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
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Middlemarch Part 2
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 a…
00:52:17 |
Thu 22 Aug 2024
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Middlemarch Part 1
Today’s Great Political Fiction is 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 …
00:51:16 |
Thu 22 Aug 2024
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Fathers and Sons
Our fourth Great Political Fiction is Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), the definitive novel about the politics – and emotions – of intergenerational conflict. How did Turgenev manage to write…
00:55:28 |
Wed 21 Aug 2024
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Mary Stuart
Our third 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 Sco…
00:56:20 |
Tue 20 Aug 2024
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Gulliver’s Travels
Today’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 cor…
00:56:34 |
Mon 19 Aug 2024
Fifteen Fictions for Summer re-release: Coriolanus
In the first episode of the summer daily re-release of our series on the Great Political Fictions, David talks about Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608-9), the last of his tragedies and perhaps his most …
00:58:15 |
Sun 18 Aug 2024
What If… The Vietnam War Had Ended in 1964?
What If… The Vietnam War Had Ended in 1964?
For our latest counterfactual David talks to historian Thant Myint-U about his grandfather U Thant, UN Secretary General for most of the 1960s and the man …
00:59:05 |
Sun 18 Aug 2024
What If… Wallace not Truman Had Become US President in 1945?
Today’s episode explores one of the big counterfactuals of twentieth-century American politics: David talks to historian Benn Steil about how close the ultraliberal Henry Wallace came to being FDR’s …
01:01:48 |
Thu 15 Aug 2024
What If… The French Revolution Had Happened in China?
For our second episode on big historical counterfactuals, David talks to world historian Ayse Zarakol about how the East might well have risen to global dominance before the West. What if the key rev…
00:55:33 |
Sun 11 Aug 2024
What If… Science Counterfactuals w/ Adam Rutherford
To kick off our new series on counterfactual histories David talks to the geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about whether ‘What Ifs’ make sense in science. If one person doesn’t make the …
00:59:45 |
Thu 08 Aug 2024
The Great Political Fictions: Tim Rice on Evita
Something different for our last episode on the Great Political Fictions as this time David talks to the person who wrote it: Tim Rice, the lyricist of the epic musical about the life of Eva Peron, E…
00:51:55 |
Sun 04 Aug 2024
The Great Political Fictions: Helen Lewis on To Kill A Mockingbird
David talks to the writer and broadcaster Helen Lewis about Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), one of the most widely read and best-loved novels of the twentieth century, and in the twenty-fi…
01:02:04 |
Thu 01 Aug 2024
The Great Political Fictions: Lea Ypi on The Wild Duck
The writer and political philosopher Lea Ypi talks about the impact on her of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (1884), which she first read when she was eight – thinking it was a children’s book (it isn’…
01:01:40 |
Sun 28 Jul 2024
The Great Political Poems
David talks to Mark Ford and Seamus Perry, hosts of the LRB’s Close Readings poetry podcast, about what makes a great political poem. Can great poetry be ideological? How much does context matter? An…
00:56:53 |
Thu 25 Jul 2024
American Elections: The Republican Convention
This week we check back in with Gary Gerstle to discuss what’s been happening in American politics after a tumultuous week. What does it say about Trump’s electoral strategy that he picked J.D. Vance…
01:02:06 |
Sun 21 Jul 2024
The Great Political Fictions: Hamilton
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 fat…
00:57:12 |
Thu 18 Jul 2024
The Great Political Fictions: American Wife
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 po…
00:56:48 |
Sun 14 Jul 2024
The Great Political Fictions: The Line of Beauty
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 i…
00:56:16 |
Thu 11 Jul 2024
UK General Elections: 2024
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 L…
00:57:51 |
Sat 06 Jul 2024
UK General Elections: 2019
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 Cu…
00:56:10 |
Thu 04 Jul 2024
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