I’m very grateful to David Runciman for sharing the fruits of his intellect in an accessible and entertaining way.

Got through an hour drive listening to History of Ideas: Virginia Woolf. Thank you for voicing the importance of women in literature. Great podcast voice.

I watched The Zone of Interest three times. David pulled so much out of the film I need to watch it again. I greatly appreciate his effort and dedication to delivering highly intellectual content in an inviting manner.

This is a great pod for 2 reasons. One is because of content. The other is because of delivery. Runciman has a great podcast voice. The best episodes feature him alone; without a guest.

A new must listen twice of week. Grateful for your intelligence, insight and creativity.

Amazing guests and intriguing topics. David is an excellent interviewer, moderator, interlocutor, and occasional adversary. Cannot recommend enough!

Thoughtful, careful analysis of current and past events, ideas, movies, and novels and things that should concern anybody who wants to understand the world around them.

Has become my favorite podcast in no time. I always learn a lot. Also, Runciman has a great radio voice, making for easy listening.

Brilliant podcast , thank you. I wish there were more episodes on the greatest novels (such as your sublime two part on Middlemarch ) and great writers (such as your excellent episode on Woolf) and less on topics such as American elections and that stuff .

I've followed David to this new podcast. He used to produce one with Helen Thompson, which was also fantastic. This podcast is probably even better

When this series resumes you should consider “Neuromancer”

Superb

🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩

This podcast is perfect for me. The topics of history, literature,philosophy, political science etc combined in an essay is just wonderful. I have listened some episodes but I am planning to listen all of them. The ideas are organized by topics that help me to gain knowledge and understanding of important ideas that have shaped our world until recently. Listening this podcast is time well spent. Thank you!

I do hope listeners appreciate what an exceptional podcast Past/Present/Future is. It certainly helps that David Runciman seems to know everything, but to pair him with guests like Lea Ypi and others approaches perfection. Altogether a remarkable pairing of scholarship and presentation.

One of those frequent types who loves to hear their own voice & thinks the audience is flattered that they can listen. When Wikipedia is better, why waste time?

This is the rich and thoughtful graduate course I longed for back in the disappointing days and parade of ‘isms that constituted undergraduate philosophy…and history. Or perhaps it’s just that education is wasted on the young; much better revisited decades later. For this I thank David Runciman, his guests and production team. I love the pace when Runciman is solo and the respectful exchange when he is not. I relisten to episodes, current

An absolutely incredible amount of information that is just not taught as part of civic education. I’ve been a longtime listener but this series takes the show to a new level and is especially important context for this year’s election.

Amazing.

I look forward to every episode. Thank you.

A friend recommended your podcast on “A Room of One’s Own”. I listened to it this morning and wow, what a great summary/analysis! I am trying to find a transcript of it because you made some great points that I want to make notes on.

Thank you for the consistently thoughtful contents!

Thank you so much for doing this service for humanity.

Imagine the smartest conversation you’ve ever had, multiply the brilliance and thoughtfulness times 10, add a dash of intellectual humility, and you have this podcast. A refuge from the awful politics of now—but a historical one, that shows you where those politics came from and where they might or might not be going.

This podcast is so good, I can’t stop recommending it to people. Engages with ideas with a level of sophistication that I haven’t found with any other podcast, while remaining accessible and entertaining. The “Great Essays” series is the best place to start — some of my favorites include the episodes on Woolf, Weil, Baldwin, and Coates.

At its best, this podcast will open your eyes to truths you’d never focused on before. The host and his guests wrestle with the biggest crises of our time in attempts to understand where we are, what is right, and what can be done. Absolutely brilliant. It probes the human condition, examines our shared histories, and stares deep into the facets of our problems from many angles. They do not pull punches. It is intellectual, but in a fundamentally creative and critically analytical way. It deals with a wide range of topics, but you will learn important things if you pay attention. If you’re not listening to this, then you’re missing out on the most relevant and penetrating conversation of the current moment. Listen. It’s worth your time and attention.

Rather dull to attempt to necklace an ethnicity with what is a univeral. Such reviews are the product of an other's envy, or that of a duped member of that group that the other scorns.

I loved David's previous program with Helen Thompson, Talking Politics. While I miss Helen, I really enjoy the variety of this program. The interviewa are amazing and Lea Ypi as a recurring guest is brilliant. David has become an incredibly strong interviewer, injecting his opinions as a way of letting the guest express their opinions in opposition. The essays (to me, at least), feel like David interviewing the author through their words. Altogether, it's one of my favorite parts of this week.

Dear David, While I’m sympathetic to your conclusion, the path you take to it is a crafty pastiche of Eurocentric chauvinism at best. It would be more accurate to label this global mess we find ourselves in the Anglocene. Britain created the Leviathan and exported it around our planet. Human slavery , colonialism, genocide, patriarchy, plantation economics, and plantation politics all to “scale” accompanied it to the Americas where it took root and flourishes to this day in the form of MAGA nuttery. Anthropocentric Leviathanism is absurd and a cruel contradiction. Our world has had enough iterations of this destructive story. We already have a way forward. It’s been here all along. Rather than reinventing Leviathanism, we need to rediscover the sanity, serenity, and wisdom of the cultures that were present in the “New World “ thousands of years prior to that fatal contact in your so-called 15th Century with your Leviathan culture. - Chris 11-3-2023

Thank you so much for this series. I think the Orwell is the best, but the Didion and Baldwin are up there. If you like this series (and you should!) go over to Mr. Runciman’s “talking politics” podcast and listen to the Weber and, especially, Benjamin Constant episodes. These might change your life (certainly how you see and, likely, approach it). The explication is so great, but the best thing about this series is that it forces you to go to the essays yourself. I know that’s cliche but it’s true. Thank you, again. I’m grateful for this series. Brian

David you definitely perk up under interrogation. Lea is making all the right points about how your account makes too strong a case for the inevitability of corporate/state power as we move forward. The weird thing is that your theory also initially appears to mute cultural context and historical contingency. But it’s so historical! And so English! Hobbes’ Leviathan not possible outside the weird destiny of the English Reformation, of course. Otherwise it would have just been some French divine right nonsense. Having said all that I agree with you because of the context of the Hobbes model which was very historically situated, very British, and perhaps the most successful imperialist model, save Genghis Kahn’s. I was shocked that you didn’t discuss the unique conditions of the Reformation in England with its sovereignty model, and the unusually successful record of British corporations from the embryonic Virginia Company to the truly hegemonic East India Company and its mania for robotic record keeping and standardization. Sometimes I listen to you at night so I may have dozed off at that point. You’re brilliant on the state/corporation assumption of decisions on behalf of the public … how you describe the God-like role of the Leviathan as anticipating the algorithmic takeover of our choice points in daily life including political life … yo bro, that was just excellent and could use a whole new episode. It ties in with that recent essay in LRB about our political sphere now being modeled on fandom, a uniquely algorithmically empowered phenomenon. So yes, another episode, please. Best, Susanna

The episode on Orwell’s essay, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” is a tour de force. This one easygoing talk has the dimensions of a whole book about British history and culture. Postscript: Also extraordinary are the episodes on Thoreau and Joan Didion. Runciman is a triple-threat with historical grounding, taste, and a point of view that gives the talks momentum. I don’t think any American understands Thoreau as well as this fine critic, Prof. Runciman, who seems too culturally savvy to be an Oxford professor.

I have listened with great pleasure to the Virginia Woolf and the Republican Party episodes so far. I’m in the middle of listening to the Simone Weil one. But I have to stop and write this (I do plan to listen to the rest of the episodes, I find your podcast very well researched and insightful). The throwaway phrase that— because she thought that scientists may follow fashion (and I don’t know if she was truly anti-science, I’ve yet to read her posthumous essays On Science, Necessity and the Love of God)— she would be in the 21st century be an anti-vaxxer is preposterous. Just because she saw various Weltanschauungen as pernicious, does not mean that she would oppose the science behind the anti-covid vaccines. Also, she wasn’t a self-hating Jew, she questioned, like you said, the institutionalization of religions. We have to thank Susan Sontag for the charge of antisemitism, and how ironic that Weil in fact influenced Sontag.

I loved his History of Ideas series, and now he’s back. I cannot get enough of his brain or voice.

I was hopeful that the presenter would discuss topics in an impartial and historical perspective. The topics are compelling and interesting. However, after listening to three episodes I have become disappointed that the host and guests only seem to be able to view things from the left and cannot be more intellectually fair minded.

The episode on Montaigne was especially good. I’m far from having read all of Montaigne’s Essays, but Sarah Bakewell’s book is one of my favorites and this episode gives me so much to think about. Runciman brings out so clearly all the ways Montaigne speaks to today.

Unexpected subject picks for the first three episodes, but I am enjoying that freshness. David Runciman is always good and it’s interesting to hear his takes on more wide-ranging topics. Definitely worth a listen.

It’s true I’m writing this only three episodes in but in his effort to come up with something different in the crowded world of podcasts David Runciman appears to have stumbled. A discussion of an old political novel with a well known but middlebrow present-day novelist, the societal significance of a racy prime time soap opera from 40 years ago, life behind the Iron Curtain with a guest he’s had before in his earlier podcast, gives this one a rather random feel, as if he’s straining for freshness.

Can’t wait to hear your first episode!