Episodi
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Today’s pivotal UK election is the one that brought Margaret Thatcher to Downing Street in 1979. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about how she did it and how it could have turned out very differently. What might have happened if the election had been called the previous year? Did Thatcherism already exist in 1979 or had it still to be invented? And how close did the Labour party come to permanent schism in the years following her victory?
To hear our bonus episode on the epochal election of 1924 sign up now to PPF+ and you’ll get ad-free listening plus all past, present and future bonuses: www.ppfideas.com
Next time: 1997 and the New Labour landslide
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In today’s episode on pivotal UK elections David talks to historian Robert Saunders about the first great Labour landslide of 1945 and how it changed Britain. Why did Churchill not get his expected reward for winning the war? How genuinely radical and popular was the Labour programme? What made the mild-mannered Attlee such an effective leader? And how did the Tories – and Churchill – manage to get themselves back in the game?
To hear our bonus episode on the epochal election of 1924 sign up now to PPF+ and you’ll get ad-free listening plus all past, present and future bonuses: www.ppfideas.com.
Next time: 1979 and the advent of Thatcherism
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Episodi mancanti?
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The first episode in our new series with historian Robert Saunders on pivotal general elections is about the Tory disaster and Liberal triumph of 1906. David and Robert explore the reasons behind the worst result in modern Conservative party history – until now? How did the Liberals achieve their landslide? What made ‘Big Loaf, Little Loaf’ a winning election slogan? And who was Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the great forgotten prime minister?
For our next bonus episode on the epochal election of 1924 sign up now to PPF+ and you’ll get ad-free listening plus all past, present and future bonuses too: www.ppfideas.com.
Coming up: the Labour landslide of 1945
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For the final episode in the current series, David discusses Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (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.
Coming next: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections, starting with the game-changing election of 1906.
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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 Tale
Coming next week on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com
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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 Children
Coming soon on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com
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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 Shrugged
Coming next week on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com
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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 Children
Coming soon on PPF: The Ideas Behind UK General Elections
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Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com
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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 Elections
Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com
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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 Elections
Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com
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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?
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.com
Next 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.
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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.com
Next 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.
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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.
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For our penultimate episode in this series David talks to Kathleen Stock about Roland Barthes’s idea of the Death of the Author (1967). Once very fashionable, the notion that readers not writers are the arbiters of what a text means has had a long and sometimes painful afterlife. As well as exploring its curious appeal and its persistent blindspots, Kathleen discusses her personal experience of how it can go wrong.
Two bonus Bad Ideas episodes for PPF+ subscribers – on Email and VAR – will be available very soon. Sign up now and get ad-free listening too! www.ppfideas.com
Coming Next: Helen Lewis on Mesmerism
Coming Soon: The Great Political Fictions Part 2, starting with Middlemarch
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In this episode of our series on the lingering hold of bad ideas David talks to the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis about the arguments made at the turn of the last century against giving the vote to women. Why were so many women against female enfranchisement? What did attitudes to women in politics reveal about the failings of men? And where can the echoes of these arguments still be heard today?
Helen Lewis’s Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights is available wherever you get your books https://bit.ly/3wp8DNX
Sign up now to PPF+ to get ad-free listening and bonus episodes to accompany every series. Coming soon: two bonus bad ideas just for PPF+ subscribers www.ppfideas.com
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Kathleen Stock discusses The Death of the Author.
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For the latest episode in our series about the hold of bad ideas, we welcome back the geneticist Adam Rutherford to talk about Linnaean taxonomy, a seemingly innocuous scheme of classification that has had deeply pernicious consequences. From scientific racism to social stratification to search engine optimisation, taxonomy gets everywhere. Can we escape its grip?
Sign up now to PPF+ to get ad-free listening and bonus episodes to accompany every series. Coming soon: two bonus bad ideas just for PPF+ subscribers www.ppfideas.com
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Helen Lewis on women against the enfranchisement of women.
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Today’s bad idea is one with a very long history: David talks to the historian Christopher Clark about antisemitism and the reasons for its endless recurrence. What has made discrimination against the Jews different from other kinds of violent prejudice over the course of European history? How did the ‘Jewish Question’ become the battleground of German politics? Why do so many Christians have a love-hate relationship with Judaism? And where does the state of Israel fit into this story?
For ad-free listening and bonus episodes – including more bad ideas – subscribe to PPF+ www.ppfideas.com
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Adam Rutherford on Taxonomy.
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In today’s episode about seemingly good ideas gone badly wrong David talks to the philosopher and journalist Kathleen Stock about Facebook Friends, something that was meant to make us happier and better connected but really didn’t. How did online friendship become so performative? Does its failings say more about Facebook and its business models or does it say more about us? And why are academics so susceptible to the madness of social media?
For ad-free listening and bonus episodes – including more bad ideas – subscribe to PPF+ www.ppfideas.com
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: historian Christopher Clark on Antisemitism
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In the second episode in our series on bad ideas David talks to the political economist Helen Thompson about the gold standard, which was meant to anchor the world economy until it all fell apart a hundred years ago. Why does gold so often appear like a stable basis for money in an unstable world – and why not silver? What made the gold standard a source of instability instead? How can money work if it has no material basis? And is quantitative easing a bad idea as well?
For ad-free listening and bonus episodes – including more bad ideas – subscribe to PPF+ www.ppfideas.com
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Kathleen Stock on Facebook Friends
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For the first episode in our new series about the hold of bad ideas David talks to the geneticist and science broadcaster Adam Rutherford about eugenics: from its origins in the 19th century through its heyday in the 20th century to its continuing legacy today. Is eugenics bad science, bad morality, bad politics – or all three? What are the fears that keep drawing people back to trying to control the consequences of human reproduction? And is a new age of consumerist eugenics upon us?
For ad-free listening and bonus episodes – including more bad ideas – subscribe to PPF+ www.ppfideas.com
Next time on The History of Bad Ideas: Helen Thompson on the Gold Standard
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