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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | David Runciman |Andrew McGregor |Esther Opoku-Gyeni |Nicola Alexandrou |Ellie Bury
We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2021: The generational divide is deforming democracy. But there is a solution
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2 months ago | 
lrb.co.uk | David Runciman
The speeches American presidents deliver on the day of their inauguration don’t make much of a difference to anything. A handful have given resonant phrases to the language (‘The better angels of our nature’, ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself’) but most are soon folded away and mothballed along with the event as a whole.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | David Runciman
Unusually for a politician, Tony Blair is an authentic writer, in that he authentically sounds like himself. His post-prime-ministerial memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, was long, discursive, eccentric, a bit mystical, but also matey, self-confident, sometimes blunt, occasionally cheesy. It read like he’d written every word of it.
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Sep 21, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | David Runciman
Is Donald Trump really a fascist? It’s a question that has been bubbling away since he first announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015 after a years-long campaign to brand Barack Obama an illegitimate occupant of the White House. Back then his questioning of Obama’s citizenship appeared overtly racist (“When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18 @BarackObama was Barry Soweto”).
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Jun 19, 2024 | 
podcasts.apple.com | David Runciman
For the final episode in the current series, 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 to Playboy and Scrabble, this novel takes the familiar and the known and makes them hauntingly and terrifyingly new.
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Apr 15, 2024 | 
beatlyzer.com | David Runciman |Nicola Alexandrou |Ellie Bury
Four years connected from nan commencement of nan pandemic, nan play whitethorn person subsided but nan lingering effects spell on. Are we suffering from governmental agelong Covid? By David RuncimanHow to perceive to podcasts: everything you request to know
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Mar 30, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | David Runciman
The brief and calamitous premiership of Liz Truss broke all sorts of political records. It was the shortest by far in British history – just 49 days, though oddly in those seven weeks she became the first prime minister since Churchill to serve under two monarchs. Her approval rating before she resigned – 9% – was the worst yet recorded by any modern UK party leader.
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Mar 27, 2024 | 
podcasts.apple.com | David Runciman
In the first episode of our new series about the history of freedom, David and Lea discuss what the idea means to them and why it matters so much. What did freedom mean to Lea growing up in communist Albania? Is it possible to know true freedom without also having experienced oppression? And how is being free different from being lucky? Subscribe now to PPF+ to get bonus episodes and ad-free listening for this and all future series. Just go to www.ppfideas.com.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | David Runciman
Like many people, I have had Covid and I have had long Covid. They are very different experiences. I first caught the disease at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, when its effects were relatively unknown. It was unnerving and highly unpredictable. I did not get particularly sick, but I probably gave the virus to my father, who did.
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Jan 24, 2024 | 
podcasts.apple.com | David Runciman
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 today. Why did hopes for a better, more rational world start to seem like wishful thinking? How was Britain implicated in the demise of Enlightenment ideals? And what might have happened if there had been no French Revolution? Richard Whatmore’s The End of Enlightenment is available now Hosted on Acast.
