Our series concludes with a musical: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular and increasingly controversial Hamilton (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?

The latest edition of our free fortnightly newsletter - which accompanies the last three episodes in this Fictions series including Hamilton - is out tomorrow, with lots of extra info, clips and reflections – just sign up here: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas

And sign up now to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes along with ad-free listening: coming very soon for PPF+ subscribers Robert Saunders on his favourite political novel plus a special episode on Evita: www.ppfideas.com

Next time: Gary Gerstle on the Republican National Convention

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The penultimate episode in our fictions series is about Curtis Sittenfeld’s American 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?

Sign up now to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes along with ad-free listening: coming soon for PPF+ subscribers Robert Saunders on his favourite political novel plus a special episode on Evita: www.ppfideas.com

Next time: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our political fictions series returns with Alan Hollinghurst’s The 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.

Sign up now to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes along with ad-free listening: coming soon for PPF+ subscribers Robert Saunders on his favourite political novel plus a special episode on Evita: www.ppfideas.com

Next time: Curtis Sittenfeld re-imagines Laura Bush in American Wife

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

To wrap up our series David and Robert attempt some instant history on the election result that’s just happened: in some ways predictable, in others utterly remarkable. What does such a big win for Labour on such a relatively small vote mean? What’s happening in Scotland? Where next for the Tories? And is the UK now an outlier in a world of increasing political turmoil, or is the turmoil just under the surface here too?

Our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this series is out now, with fact, figures, clips and reflections on all these elections and more – just sign up here: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas

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 too: www.ppfideas.com

Coming Up: More Great Political Fictions

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For election day, David and Robert discuss the previous general election in December 2019, which saw Boris Johnson win a decisive victory under the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’. How did he (or Dominic Cummings) do it? Was Corbyn to blame for Labour’s defeat? And how the hell did the Tories get from that resounding victory to their current disarray in just 4½ years?

To get our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this series, with fact, figures, clips and reflections on all these elections and more, just sign up via the Newsletter button here: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas

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 too: www.ppfideas.com

Coming next: 2024 – What Happened?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this extra episode for election week David talks to historian Robert Saunders about the last great Labour landslide of 1997, when Tony Blair won the biggest majority in his party’s history (till now?). Why did the Tories get no credit for a strong economy? How did New Labour change political campaigning? Was this the election that did for the prospects of proportional representation? Plus – the Millennium Dome: totemic or tat?

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 too www.ppfideas.com

For election day tomorrow: the Boris + Brexit election of 2019

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com

To sign up for our free fortnightly newsletter to accompany this and future series, just click on the Newsletter link in our Link Tree: https://linktr.ee/ppfideas

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

To receive our fortnightly newsletter just follow the link here https://linktr.ee/ppfideas

Sign up now to PPF+ to get 2 bonus episodes every month and ad-free listening www.ppfideas.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices