Past Present Future
Past Present Future is a bi-weekly History of Ideas podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter.
Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future.
New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday.
- Update frequency
- every 3 days
- Average duration
- 56 minutes
- Episodes
- 235
- Years Active
- 2023 - 2025
The Great Political Fictions: Mary Stuart
This week’s Great Political Fiction is Friedrich Schiller’s monumental play Mary Stuart (1800), which lays bare the impossible choices faced by two queens – Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of S…
00:57:16 |
Thu 15 Feb 2024
The Great Political Fictions: Gulliver’s Travels
This week’s episode on the great political fictions is about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) – part adventure story, part satire of early-eighteenth-century party politics, but above all a…
00:57:42 |
Thu 08 Feb 2024
The Great Political Fictions: Coriolanus
In the first episode of our new series on the great political fictions, David talks about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608-9), the last of his tragedies and perhaps his most politically contentious pla…
01:00:02 |
Thu 01 Feb 2024
The End of Enlightenment
This week David talks to Richard Whatmore and Lea Ypi about what caused the loss of faith in the idea of Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century and the parallels with our loss of faith to…
01:00:18 |
Thu 25 Jan 2024
Rory Stewart: What Does it Mean to be a 21st-Century Tory?
This week David talks to Rory Stewart about his life in politics and the history of the ideas behind his political philosophy. What does it mean to be a Tory in the twenty-first century? When and how…
00:50:15 |
Thu 18 Jan 2024
The End of the UK?
This week David talks to the political scientist Mike Kenny about the possible fate of the United Kingdom. What makes the UK such an unusual political arrangement? How has it managed to hold together…
01:01:05 |
Thu 11 Jan 2024
History of Ideas 12: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Episode 12 in our series on the great essays is about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘The Case for Reparations’, published in the Atlantic in 2014. Black American life has been marked by injustice from the begin…
00:54:21 |
Fri 05 Jan 2024
History of Ideas 11: Umberto Eco
Episode 11 in our series on the great essays explores Umberto Eco’s ‘Thoughts on Wikileaks’ (2010). Eco writes about what makes a true scandal, what are real secrets, and what it would mean to expose…
00:49:35 |
Thu 04 Jan 2024
History of Ideas 10: David Foster Wallace
Episode 10 in our series on the great essays is about David Foster Wallace’s ‘Up, Simba!’, which describes his experiences following the doomed campaign of John McCain for the Republican presidential…
00:54:45 |
Wed 03 Jan 2024
History of Ideas 9: Joan Didion
Episode 9 in our series on the great essays is about Joan Didion's 'The White Album' (1979), her haunting, impressionistic account of the fracturing of America in the late 1960s. From Jim Morrison to…
00:52:46 |
Tue 02 Jan 2024
History of Ideas 8: Susan Sontag
Episode 8 in our history of the great essays is about Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation’ (1963). What was interpretation and why was Sontag so against it? David explores how an argument about ar…
00:55:37 |
Mon 01 Jan 2024
History of Ideas 7: James Baldwin
Episode 7 in our series on the great essays is about James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics. At it…
00:51:19 |
Sun 31 Dec 2023
History of Ideas 6: Simone Weil
Episode 6 in our series on the great essays is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943). Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building block…
00:53:21 |
Sat 30 Dec 2023
History of Ideas 5: George Orwell
Episode 5 in our series on the great essays is about George Orwell. His wartime essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941) is about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English. How did the English m…
00:53:07 |
Fri 29 Dec 2023
History of Ideas 4: Virginia Woolf
Episode 4 in our series on the great essays is about Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929). David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being …
00:52:04 |
Thu 28 Dec 2023
History of Ideas 3: Thoreau
Episode three in our series about the great political essays is about Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy. Thoreau wanted to resist slavery a…
00:56:38 |
Wed 27 Dec 2023
History of Ideas 2: Hume
Episode two in our series on the great essays is about David Hume. How can eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt help make sense of American politics today? When does public borrowing …
01:00:28 |
Tue 26 Dec 2023
History of Ideas 1: Montaigne
Episode one in our series on the great essays is about Montaigne, the man who invented a whole new way of writing and being read. From the fear of death to the joys of life, from the perils of atheis…
00:52:56 |
Mon 25 Dec 2023
History of Ideas Q&A
For our last episode before Christmas David answers some of your questions about the History of Ideas series – What would Dickens have made of Trump? How would reparations work? Which essays are miss…
00:53:00 |
Thu 21 Dec 2023
The Art of the Essay
As we wrap up our History of Ideas series David discusses what makes a great essay and whether the best contemporary writing is as good as what went before. The answer is yes, as shown by Jiayang Fan…
00:53:55 |
Thu 14 Dec 2023
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