Living Behind the Iron Curtain

Today’s episode is part two of David’s conversation with political theorist Alan Finlayson about the up-and-down history of British universities since 1945, taking the story from the Blair years to the present. What changed when the ambition became to send half of all young peopl ...  Show more

In today’s episode for our series about the plight facing universities David talks to political theorist Alan Finlayson about what’s happened to higher education in the UK since 1945. It is a story of massive expansion in the number of universities and numbers of students. What w ...  Show more

When the Iron Curtain fell in 1990, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Soci ...  Show more

The German Democratic Republic was born in the ashes of the Second World War, and described itself as a socialist “workers’ and peasants’ state”. The country struggled for much of the latter half of the 20th century, relying on economic support and political backing from the USSR ...  Show more

Professor Lea Ypi reflects on her childhood years, which witnessed the final years of communism in Albania and the fraught transition to capitalist democracy. In conversation with Rob Attar, she also considers what these experiences have taught her about the true nature of freedo ...  Show more