Talking Politics: HISTORY OF IDEAS

A special episode in which David answers some of the audience's questions about the second series of History of Ideas. From how he chooses which writers and works to talk about, to whether Boris Johnson is the ultimate Benthamite and whether the idea of a pleasure machine isn't - ...  Show more

Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices (1984) made the case that the worst of all the vices is cruelty. But that meant we needed to be more tolerant of some other common human failings, including snobbery, betrayal and hypocrisy. David explores what she had to say about some of the other ...  Show more

We explore today's seismic changes in media and society, by tracing historical parallels between James Joyce’s The Dead (1907) and today’s digital age. Joyce’s observations on in The Dead about generational divides, the rise of newspapers, and societal shi ...  Show more

How do our politicians use the media? Throughout the 2024 election we have seen a boom in the use of social media and cable news, so how far back does this go?

To find out, Don speaks first to crisis public relations expert and TikTok star, Molly McPherson, to hear a ...

Unrest across the country has been driven in part by the provably false claims of right-wing provocateurs. We examine the real concerns underlying the violence, and how to end it swiftly. Japanese politics had until recently been anachronistically tame; not so now that the social ...  Show more

Less than nine months after Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad was toppled, the honeymoon is over. How is the new regime responding to rising dissent? Introducing Britain’s revolutionary retirees: why pensioners increasingly dominate political protest. And celebrating the life of o ...  Show more