next time: Ayn Rand’s Atlas ShruggedComing next week on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General ElectionsSign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com

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 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?Next time: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her ChildrenComing soon on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General ElectionsTo receive our fortnightly newsletter just follow the link here https://linktr.ee/ppfideasSign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com 

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 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?Next time: H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.Coming next month on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General ElectionsSign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com

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 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.Next time: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.Coming next month on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General ElectionsSign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com

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?To get two bonus episodes from our recent Bad Ideas series – on Email and VAR – sign up now to PPF+ and enjoy ad-free listening as well www.ppfideas.comNext time: Trollope’s Phineas Redux, the great novel of parliamentary ups and downs.Coming soon on the Great Political Fictions: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine, Mother Courage and her Children, Atlas Shrugged, Midnight’s Children, The Handmaid’s Tale, and much more.

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 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.To get two bonus episodes from our recent Bad Ideas series – on Email and VAR – sign up now to PPF+ and enjoy ad-free listening as well www.ppfideas.comNext time: Middlemarch (part 2) on marriage, hypocrisy, guilt and redemption.Coming soon on the Great Political Fictions: Phineas Redux, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Time Machine, Mother Courage and her Children, and much more.

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. Was its originator, Franz Mesmer, a charlatan or a healer? Was his movement science or religion or something in between? And what can it tell us about twenty-first century phenomena from online social contagion to hypnotherapy? To get two bonus Bad Ideas episodes – on Email and VAR – sign up now to PPF+, where you will also get all our past and future bonus episodes plus ad-free listening www.ppfieas.com Coming next: The Great Political Fictions resumes with Middlemarch, the greatest of them all.