Past Present Future David Runciman

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
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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
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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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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
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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
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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?
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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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