HARLEY DAVIDSON ROAD GLIDE 2024!


Today’s Great Political Fiction is 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.
Tomorrow: Curtis Sittingfield’s American Wife
Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, medieval spells and modern cures, as we look back at some podcast highlights with Mary C Flannery and Charles Foster.
'Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England', by Katherine Storm Hindley
'Ten Trips: The new reality of psychedelics', by Andy Mitchell
'Psychedelics: The revolutionary drugs that could change your life – a guide from the expert', by David Nutt
'I feel love: MDMA and the quest for connection in a fractured world', by Rachel Nuwer
'Psychonauts: Drugs and the making of the modern mind', by Mike Jay
Produced by Charlotte Pardy
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For the twelfth episode in our Great Political Fictions re-release, 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.
Tomorrow: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty
Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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 Tale
Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In today’s 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?
Tomorrow: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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 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?
Tomorrow: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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-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?
Tomorrow: Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage & Her Children
Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Luís Vaz de Camões (1524-80) reinventou o soneto, viajou pelos sete mares, foi preso, deportado, exilado, perdeu um olho durante uma batalha, salvou seus manuscritos de um naufrágio e se entregou sem pudor aos amores e à boemia. Hoje é cantado na música pop, dá nome a um bife no Rio de Janeiro e virou até comercial de carro. Acima disso tudo, porém, está uma poesia que chega até nós em pleno vigor e beleza, inseminando a produção brasileira contemporânea. Nos 500 anos do poeta, este episódio narrativo resgata a biografia e decifra as múltiplas facetas desse apaixonado. Uma história contada em prosa e verso por Gregório Duvivier, Paulo Henriques Britto, Maria Bochicchio, Sabrina Sedlmayer, Luiz Antonio Simas e Rui Tavares, com textos lidos pela atriz Maria Manoella.
Episódio especial realizado com o apoio da Lei de Incentivo à Cultura e do Instituto Camões-CCP Brasília.
Apoie o 451 MHz: https://bit.ly/Assine451
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. David 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?
Tomorrow: H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine
Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
Find out more about Past Present Future on our new website www.ppfideas.com where you can also join PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
This week, Lucy and Alex are joined by Amber Massie-Blomfield, who discusses her new book about the connections between art and protest.
'Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create a Better World', by
Amber Massie-Blomfield
Produced by Charlotte Pardy
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.