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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. Brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books. New episo ...
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Close Readings

London Review of Books

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Close Readings is a new multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books. Two contributors explore areas of literature through a selection of key works, providing an introductory grounding like no other. Listen to some episodes for free here, and extracts from our ongoing subscriber-only series. How To Subscribe In Apple Podcasts, click 'subscribe' at the top of this podcast feed to unlock the full episodes. Or for other podcast apps, sign up here: lrb.me/closereadings Close ...
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The Fade

Fade To Black Arts Festival

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The Fade podcast interviews artists and creators involved with and in preparation for the 2025 Fade To Black Arts Festival to be held in June 2025 in Houston, TX. Join us for entertaining and informative conversations with creatives from Houston and beyond as we prepare for one of the biggest events to come in 2025! Let's fade it forward!! For more information about the festival, visit fadetoblackfest.com. #thefadepod #ftbaf #fadingitforward #FTBFEST2025
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“Max Brand”, the most used pseudonym of Frederick Schiller Faust (1892-1944), is best known today for his western fiction. Faust began in the early twentieth century selling his stories to the pulp magazines, writing in many genres under numerous pseudonyms. He is probably best known as the creator of the character Destry. His novel Destry Rides Again has been filmed several times, most notably the 1939 version starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. Also his character Dr. Kildare which ...
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David talks to historian Margaret MacMillan, author of the prize-winning Peacemakers, about whether the 1919 Paris Peace Conference deserves its reputation as a missed opportunity and the harbinger of another war. Could the peace have been fairer to the Germans? Could the League of Nations have been given real teeth? Could the Bolsheviks have been …
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Brent Hayes Edwards and Adam discuss the ‘ur-text of Black political philosophy’, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Spanning autobiography, history, biography, fiction, music criticism and political science, its fourteen essays set the tone for black literature, political debate and scholarly production for the course of the twentieth centu…
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Today’s episode is another big early twentieth-century counterfactual: David talks to the historian of Russia Edward Acton about how the Russian Revolution might have unfolded if the Left SRs and not the Bolsheviks had come out on top. Could Lenin have been sidelined? Might the Terror have been avoided? And what would it have meant to the wider wor…
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We return to our series on historical counterfactuals with the big one: how might WWI have been avoided? David talks to Chris Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers, the definitive history of the July crisis of 1914, to explore how it might have turned out differently. What would have happened if Franz Ferdinand had survived the assassination attempt in…
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Few poets have had the courage (or inclination) to rhyme ‘Plato’ with ‘potato’, ‘intellectual’ with ‘hen-peck’d you all’ or ‘Acropolis’ with ‘Constantinople is’. Byron does all of these in Don Juan, his 16,000-line unfinished mock epic that presents itself as a grand satire on human vanity in the tradition of Cervantes, Swift and the Stoics, and re…
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Send us a text This episode, host, Brandon Morgan is joined by Children’s Festival and activities Division Leads for the 2025 Fade To Black Arts Festival, Tene A. Carter and Angela Rice. These talented and purpose-filled leaders discuss their charge for the 2025 Fade To Black Arts Festival and their respective careers. Don’t miss this spectacular i…
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Our Great Political Fictions re-release 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…
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The penultimate episode in our Great Political Fictions re-release 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 l…
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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 …
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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 t…
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‘Goblin Market’ was the title poem of Christina Rossetti’s first collection, published in 1862, and while she disclaimed any allegorical purpose in it, modern readers have found it hard to resist political interpretations. The poem’s most obvious preoccupation seems to be the Victorian notion of the ‘fallen woman’. When she wrote it Rossetti was wo…
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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 …
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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 hav…
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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 …
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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 wi…
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In his prodigious, prolific and very short career, Lucan was at turns championed, disavowed and finally forced into suicide at 25 by the emperor Nero. His only surviving work is Civil War, an account of the bloody and chaotic power struggle between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. In their first episode on Latin literature’s so-called ‘Silver Ag…
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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 g…
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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 politician…
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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 …
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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 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 rel…
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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 a wistful novel about nihilism? What made Russian politics in the early 1860s so chock-full of frustration? Why did Turgenev’s book infuriate his cont…
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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 Scots – in a world of men. Schiller imagines a meeting between them that never took place and unpicks its fearsome consequences. Why does it do such damag…
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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 coruscating reflection on the failures of human perspective and self-knowledge. Why do we find it so hard to see ourselves for who we really are? What mak…
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Send us a text This episode's guest, trailblazing journalist and playwright, Fernando Dovalina. Fernando joins us to discuss his groundbreaking journalism career, his journey as a playwright and his loyal support of The Fade To Black festivals. Join us for this compelling conversation with this committed artist! Catch the video premiere of new epis…
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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 politically contentious play. Why has Coriolanus been subject to so many wildly different political interpretations? Is pride really the tragic flaw of…
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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 who might have ended the Vietnam War before it really got started. How close did U Thant get to bringing LBJ and the Vietcong to the negotiating table …
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The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. In 'Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight', his most well-known incarnation, Gawai…
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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 running mate in 1944 and successor as president in 1945. How near did Wallace get to making it onto the ticket at the 1944 Democratic National Conventi…
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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 revolutions of the modern world – political and industrial – had happened in Asia first? What if there had been an Iranian Napoleon? And how much of our u…
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After reciting an unflattering poem about Stalin to a small group of friends, Osip Mandelstam was betrayed to the police and endured five years in exile before dying in transit to the gulag. His wife, Nadezhda, spent the rest of her life dodging arrest, advocating for Osip’s work and writing what came to be known as Hope against Hope. Hope against …
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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 big discovery, will someone else do it? Are scientific breakthroughs the product of genius or of wealth and power? And how might the world have been a …
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Send us a text In this mini-episode (a light Fade) we sat down with multi-hyphenated artists, Thomas Meloncon, Curtis Von and Errol Anthony Wilks to discuss the state of black theatre. You won't want to miss this short, but topical discussion. Catch a Light FADE!! Catch the video premiere of new episodes on Wednesdays at 7PM here: https://youtube.c…
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What kind of satirist was Jane Austen? Her earliest writings follow firmly in the footsteps of Tristram Shandy in their deployment of heightened sentiment as a tool for satirising romantic novelistic conventions. But her mature fiction goes far beyond this, taking the fashion for passionate sensibility and confronting it with moneyed realism to dep…
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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, Evita (co-written with Andrew Lloyd-Webber). Where did the idea for such an unlikely subject come from? Why has it struck a chord with politicians from …
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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-first century increasingly one of the most controversial. Is the book an attack on or an apology for Southern racism? How does its view of race relate to…
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Whitman wrote several poetic responses to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He came to detest his most famous, ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, and in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd’ Lincoln is not imagined in presidential terms but contained within a love elegy that attempts to unite his death with the 600,000 deaths of the civil war and r…
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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’t!) – and has been returning to ever since. A play about family and betrayal, idealism and disappointment, temptation and self-destruction, is it also …
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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? And is it possible to tell political truths in verse? From Yeats’s ‘Easter 1916’ to Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ to Auden’s ‘Spain 1937’: a conversation abou…
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In episode seven, we turn to some of the earliest surviving examples of Roman literature: the raucous, bawdy and sometimes bewildering world of Roman comedy. Plautus and Terence, who would go on to set the tone for centuries of playwrights (and school curricula), came from the margins of Roman society, writing primarily for plebeians and upsetting …
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Send us a text This episode's guest, ShaWanna Renee Rivon, playwright, screenwriter, actress and director. Shawanna discusses her journey as an actress, her triumphs as a playwright, her continuous growth as an artist and her involvement in the Fade To Black. Join us for this dynamic conversation with this gifted artist! Catch the video premiere of…
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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 as his running mate? How would the Republican party have coped if the assassin’s bullet hadn’t missed? Who might replace Biden at the top of the Democ…
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The foul-mouthed, mean-spirited peasant Marcolf was one of the most well-known literary characters in late medieval Europe. He appears in many poetic works from the 9th century onwards, but it’s in this dialogue with Solomon, printed in Antwerp in 1492, that we find him at his irreverent and scatological best as they engage in a battle of proverbia…
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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 powerf…
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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 …
  continue reading
 
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 liberat…
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Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s formally brilliant and startlingly frank 1962 novel. In her portrait of ‘free women’ – unmarried, creatively ambitious, politically engaged – Lessing wrestles with the breakdown of Stalinism, settler colonialism and traditional gender roles. Pankaj and Adam explore the l…
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Send us a text This episode's guest, Jabari Collins, Board President of Shabach Enterprise, parent company of The Fade To Black Play Festival. Jabari discusses his "everyman" duties with FTB and other organizations, his career as an theatre educator, theatre's role in education, and his role in the 2025 Fade To Black Arts Festival. Join us for this…
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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 increas…
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'Tristram Shandy' was such a hit in its day that you could buy tea trays, watch cases and cushions decorated with its most famous characters and scenes. If much of the satire covered in this series so far has featured succinct and damning portrayals of recognisable city types, Sterne’s comic masterpiece seems to offer the opposite: a sprawling and …
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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 j…
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