In part one, Ian unravels Matt Goodwin’s strange journey from ambitious young academic to GB News host, Reform UK candidate and fellow traveller of Viktor Orbán. Was he radicalised by his professional immersion in the far right, did he just follow the prevailing winds to money and influence, or was he always like this?

Then Dorian breaks down Goodwin’s book Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity, in which Enoch Powell meets ChatGPT, London has fallen and good old Britain is being betrayed by something called “suicidal empathy”. As sloppy as it is unpleasant, it positions Goodwin as the UK’s cut-price answer to Stephen Miller but will his unique charmlessness scupper his political aspirations? Goodwin predicted that the “elites” (ie, anyone who disagrees with him) would hate his book and who are we to disappoint him?

In part two, we take a much-needed mind bath and each select five films that we think illuminate the recurring themes we discuss in Origin Story, from Batman Begins to All the President’s Men. Finally, we take some questions, both political and personal, from our wonderful audience.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• James Bloodworth – ‘Matthew Goodwin, Reform and the politics of resentment’, Prospect (16 July 2025)

• Daniel Boffey – ‘“It’s about ego’: Matt Goodwin’s journey from far-right expert to firebrand Reform candidate’, Guardian (30 January 2026)

• Josh Glancy – ‘The reinvention of Matt Goodwin, from professor to Reform radical’,

The Times (31 January 2026)

• Matt Goodwin – Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity (2026)

• Sam Leith – ‘The Illusion and Delusion of Matt Goodwin’, Spectator (30 March 2026)

• John Merrick – ‘Matt Goodwin’s intellectual suicide’, New Statesman (24 March 2026)

• Joe Mulhall – ‘The Opportunist Extremist: The Strange Radicalisation of Matt Goodwin’, Hope Not Hate (2025)

• Mark Sellman – ‘Matt Goodwin accused of AI blunders in new book on migration’, The Times (26 March 2026)

• Andy Twelves – ‘Did Matthew Goodwin use AI to write his book?, Spectator (24 March 2026)

• Andy Twelves debates Matt Goodwin, GB News (27 March 2026)

• Julia Carrie Wong – ‘Loathe thy neighbor: Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy’, Guardian (8 April 2025)

• Cathy Young – ‘The Bizarre Right-Wing War on... Empathy?’, The Bulwark (21 April 2025)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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One strange thing about the General Strike is that it happened when industrial relations, which had reached their fiery nadir before and after the First World War, seemed to be cooling down. But tensions between coal miners and mine owners got so bad that the Trades Union Congress had no choice but to join the fight, even though its leaders did not expect to win. It was a showdown that very few people wanted.

The strike began at one minute to midnight on 3 May. The following nine days were intense, exciting and unprecedented. Future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell and future fascist Oswald Mosley backed the workers, Evelyn Waugh and the Mitford sisters joined the army of volunteers trying to keep Britain moving, and Virginia Woolf just complained. In some places, the strike became a proxy war between communists and fascists. Meanwhile, the BBC faced the first existential crisis of its short life, struggling to maintain impartiality while under the threat of a government takeover.

The cast of characters is a kind of Origin Story all-stars, including prime minister Stanley Baldwin, chancellor and propagandist Winston Churchill, Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, trade union heavyweight Ernest Bevin, BBC chief John Reith and Liberal peace-maker Herbert Samuel.

The strike ended on 12 May because the TUC surrendered, to the dismay of many workers. At the time, it seemed like an unmitigated defeat for the unions, a humiliation for the Labour Party and a vindication for Baldwin’s Tories. But the long-term consequences were unpredictable and the strike’s legacy is still up for debate.

How did the General Strike become inevitable when almost everybody was desperate to avoid it? What were those nine days like for people on both sides of the barricades? How did the BBC survive? Could the unions have won with different leaders or was it an impossible battle from the start? Why did a Tory victory lead so quickly to a Labour government and a stronger TUC? And why was Churchill such a dick about it?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

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Reading list

• Stanley Baldwin – Prime Minister’s Statement, Hansard (3 May 1926)

• David Brandon – The General Strike 1926: A New History (2023)

• A. J. Cook – The Nine Days: The Story of the General Strike Told by the Miners’ Secretary (1927)

• David Hendy – The BBC: A People’s History (2022)

• Roy Jenkins – Churchill (2001)

• Keith Laybourn – The General Strike of 1926 (1993)

• Martin Pugh – ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Julian Symons – The General Strike (1957)

• David Torrance – The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike That Shook Britain (2026)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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We trace the weird story of these terms back to Vienna, on March 3rd 1907, when the Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Jung first met the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. What follows is a hysterical, combative and sexually charged relationship which left both men in a state of social disarray. But in his efforts to later work out what happened, Jung settled on a personality binary which proved extremely intuitive to the public at large. 

Are these terms meaningful? Do they have scientific validity? And what are the dangers and advantages of defining ourselves in this way? Let's find out, as we delve into the world of personality types, psychoanalysis and what might genuinely be the single most preposterous intellectual dispute in the history of ideas.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

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Reading list

• Peter Geyer – Extraversion – Introversion: what C.G. Jung meant and how contemporaries responded, AusAPT Biennial Conference Melbourne, Australia – October 25–27, 2012

• Carl Gustav Jung – "The Association Method", The American Journal of Psychology 1910-04: Vol 21 Iss 2

• Carl Gustav Jung – Psychological Types, Princeton University Press, 1971

• D. L. Johnson, J. S. Wiebe, S. M. Gold, N. C. Andreasen – Cerebral blood flow and personality: A positron emission tomography study, American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 252–257 (1999).

• Florencio (Jun) Kabigting, Jr - The Discovery and Evolution of the Big Five of Personality, GNOSI: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Theory and Praxis, Volume 4, Issue 3, June 2021

• Frank McLynn – Carl Gustav Jung: A Biography, St Martin's Press 1996.

• The Invention of 'Introvert', Words Matter podcast, episode 51

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Currently the deputy White House chief of staff, Miller has been Trump’s most influential aide for the past decade, steering him towards ever greater extremes of nativism and authoritarianism. He’s been described as Trump’s prime minister, the shadow president, the intellectual engine behind MAGA fascism, and a real-world version of Tolkien’s Grima Wormtongue. To understand the Trump administration, you need to understand Stephen Miller. But where did he come from and why is he still here?

In this episode, we explain how Miller emerged from the toxic politics of 1990s California to became an abrasive right-wing troll before he’d even graduated from middle school. At high school in Santa Monica and college in North Carolina, it was the same story: no friends but plenty of attention. On the one hand, Miller revelled in provoking the hatred of his peers. On the other, he sincerely believed that immigration was a mortal threat to America, despite being the descendant of Jewish refugees who owed their lives to American hospitality.

After graduation, Miller headed to Washington, winding up as an attack dog for elf-faced xenophobe Senator Jeff Sessions and a conduit between the far right and mainstream conservatism. When Trump entered the political scene in 2015, Miller saw the ideal vehicle for his white nationalist monomania. While most Republicans opposed illegal immigration, Miller demonised legal immigration, too. The most inhumane of Trump’s policies — child separation, the Muslim ban, ICE’s reign of terror — have his fingerprints all over them.

Learning from the setbacks of Trump’s first term, Miller has evolved into Washington’s most ruthless operator and arguably the most powerful unelected official in the world. Look into almost any corner of Trumpland, from January 6 to Project 2025, or Elon Musk’s political donations to Nicolas Maduro’s removal, and you’ll find Stephen Miller.

How did Miller become such an enduringly powerful influence on such a fickle president? Is he, in fact, the real force behind the Trump administration’s fascist impulses? What do his obsessions owe to the long history of American nativism? Could he outlast Trump and expand his mission to transform America or has he already overreached? And does he have any redeeming features whatsoever?

• See Origin Story live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 15th April 2026: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-theatre/events/2026/apr/origin-story-live

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

Books and articles

• Eitan Arom – ‘From Hebrew school to halls of power: Stephen Miller’s unlikely journey’, Jewish Journal (15 March 2017)

• Jonathan Blitzer – ‘How Stephen Miller Single-Handedly Got the U.S. to Accept Fewer Refugees’, The New Yorker (13 October 2017)

• Jonathan Blitzer – ‘How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further His Immigration Obsession’, The New Yorker (21 February 2020)

• Sarah Churchwell – Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream (2018)

• Nancy Cook – ‘Trump’s immigration push is Stephen Miller’s dream come true’, Politico, 31 October 2018

• McKay Coppins – ‘Trump’s Right-Hand Troll’, The Atlantic (28 May 2018)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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We meet Clarence Arthur Perry, the first urban planner to protect city life from the rise of the automobile; Jane Jacobs, the urban theorist who championed mixed-use neighbourhoods in 1960s New York and prevented Robert Moses’ expressway from slicing through downtown Manhattan; and Carlos Moreno, the French-Colombian scientist who invented the 15-minute city in 2015.

Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo made the policy a cornerstone of her mayoralty and a model for cities around the world. But as the pandemic melted people’s brains, Moreno’s innovation became demonised as a “war on motorists” and, worse, a “Stalinist” plot to confine citizens to their neighbourhoods — permanent lockdown. By the end of 2023, Rishi Sunak’s government was fluently speaking the language of online conspiracy theorists.

What constitutes the ideal urban environment? How can planning make residents happier, healthier and safer? Why is the psychology of driving so weird? How did paranoia about 15-minute cities fuse with lockdown hysteria, anti-vax thinking, climate change denial and far-right fantasies to turn Moreno into “public enemy number one”? And will the 15-minute city prevail anyway?

• See Origin Story live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 15th April 2026: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-theatre/events/2026/apr/origin-story-live

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Anonymous – ‘City of “cells” seen created by auto era’, New York Times (4 August 2029)

• Anonymous – ‘A guide to 15-minute cities: why are they so controversial?’, University of the Built Environment (2 December 2024)

• Joseph Giovanni – ‘Apartment builders return to prewar design’, New York Times (13 October 1986)

• Tiffany Hsu – ‘He Wanted to Unclog Cities. Now He’s “Public Enemy No. 1.”’, New York Times (28 March 2023)

• Jane Jacobs – The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

• The Life Well Lived, Episode 32, podcast (19 August 2020)

• Douglas Martin – ‘Jane Jacobs, Urban Activist, Is Dead at 89’, New York Times (25 April 2006)

• Georgia Pozoukidou and Zoi Chatziyiannaki – ‘15-Minute City: Decomposing the New Urban Planning Eutopia’, MDPI (17 January 2021)

• Georgia Pozoukidou and Margarita Andelidou – ‘Urban Planning in the 15-Minute City: Revisited under Sustainable and Smart City Developments until 2030’, MDPI (12 October 2022)

• Pallavi Sethi – ‘The Telegraph misrepresents 15-minute cities’, LSE (2 February 2026)

• Camilla Turner – ‘Labour opens door to “Stalinist” 15- minute cities across Britain’, Telegraph (24 January 2026)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to a between-season bonus episode of Origin Story. We’ve missed you! This one emerged from our three-parter on the history of the Labour Party and one of the burning obsessions of British politics: the faction known as Blue Labour and its ubiquitous founder Maurice Glasman.

As Keir Starmer’s government continues to alienate its base in order to chase the same socially conservative voters as Reform UK, fingers are pointing at chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and his connections to Blue Labour, turning Glasman into the party’s eminence grise. But how influential is Glasman really? And where did Blue Labour come from?

The story begins in 2008, when the financial crisis coincides with the death of Glasman’s mother. The jazz-loving, City-hating, chain-smoking academic and community organiser invents Blue Labour: blue as in sad and blue as in “conservative socialism”. As New Labour falls to pieces, Glasman’s maverick vision of Labour’s long history and possible future intrigues heavyweights from across the party. He’s elevated from obscurity to the House of Lords by Ed Miliband but explodes on the launchpad after some provocative statements about immigration and Europe. Amid accusations of racism, misogyny and toxic nostalgia, Blue Labour Mark 1 burns out.

When Blue Labour resurfaces with a vengeance in 2025, it has been thoroughly radicalised by a decade of Brexit and right-wing populism. Having been JD Vance’s personal guest at the second inauguration of Donald Trump, Glasman is now praising MAGA while waging all-out war on immigrants, liberals and the so-called “lanyard class”. Original Blue Labourite Marc Stears calls Blue Labour Mark 2 “a clear and present danger to our politics”.

How did Blue Labour lurch from the party’s soft left to its hard right? Why do so many of the people who once found Glasman’s ideas stimulating now find them horrifying? Is Blue Labour, then and now, a symptom of a party in intellectual crisis? What exactly is Glasman’s connection to Morgan McSweeney and Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood? And is the rogue peer really as significant as he, and his enemies, like to make out?

Reading list

Books

Rowenna Davis – Tangled Up in Blue (2011)

Ian Geary and Adrian Pabst – Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015)

Maurice Glasman, Jonathan Rutherford, Marc Stears and Stuart White – The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox (2011)

Maurice Glasman – Blue Labour: The Politics of the Common Good (2022)

Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire – Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer (2025)

Articles

• Philip Collins – ‘Maurice Glasman and the origins of Blue Labour’, Prospect (24 February 2025)

• Julian Coman – ‘Maurice Glasman, architect of Blue Labour: “Labour needs to be itself again”’, The Observer (25 September 2022)

• Rachel Cooke – ‘Maurice Glasman: Labour’s Trump Card’, The Observer (25 April 2025)

• Ethan Croft – ‘Blue Labour is fighting for its future’, The New Statesman (26 November 2025)

• Annabel Denham - Lord Glasman: ‘Shabana is like Elizabeth I – devoted to her job. She’s utterly unique’, The Telegraph (23 November 2025)

• Jonathan Derbyshire – ‘Voice of the Heartlands’, The New Statesman (7 April 2011)

• Maurice Glasman - Maurice Glasman: my Blue Labour vision can defeat the coalition, The Guardian (24 April 2011)

• Toby Helm and Julian Coman – ‘Maurice Glasman – the peer plotting Labour’s new strategy from his flat’, The Observer (16 January 2011)

• Preet Kaur Gill, ‘Labour Must Go Blue’, The Telegraph (6 January 2026)

• Dan Hodges – ‘Exclusive: the end of Blue Labour’, The New Statesman (20 July 2011)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Chris Jones and Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production 

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We left the narrative in 1991, with the collapse of the USSR and the so- called “end of history”. This week we’re not telling a new story but looking back on the whole season to reflect on the evolution of socialism over the last two centuries and where it might go from here.

We begin by catching up with socialism since 1991, as China embraced “market socialism”, Latin America’s ‘Pink Wave’ rose and fell, and the Western left all but gave up on its dream of building a new economic model. Was the left forced to fight for small victories because the

possibility of bringing down capitalism had slipped away?

We then return to the beginning of the season and ask if all the most important strands of socialism, from violent revolution to utopian communes, existed in some form by the time Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Can socialism be strictly defined or is it a broad tradition encompassing multiple different visions? And how does it relate to communism, left-wing populism or social democracy?

We explore some of the obstacles that repeatedly prevent socialists from achieving their goals, including factions, personality cults, cranks, authoritarians and the romance of defeat — most of which were recently illustrated by the fiasco of Your Party. Finally, we take stock of socialism’s achievements, including many of the rights we now take for granted. Has socialism been more successful as a means of critiquing and moderating capitalism than replacing it?

So, what is socialism? Can one word really describe Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Zarah Sultana and Zohran Mamdani? How has a creed dedicated to solidarity and collective liberation produced so much rancour and oppression? Why are “temporary” dictatorships never temporary? Is social democracy really socialism? Will we ever see another socialist revolution or will that energy be sucked up by the populist right? And is socialism’s tremendous optimism about human nature both its greatest strength and its greatest flaw?

Thanks again for listening to the story of socialism. It’s been a journey. We’ll see you in 2026 for some bonus episodes while we start work on season nine.

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• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Mikhail Gorbachev’s desire to change his country was a product of the secret speech in 1956 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As he climbed the ladder to power, he witnessed the Soviet Union flinch from reform and slide into stagnation and decline. So when he became General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985 he sought to rejuvenate the regime with three audacious innovations: perestroika (restructuring), glasnost (openness) and democratisation.

It was a punishing task. Old hardliners in the Politburo thought Gorbachev was too radical while his populist arch-rival Boris Yeltsin thought him not daring enough. Gorbachev wanted to end the Cold War and open his country to the world but he did not foresee the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact in 1989. He certainly didn’t want the USSR itself to come undone two years later. But the desire for change that he had unleashed could not be tamed.

By 1991, Gorbachev was lionised abroad and loathed at home. A failed coup attempt set off a rapid chain of events that ended not just his leadership but the Communist Party and the USSR itself. In trying to save his country, he ended up enabling its destruction. The era of world history that began in 1917 was over.

Why did the Soviet Union prove impossible to reform? Did Gorbachev move too fast or too slowly? How significant was his vicious feud with Yeltsin? Did the US bungle the USSR’s transition to a capitalist democracy and misread the collapse of its rival superpower? What did this do to the hopes of socialists around the world? And how do the tumultuous events of 1985-91 still shape the world today?

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• Head to⁠ nakedwines.co.uk/origin to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included.

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• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Sven Beckert – Capitalism: A Global History (2025)

• Francis Fukuyama – ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (Summer 1989)

• Anna Funder – Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (2004)

• Masha Gessen – The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017)

• Mikhail Gorbachev – Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (1987)

• Leslie Holmes – Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009)

• Stephen Kotkin – Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000 (2001)

• Serhii Plokhy – The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014)

• Robert Service – Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007)

• Tom Stoppard – Rock’n’Roll (2006)

• William Taubman – Gorbachev: His Life and Times (2017)

• Mikhail Zygar – The Dark Side of the Earth: How the Soviet Union Collapsed but Remained (2025)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Born in Argentina to wealthy but unhappy parents, Ernesto Guevara travelled around Latin America during his youth until he met Fidel Castro in Mexico City. From then on his path was set, following the Cuban nationalist leader into a guerilla campaign in the Sierra Maestra and then into government. He concocted a rare form of socialism which combined Maoist peasant rebellion with pan-Latin American nationalism and Jack Kerouac’s drifter idealism.

His fame lies not so much in his actions or his thoughts but his image, specifically the iconic Che photograph, taken by Alberto Korda on March 5th 1960. For decades, it has been put up in student bedrooms and raised above protest marches as an encapsulation of youthful idealism, resistance and social justice.

We look at the man behind the image and find a strange, intoxicating bundle of seemingly contradictory elements: a poet executioner, a cold-hearted idealist, a sociopath bohemian, and much more besides. 

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• See Origin Story live at the Bloomsbury Theatre on 15th April 2026.

Reading list

Jon Lee Anderson – Che Guevara, a Revolutionary Life

Che Guevara – Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58 (1963)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1963/reminiscences/index.htm

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro – Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/guevara/1965/03/man-socialism.htm

Che Guevara – The Motorcycle Diaries

Che Guevara – Guerrilla Warfare

Mark Kurlansky – 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (2004)

Michael Newman – Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2020)

Andrew Sinclair – Che Guevara (1998)

FiIm club

Evita, directed by Alan Parker

The Motorcycle Diaries, directed by Walter Salles 

Che Part One and Part Two, directed by Steven Soderbergh

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison.

Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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It all comes to a head in 1968 with a chain reaction of youth-driven street protests and occupations: Paris, London, New York, Rome, Mexico City, Tokyo. It’s 1848 all over again, only this time its global and its televised, turning leading activists into overnight celebrities. Everywhere, though, these rebellions end in defeat and fragmentation. In its wake, figures as prominent as John Lennon convince themselves that revolution is imminent even as it becomes vanishingly improbable.

The New Left splinters in the 1970s. Some “68ers” enter mainstream politics. Others turn to terrorism. A few plunge into the factional jungle of Maoist and Trotskyist sects. But many more redirect their idealism towards new liberation movements: second-wave feminism, gay rights, racial justice, Third World solidarity.

We explain how the theories of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci became a lodestar for the left decades after his death — a new approach to changing society. The New Left may have failed to mount a political revolt but it succeeded in redrawing the parameters of socialism beyond class struggle. The left of today is its legacy.

Why did the thrilling upheavals of 1968 fall so short? What led so many people to expect a revolution? How did Gramsci become the most important socialist thinker of the modern era? Was toxic disunity inevitable? And how did the New Left ultimately succeed, despite backlashes, setbacks and self-imposed wounds, in changing the world?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠

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Reading list

Histories

• Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024)

• Bryan Burrough – Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015)

• Max Elbaum – Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (2002)

• Todd Gitlin – The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage: Revised Edition (1993)

• Vivian Gornick – The Romance of American Communism (1977)

• Joachim C. Häberlen – Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counter-Culture in Post-War Europe (2023)

• Michael Kazin – American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011)

• Mark Kurlansky – 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (2004)

• Dorian Lynskey – 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs (2011)

• William L. O’Neill – The New Left: A History (2001)

• Rick Perlstein – Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008)

• Terence Renaud – New Lefts: The Making of a Radical Tradition (2021)

• Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright – Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism (1979)

• Roger Simon – Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction: Third Edition (2015)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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The big bang was 1956. Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech made Stalin’s crimes undeniable while the invasion of Hungary disgraced the new regime too. The first New Left was an intellectual effort by disillusioned British ex-communists to develop a new “socialist humanism”: neither Washington nor Moscow nor mainstream social democracy but a revival of socialism’s highest ideals in the post-war world.

The New Left was reborn as an international youth movement in the 1960s as the baby boomers came of age and rallied around new issues: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, the end of imperialism and the hollow conformity of the affluent society. From London to Paris and Berkeley to Berlin, students were in the vanguard.

“We don’t trust anybody over 30,” they joked, but we take a look at three older thinkers whose ideas shaped the movement. The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse diagnosed the West as rotten and called for a new alliance of outsiders — students, minorities, Third World revolutionaries — to redeem it. The radical French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon sought the decolonisation of not just countries but minds, by any means necessary. And China’s Mao Zedong, the pioneer of guerrilla warfare, positioned himself at the epicentre of the movement for global revolution, even as his own crimes at home rivalled Stalin’s.

By the end of 1967, the student movement was turning from protest to resistance, with a view to overturning the whole system, but it was also beginning to splinter. The upheavals of 1968 would be the making, and the breaking, of the New Left.

Was the New Left ever a coherent socialist project or just a fragile dissident coalition? How did the first New Left pave the way for the movement that swept the world? What fuelled its accelerating radicalism in the mid-60s? How did students who loathed Stalin end up venerating dictators like Mao and Ho Chi Minh? And in rejecting the fatal errors of the Old Left, did the New Left create their own?

For scheduling reasons we’re releasing both parts this week — part two will be with you on Saturday.

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• See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026.

Reading list

Histories

• David Aaronovitch – Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists (2016)

• Bryan Burrough – Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (2015)

• David Caute – Fanon (1970)

• Max Elbaum – Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (2002)

• Todd Gitlin – The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage: Revised Edition (1993)

• Vivian Gornick – The Romance of American Communism (1977)

• Joachim C. Häberlen – Beauty Is in the Street: Protest and Counter-Culture in Post-War Europe (2023)

• Stuart Jeffries – Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016)

• Michael Kazin – American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (2011)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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The theme is political insurgents: the politicians and thinkers who are reshaping politics in 2025. In part one we profile two of the most significant intellectuals on the radical right. The Cambridge academic James Orr is senior adviser to Reform UK, friend to JD Vance and networker extraordinaire. Curtis Yarvin is a far-right blogger whose extreme views on race, democracy and “techno-monarchy” are required reading in the Trump administration. Who are they? How did they become so influential? And — yikes! — what do they actually think?

In part two we take a look at two young socialist politicians who have shaken up the left this year: the next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and the new “eco-populist” leader of the UK Green Party, Zack Polanski. How have they risen so fast? What are they proposing? And could they be the future of socialism? We also take an axe to some of the buzzphrases that are making political discourse dumber, from “optics” to the “woke right”. And we answer some questions from the audience.

If you missed the show and the livestream, or if you just want to relive the “magic”, dive in.

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• See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026.

Reading list

James Orr

• Nafeez Ahmed – ‘Cambridge Faculty of Divinity Ignores Demands for Inquiry Into Peter Thiel’s Far-Right Influence’, Byline Times (23 December 2021)

• Robert Crampton – ‘James Orr: JD Vance is just a normal guy who likes his beers’, The Times (15 August 2025)

• Zoltán Kottász – ‘“No civilisation has invited invaders in and put them up in four-star hotels”: James Orr’, European Conservative (13 August 2025)

• Marie Le Conte – ‘James Orr: Reform’s polished extremist’, The New World (27 October 2025)

• Charles Moore – ‘Perverted liberalism has left to neo-Marxism, perverted patriotism may yet lead to neo-fascism’, Daily Telegraph (15 August 2025)

• James Orr – ‘Faith, Family, Flag, Freedom’ (2023)

• Radical with Amol Rajan, Britain’s New Right: Could Reform Replace the Tories? (Dr James Orr), BBC (2 August 2025)

• Noah Vickers – ‘James Orr: “This New Nation That’s Emerging Is Really No Nation At All’, The House (4 September 2025)

Curtis Yarvin

• Sam Adler-Bell – ‘The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right’, The New Republic (2 December 2021)

• David Brooks – ‘The Terrifying Future of the American Right’, The Atlantic (18 November 2021)

• Ava Kafman – ‘Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America’, The New Yorker (2 June 2025)

• Jemima Kelly – ‘Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right’, Financial Times (8 August 2025)

• Matt McManus – ‘Yarvin’s Case Against Democracy’, Commonweal (27 January 2023)

• David Marchese – ‘The Interview: Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening’, The New York Times (18 January 2025)

• Corey Pein – ‘The Moldbug Variations’, The Baffler (9 October 2017)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory in 1979 initiates Labour’s longest period in opposition and its deepest identity crisis: Bennites to the left, SDP defectors to the right. After Michael Foot leads Labour to its worst vote share since 1918, Neil Kinnock takes on the long and painful job of rebuilding the party in the face of Thatcherism. Following another two defeats, the task of modernisation passes to John Smith but his sudden death enables Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to go even further, determined to transform the party and erase the trauma of 1983.

Labour’s spectacular 1997 landslide seems to confirm the agenda of New Labour and the nebulous political project known as the Third Way. But its many achievements are limited by its caution, duelling egos and ideological vagueness. Is Labour still a socialist party in any meaningful way or has it disowned too much of its heritage? By the time Brown becomes PM in 2007, New Labour is exhausted and rudderless.

History repeats itself: another heavy defeat, another pivot to the left. When Jeremy Corbyn replaces Ed Miliband, the left is in charge for the first time in 80 years — the revenge of the Bennites — but Labour’s fortunes are hostage to the chaos of Brexit. An impressive advance in 2017 turns into a crushing humiliation in 2019. New leader Keir Starmer mounts a speedy recovery but soon finds himself desperately unpopular: accused of squandering a remarkable comeback by lacking vision and waging an unprecedented war against the left. With new challengers to the left and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK threatening to form the most right-wing government in British history, the stakes are once again existentially high.

How did Thatcherism cast Labour into the wilderness? How did Neil Kinnock make the party viable again? Did Tony Blair ever develop a coherent theory of progressive politics? Could Jeremy Corbyn ever have succeeded? Why do Labour’s left and right keep making the same mistakes? What can Labour’s history tell us about Keir Starmer’s current problems? And is it still a party of democratic socialism?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠

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• New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠

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• See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026.

Reading list

Histories

• Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024)

• Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey – Centrism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022)

• Owen Jones – This Land: The Struggle for the Left (2020)

• David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999)

• John O’Farrell – Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter (1998)

• Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire - Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Andrew Rawnsley – Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour (2001)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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It’s 1940 and Clement Attlee’s Labour has joined the wartime coalition with Winston Churchill’s Tories, making it seem for the first time like a natural party of government and paving the way for its surprise 1945 landslide. Despite enormous obstacles at home and abroad, Attlee’s ageing all-stars lay the foundations of post-war Britain, from the NHS to NATO. How did they pull it off?

Losing office in 1951 kicks off the wilderness years. Civil war rages between followers of the left-wing titan Nye Bevan and the revisionist Hugh Gaitskell as Labour struggles to find a purpose in a decade of growing affluence and relative consensus. A new socialism of liberty and equality battles with the old socialism of nationalisation while fresh divisions open up over Europe and the Cold War. After 13 years, the shrewd unifier Harold Wilson leads Labour back to power and Home Secretary Roy Jenkins leads a liberalising revolution in British life. But is social democracy still socialism?

If 1970 is an unexpected defeat, then 1974 is an unexpected victory —and a very mixed blessing. Wilson and his successor James Callaghan preside over five years of crisis and precarity as the post-war consensus cracks and crumbles. The born-again socialist Tony Benn and the liberal Europhile Roy Jenkins represent two poles of an increasingly fractious party. When Margaret Thatcher sweeps to power in 1979, Labour returns to the wilderness and faces its worst identity crisis yet.

Why was the Second World War the making of the Labour Party? Who, or what, killed the post-war consensus? How did Labour governments navigate one crisis after another? How did its theory of socialism evolve to meet a changing electorate? And why does every Labour government leave the left disappointed?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠

• Head to⁠ ⁠⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included.

• Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠

• New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠

• Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠

• See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026.

Reading list

Histories and Biographies

• Andy Beckett – When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009)

• Andy Beckett – The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies (2024)

• John Bew – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016)

• John Campbell – Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life (2015)

• Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey – Centrism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Michael Foot – Aneurin Bevan: A Biography: Volume Two: 1945-1960 (1966)

• Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022)

• Jam Tomorrow podcast, written and presented by Ros Taylor (2023-24)

• Roy Jenkins – A Life at the Centre (1992)

• David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999)

• Ben Pimlott – Harold Wilson (1993)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson (2019)

• Steve Richards – The Prime Ministers We Never Had: Success and Failure from Butler to Corbyn (2021)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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“The British Labour Party is an expression of the Socialist movement adapted to British conditions,” wrote Clement Attlee. But British socialism meant different things to different people. When the Labour Representation Committee was formed in 1900, its socialism was a tense alliance of Marxists and liberals, hard-nosed trade unionists and Fabian intellectuals, puritans and hedonists, pragmatists and romantics. From the start, they were arguing about everything from alcohol to war. It was the job of two remarkable Scotsmen to keep it united: the eccentric idealist Keir Hardie and the canny, charismatic Ramsay MacDonald.

The social upheaval of the First World War turned Labour into a mass party which supplanted the Liberals as the main opposition to the Tories and took office for the first time in 1924. MacDonald’s minority government lasted for just over eight months but it proved that Labour could be a respectable party of government and not reckless “wild men” under the spell of Moscow.

MacDonald returned to Number 10 in 1929 but his second government was capsized by the Wall Street Crash and ended two years later in rupture, betrayal and trauma. While some Labour MPs joined MacDonald’s National Government, most lost their seats, leaving the surviving leadership troika of George Lansbury, Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps to rebuild the party amid the turmoil of the Great Depression and rising fascism. The challenge was existential. In 1935, Lansbury was felled by his untimely pacifism and Attlee took the job that nobody predicted he would hold for the next 20 years.

We conclude, as tradition dictates, on the eve of the Second World War: the cataclysm that will be the making of the Labour Party.

Why did British socialism break from Marx? What different traditions did Labour pull together and how did Hardie and MacDonald make them cohere? How did MacDonald go from hero to villain? Has the Labour Party always been at war with itself? And — pub quiz! — which four Labour leaders had the first name James?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠

• Head to⁠ ⁠⁠nakedwines.co.uk/origin⁠⁠ to get a £30 voucher and 6 top-rated wines from our sponsor Naked Wines for £39.99, delivery included.

• Get 25% off our highest tier annual Patreon subscription at ⁠https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod/membership⁠

• New Origin Story merch! ​​⁠https://podmarket.co.uk/collections/origin-story⁠

• Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠

• See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026.

Reading list

Histories and Biographies

• John Bew – Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016)

• Jon Cruddas – A Century of Labour (2024)

• Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in It: A History of the Labour Left: Second Edition (2022)

• Bob Holman – Keir Hardie: Labour’s Greatest Hero? (2010)

• David Marquand – The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Blair: Second Edition (1999)

• Henry Pelling – The Origins of the Labour Party 1880-1900: Second Edition (1965)

• Martin Pugh – Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party (2010)

• Donald Sassoon – One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (1996)

• Andrew Thorpe – A History of the British Labour Party: Fourth Edition (2015)

• David Torrance – The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government (2024)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to the third and final part of the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin: Terror.

It’s 1929 and the age of Stalin has begun. His mission to revolutionise the Soviet economy succeeds at the price of millions of lives: kulaks are murdered en masse while Ukrainians starve in the man-made famine known as the Holodomor. In 1936 he commences the purge known as the Great Terror, which radiates out from the highest levels of the Communist Party to ravage the entire country. Nobody is safe in Stalin’s nightmare state.

While communists abroad excuse or actively endorse Stalin’s atrocities, some socialists and ex-communists recognise that this is the antithesis of what socialism should be and sound the alarm. Stalin has no fiercer critic than Trotsky, but his former rival flounders in exile and meets a sticky end. The USSR’s international reputation is complicated by the rise of Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War. Is Stalin Hitler’s worst enemy, his gullible enabler or his unlikely friend? Turns out it’s all three.

Stalin’s murderous paranoia fails him just once: he ignores warnings that Hitler will break the Nazi-Soviet Pact and launch an invasion in 1941. The war claims as many as 27 million Soviet lives. Victorious, Stalin sets about strangling hopes of post-war liberalisation and taking control of Eastern Europe — the Cold War begins. Trapped in his cult of personality and endless suspicions, he seems set to launch a new, antisemitic purge in 1953 until death mercifully intervenes. He leaves behind a powerful but traumatised country, a very long way from the hopes of 1917.

How much of what the USSR became can be pinned on Stalin’s disastrous personality? What was it like to live and die under his regime? What was the relationship between economics and mass murder? How did the Second World War transform Stalin? How similar were Stalinism and Nazism, the two faces of totalitarianism? And why did so many western communists become accomplices to terror?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠⁠https://incogni.com/originstory⁠⁠

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• Subscribe to Origin Story on ⁠⁠YouTube⁠

• See Origin Story ⁠live at the Bloomsbury Theatre⁠ on 15th April 2026.

Reading list

• Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002)

• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (2003)

• Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (2012)

• Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017)

• Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938)

• Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment: Fortieth Anniversary Edition (2008, first published 1968)

• The Death of Stalin, co-written and directed by Armando Iannucci (2017)

• Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)

• Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (2007)

• Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism (1977)

• Christopher Hitchens, Arguably: Essays (2011)

• Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (2008)

• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017)

• Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (1940)

• Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019)

• Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (1938)

• Mr Jones, written by Andrea Chalupa and directed by Agnieszka Holland (2019)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome back to Origin Story: The Story of Socialism as we resume the story of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin in part two: Power.

It’s 1917. The Bolsheviks have seized control of Russia, the world’s first socialist state, but they’re a small party in a very big country, besieged by enemies at home and abroad. No sooner has it extricated itself from the First World War than Russia is plunged into an existentially perilous civil war between the Reds and the Tsarist Whites and, well, everybody else. 

The war accelerates Russia's transformation into a dictatorship, with one-party rule, a secret police force and a ruthless disregard for human life. The suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921 confirms that the dictatorship of the proletariat will brook no dissent.

Meanwhile in Germany, revolutionary hopes are crushed with the murder of German communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. As other communist uprisings also fail, Trotsky’s dream of world revolution fades and Stalin’s vision of “socialism in one country” prevails.

As Lenin’s health collapses, a succession battle between Stalin, Trotsky and other leading Bolsheviks begins that will last for most of the decade. It ends in 1929 with Stalin triumphant, Trotsky in exile, the dead Lenin a kind of deity, and the USSR’s age of terror ready to begin.

Could the progress of the revolution have been different without the brutal chaos of the Civil War or was tyranny always part of the plan? How did Stalin outwit his rivals to take over from Lenin, and how did Trotsky blow it? Why didn’t communist revolutions succeed anywhere else but Russia? How was the new regime perceived by socialists around the world? And did Rosa Luxemburg, more than anyone, represent the humane, democratic socialism that might have been?

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: https://incogni.com/originstory

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• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

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Reading list

• Franz Borkenau, The Communist International (1938)

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921 (1954)

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1921-1929 (1959)

• Ian Dunt, How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955)

• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988)

• Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

• Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator (2017)

• Dorian Lynskey, The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019)

• Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981)

• Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism (1920)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

• Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004)

• Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

• Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Study of Bolshevism (1939)

• Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism: Against Kautsky (1920)

• Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994)

• H. G. Wells, Russia in the Shadows (1920)

• Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1921)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to Origin Story. The Story of Socialism is our first ever themed season and now we begin our first ever three-part story because there’s just so much to tell: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin.

Vladimir Lenin’s political journey begins in 1887 when he’s 17 and his older brother is executed for plotting to assassinate the Tsar. As Russian socialism pivots from rural agitation to Marxism, Lenin develops his own version of Marxism: violent revolution led by an elite vanguard rather than the masses, leading to a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat (details TBC).

Forced to leave Russia, Lenin wages a power struggle for command of its socialist exiles in Europe, splitting the party into his own aggressive Bolsheviks and the more moderate Mensheviks. In the process, he first meets the flamboyant writer and orator Leon Trotsky and the sullen Georgian activist who will become Stalin.

After the failure of Russia’s 1905 revolution, Lenin tightens his grip on the movement. In 1907, the socialists of the Second International pledge not to fight each other in a European war but the Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg predicts that nationalism will trump class solidarity when it comes to the crunch. She’s right. When the First World War begins in 1914, socialists take up arms and the Second International implodes. 

The war also finishes off the teetering Tsarist regime in February 1917 and a Provisional Government of liberals and socialists takes over, but it’s doomed from the start. Lenin races to Petrograd, where he reconnects with Trotsky and Stalin and convinces the Bolsheviks to stage a second revolution. In October, Petrograd revolts, the government caves in and Lenin takes charge of a vast empire of 125 million people — the world’s first socialist regime. Leninism has triumphed. The dictatorship of the proletariat can begin.

What was Leninism? How did one man redefine Russian Marxism and squash his rivals? How did he see the distinction between socialism and communism? What role did the very different personalities of Trotsky and Stalin play on the road to revolution? Was it only the war that made revolution possible, let alone inevitable? Who predicted years in advance that Bolshevism would mean tyranny? And is this really want Marx wanted? Join us as we begin one of the most earth-shaking stories of the 20 th century

• Use code ORIGINSTORY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan: ⁠https://incogni.com/originstory

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Buy the Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory 

• Subscribe to Origin Story on YouTube

Reading list

• Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky: 1879-1921 (1954)

• Ian Dunt, How to be a Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for Its Survival (2020)

• Elzbieta Ettinger, Rosa Luxemburg: A Life (1988)

• Oleg V Khlevniuk, Stalin: New biography of a dictator (2015)

• V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902)

• V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution’ (aka the April Theses) (1917)

• V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)

• Reds, co-written and directed by Warren Beatty (1981)

• Kevin Morgan, ‘Rummaging in Trotsky’s dustbin or what does the left need with history?’ (2003)

• John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919)

• Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (2000)

• Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (2004)

• Robert Service, Trotsky: A Biography (2009)

• Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1932)

• Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography (1994)

• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)
Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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It’s 1849. In the wake of the failed revolutions in Europe, Marx and his wife Jenny arrive in London for a fresh start. But his magnum opus, Capital, is a long time coming due to chronic illness, the loss of three children and recurring money worries. The great critic of capitalism is such a disaster with finances that his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels has to take a job at his father’s textile company in Manchester to keep the project of communism afloat. Then there are the feuds. So many feuds!

Eventually, in the 1860s, a flurry of productivity bears fruit. Capital is finally finished (or volume one at least) and Marx becomes head of the International Working Men’s Association, where he wages war against rival socialists and the fearsome anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.

In 1871, Marx’s response to the doomed experiment of the Paris Commune makes him famous at last — and infamous. He’s the “Red Doctor” accused of orchestrating a vast communist conspiracy that doesn’t actually exist. But then he falls quiet, retreating from political activism and writing relatively little. When he dies in 1883, there are only 11 mourners at his funeral. It is left to Engels to simplify and spread the tenets of Marxism, revolutionising European socialism.

Where did Capital succeed and fail? What did he get right and wrong about capitalism and why was he so vague about the future of communism? What does Marx’s clash with Bakunin tell us about the dangerous flaws in his theory? Did Engels rewrite Marxism in the process

of popularising it? And has any great writer ever been as bad with deadlines as Marx?

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Reading list

• Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978)

• John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997)

• Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953)

• GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975)

• Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009)

• In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005)

• In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022)

• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888)

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

• Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894)

• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891)

• Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918)

• Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (2001)

• Peter Singer, Marx: A Very Short Introduction: Second Edition (2018)

• Jonthan Sperber, Karl Marx: A 19th Century Life (2013)

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)

• Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader: Second Edition (1978)

• Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (1999)

• Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Born in Prussia in 1818, Marx was on course to become one of many young German philosophers wrestling with the legacy of Hegel. But when he was frozen out of academia, journalism set him on a more confrontational, activist path. His extraordinary intellect was wrapped up in a spectacularly belligerent personality, addicted to vicious feuds and denunciations. He could start a fight in an empty room.

As he moved from Prussia to Paris to Brussels during the 1840s, Marx went on a political journey, too: from liberal to socialist to head of the Communist League. Along the way, he built the basic framework of Marxism: the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the value of labour, the volatile, insatiable energy of capitalism, and the dialectical progress of history. It was nothing less than a new way of understanding the world.

Marx’s first phase culminated in The Communist Manifesto in 1848, the same year that revolution swept the great cities of Europe. Explaining its failure was the first task of Marx’s next phase as he left the continent for good, settled in London and embarked on the torturous process of writing his masterwork, Capital.

How did Marx become a communist? What did he owe to Hegel? Why was his friendship with Engels so essential? Why was he more dedicated to waging war on his former friends than his obvious enemies? Which rival socialist called him “the tapeworm of socialism”? And what exactly is dialectical materialism anyway?

“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways,” Marx wrote. “The point is to change it.” This is how he began to change it.

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Reading list

• Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: Fourth Edition (1978)

• John Cassidy, ‘The Return of Karl Marx’, The New Yorker (1997)

• Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849 (2023)• GDH Cole: History of Socialist Thought, Volume one, The Forerunners (1953)

• GDH Cole: Socialism in evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962)

• E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975)

• Tristram Hunt, Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels (2009)

• In Our Time: Marx, Radio 4 (2005)

• In Our Time: Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Radio 4 (2022)

• Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845, published 1888)

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

• Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852)

• Karl Marx, Preface to Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859)

• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867, 1885, 1894)

• Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (1871)

• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875, first published 1891)

• Louis Menand, ‘Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today’, The New Yorker (2016)• Bertrand Russell, Roads to freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism (1918)

... Reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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H.G. Wells summed up early versions of socialism as “a vast system of questionings and repudiations, political doubts, social doubts, hesitating inquiries, and experiments”. We begin in the wake of the French Revolution with the radical republican Gracchus Babeuf and his “enraged ones” calling for absolute equality. In France, the rebel aristocrat Henri de Saint-Simon imagined a progressive secular technocracy while Charles Fourier dreamt of communes in which the human spirit was liberated from drudgery and oppression. In the UK, the businessman Robert Owen modelled a new society based on cooperation and the fair exchange of labour. These so-called “utopian socialists” inspired numerous attempts to build a better world in miniature.

The 1830s and 1840s produced an explosion of new words to make sense of immense social change: socialism, communism, anarchism, capitalism. Thinkers like the utopian Étienne Cabet, the anarchist Joseph Proudhon and the politician Louis Blanc introduced concepts that are with us to this day, while the scholar Lorenz von Stein was the first to ask: what is the difference between socialism and communism anyway? (We’ll come back to this.) Out on the streets, Louis Blanqui championed revolutionary violence. And in 1848, actual revolution broke out in the great cities of Europe.

Soaking up all these ideas and developing their own version of communism were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — the subjects of our next two episodes. But even as Marxism swept Europe at the end of the century, the American journalist Edward Bellamy revived utopian socialism and made it more popular than ever. That dream refused to die. 

What unites all these disparate visions that called themselves socialism? How did they feed into both Marxism and the Labour Party? How did America become the world’s biggest laboratory for socialist experiments? Why did they fail? And can a change in the economic system really transform human nature? Join us as we begin the epic story of socialism.

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Reading list

• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1888, OUP edition 2007)

• James Boyle, What Is Socialism? (1912)

• Étienne Cabet, The Voyage to Icaria (1839)

• G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850 (1959)

• G.D.H Cole: Socialism in Evolution (1938)

• Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880)

• Leslie Holmes, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (2009)

• William Morris, News from Nowhere (1890)

• Michael Newman, Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2020)

• John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870)

• Betrand Russell: Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918)

• Robert Service, Comrades: Communism: A World History (2007)

• George Bernard Shaw et al, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889)

• Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (2016)

• H.G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (1908)

• Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891)

• Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History, The Utopian Socialists: Charles Fourier

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In this Origin Story special edition, we trace the history of the British Chinese community, from the days of Roman Britain to the present day. Along the way, we see the construction of the first Chinatown in London's Limehouse, at the height of Empire, when ports function as joining-places for the world. We witness the racism that hit Chinese communities during the wars, when fear of 'Yellow Peril' and miscegenation resulted in deportation programmes against the very people who had helped Britain in the fight against Germany. And we follow the second triumphant wave of immigration in the 20th Century, in the restaurant business, as Chinese food helps democratise the practice of eating out in Britain.

We then look at the extraordinary accomplishments of the British Chinese in the modern era, particularly in education, culture and the economy. And we start to tease apart a richer, deeper story about multicultural Britain, one which is much more varied and surprising than people allow for in the barren conversation about immigration we read in the newspapers every day.

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Reading list

• William Poole, The Letters of Shen Fuzong to Thomas Hyde, 1687-88, British Library Journal, volume 2015, article 9

• Earle Gale, Chinese pathfinders paved the way in UK hundreds of years ago, China Daily

• Marc Horne, Extraordinary tale of first Chinese Scotsman, The Times

• Anonymous, William Macao

• Sylvia Hahn, Stanley Nadel (eds) Asian Migrants in Europe: Transcultural Connections

• Gregor Benton and Edmund Terence Gomez, The Chinese in Britain, 1800–Present 

• Anonymous, Liverpool Chinatown History

• Jody-Lan Castle, Looking for my Shanghai father, BBC.co.uk

• Anonymous, London by ethnicity: Analysis, The Guardian

• Emily Thomas, British Chinese people say racism against them is 'ignored', BBC.co.uk

• John Hills et al, An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK: Report of the National Equality Panel, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, LSE. 

• Tze Ming Mok and Lucinda Platt, All look the same? Diversity of labour market outcomes of Chinese ethnic group populations in the UK, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

• Zain Mohyuddin and Sophie Stowers, Minorities Report: The Attitudes of Britain's Ethnic Minority Population, UK in a Changing Europe

• Anon, Chinese ethnic group: facts and figures, Gov.uk

• Anonymous, Ethnicity pay gaps, UK: 2012 to 2022, ONS• Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume One

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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We start by examining Powell’s youth as a brilliant scholar, war hero and ardent imperialist who developed an idiosyncratic version of nationalism. As a junior minister and pioneering neoliberal  in the 1950s, he barely mentioned race or immigration but he became increasingly obsessed during the 1960s, and increasingly vocal. Powell contrived his speech to have the biggest possible impact and he succeeded. While he was sacked by Tory leader Ted Heath and denounced as an evil race-baiter by the establishment (even The Beatles took a shot), he became the most popular politician in Britain almost overnight. It was the first eruption of what we now know as right-wing populism and its aftershocks extended from Rock Against Racism and no-platforming to the Great Replacement Theory and Brexit.

How did one speech poison British politics? What led Powell to deliver it? What can it teach us about the timeless tricks of anti-immigrant oratory? Did he merely activate the British public’s latent racism or actively feed it? What lessons have politicians failed to learn about how to deal with anti-immigrant sentiment? And why are Britain’s elites more tolerant of overt racism in 2025 than they were in 1968?

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘An Evil Speech’, The Times (22 April 1968)

• Anonymous, ‘Coloured Family Attacked’, The Times (1 May 1968)

• Paul Foot, The Rise of Enoch Powell (1969)

• Simon Heffer, Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell (1998)

• Tom McTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 (2025)

• Sarfraz Manzoor, ‘Black Britain’s Darkest Hour’, The Guardian (2008)

• Caroline Moorhead, ‘A Would-Be Leader Deserted by Destiny’, The Times (12 May 1975)

• Enoch Powell, the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, 20 April 1968

• J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality, edited by John Wood (1969)

• Andrew Roth, Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune (1970)

• Michael Savage, ‘Fifty years on, what is the legacy of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech?’, The Observer (2018)

• Douglas E. Schoen, Enoch Powell and the Powellites (1977)

• Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell (1996)

• Evan Smith, No Platform: A History of Anti-Fascism, Universities and the Limits of Free Speech (2020)

• Bill Smithies and Peter Fiddick, Enoch Powell on Immigration (1969)
Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Tortured genius? Stalinist stooge? Undercover dissident? Perhaps no musician better represents the competing demands of art and politics than Dmitri Shostakovich, who died 50 years ago this week. He has been called the most brilliant symphonist of his age and the most controversial composer since Wagner.

Shostakovich’s career began with Lenin and ended with Brezhnev but his great antagonist was Stalin, a self-styled music buff and maestro in the art of fear. From symphony to symphony, Shostakovich danced on the edge of a knife. Sometimes he was the Soviet Union’s favourite composer, bathing in privilege and acclaim. At other times he was an “enemy of the people”, bullied into silence and terrified for his life.

Nobody knew what Shostakovich’s music was really saying until the posthumous publication of his memoir Testimony made an extraordinary claim that turned all assumptions on their head. But was this just a dying man’s attempt to save his reputation and was Testimony even his words or a brilliant forgery? His admirers and detractors have been fighting the

“Shostakovich wars” ever since.

How did Shostakovich and contemporaries like Prokofiev manage to produce great art in a dictatorship, and what did it cost them? Why did his Leningrad Symphony transfix the world? How did he inspire the most consequential review in the history of music criticism? And can we ever truly know what his music meant or is it all in the ear of the beholder? Listen closely.

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘Muddle Instead of Music’, Pravda (28 January 1936)

• Anonymous, ‘Shostakovich and the Guns’, Time (20 July 1942)

• Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time (2016)

• James Devlin, Shostakovich (1983)

• Jeremy Eichler, ‘The Composer and the Dictator’, New York Times (2004)

• Laurel E. Fay, Shostakovich: A Life (2000)

• Michel Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin (2025)

• Dorian Lynskey, ‘Settling a Soviet Score’, Jewish Renaissance (Spring 2025)

• Brian Morton, Shostakovich: His Life and Music (2006)

• Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

• Nikil Saval, ‘Julian Barnes and the Shostakovich Wars’, The New Yorker (2016)

• Dmitri Shostakovich, Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov (1979)

• Elizabeth Wilson, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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This special edition of Origin Story looks into US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a body which was once responsible for tracking undocumented immigrants who were a threat to national security, but has now metastasised into a group which seems to target all immigrants and many US citizens.

We track its birth under George Bush Jr, its actions under Barack Obama and then its radicalisation and expansion under Donald Trump. Then we peer into the alarming evidence about its behaviour and its part in Trump's broader agenda, before listing the comparisons with Nazi Germany. Everything you need to know about one of modern America's most disturbing developments.

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Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Estranged from President Johnson, challenged by the young firebrands of Black Power, hounded by the FBI and horrified by the despair that fuelled urban riots, King spent the rest of his life on the back foot. In 1968, he staked everything on an ambitious Poor People’s Campaign but his movement had fragmented and public opinion had turned against him. On 4 April, he was shot dead in Memphis.

The assassination simplified King into a martyr. We track the explosive unrest in the days after his death, the long struggle to make Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, and the way his philosophy has been caricatured and neutered by those who believe that civil rights have gone far enough. Finally, we unpack some of King’s most famous quotes to separate the myth from the reality.

Why did the movement unravel after Selma? Did King pick the wrong battles or were the forces ranged against him too powerful to vanquish? What happens when a human being becomes a symbol? How has his message been whitewashed by the right? Does President Trump’s backlash politics prove that King was right to lose faith in white America’s willingness to reject racism? And what can today’s activists learn from King’s victories and defeats?

Thanks for listening to season seven of Origin Story, and for supporting our work. We’ll be back soon with bonus episodes and Q&As.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a prominent pastor, King was a brilliant student who developed a sophisticated worldview grounded in both Christianity and philosophy. His Gandhi-inspired belief in nonviolent resistance became central to the civil rights struggle when he was thrust onto the frontlines during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-6 and quickly became the most admired black man in America. He was just 27.

King’s new role as leader and symbol of the movement was both an honour and a burden. Abused, threatened, assaulted and jailed, he wrestled with his own feelings of inadequacy and guilt as well as the violent forces of white racism and the obsessive attention of the FBI. We follow him through his great triumphs — Montgomery, Birmingham, the March on Washington, Selma — but also his setbacks, his mistakes and his complicated relationships with presidents and fellow activists.

What made this previously unknown preacher the unrivalled leader of the civil rights movement for more than 12 years? How did he develop, and evolve, his philosophy of nonviolence? Who were his loyal allies, vicious antagonists and complicated frenemies? How did he play to his strengths and transcend his weaknesses? And what gave him the strength to carry on in the face of both the American South’s barbaric racism and his own

ceaseless insecurities?

This is an inspiring and often surprising story of moral courage and strategic leadership pitted against terrible odds — one with vital lessons for anybody who seeks to change the world for the better.

Plus! Another Origin Story playlist, featuring songs about and inspired by Martin Luther King. It’s sequenced to tell his story chronologically.

Reading list

• Ralph Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (1989)

• Jonathan Eig, King: The Life of Martin Luther King (2023)

• Marshall Frady, Martin Luther King, Jr: A Life (2001)

• Martin Luther King Jr, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958)

• Martin Luther King Jr, Why We Can’t Wait (1963)

• Martin Luther King Jr, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

• Dr Martin Luther King Jr, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches, edited by James Melvin Washington (1986)

• Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr (1982)

• Jason Sokol, The Heavens Might Crack: The Death and Legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr (2018)

Articles

• Renata Adler, ‘The Selma March’, The New Yorker (1965)

• Jelani Cobb, ‘Martin Luther King, Jr.’s History Lessons’, The New Yorker (2022)

• Alex Haley (uncredited), Playboy interview: Martin Luther King (1965)

• Howell Raines, ‘Driven to Martyrdom’, New York Times (1986)

• Kelefa Sanneh, ‘Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Perilous Power of Respectability’, The New Yorker (2023)

• Time, ‘THE SOUTH: Attack on the Conscience’, Time (1957)

• Time, ‘America’s Gandhi: Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’, Time (1964)

• Calvin Trillin, ‘The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi’, The New Yorker (1964)

Video

• 60 Minutes interview with Martin Luther King (1966)

• BBC Face to Face interview with Martin Luther King (1961)

• Martin Luther King, ‘I Have a Dream’ speech (1963)

... Full reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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For most of human history economic growth didn’t exist. The average person was no better off than their distant ancestors. Even when the age of growth began with the Industrial Revolution, nobody knew how to measure it or control it until the 1940s. Enter GDP, which quickly became the most important number in the world despite its creators acknowledging from the start that it was both artificial and deeply flawed.

We talk about what GDP does and does not measure and how it has adapted to an increasingly complicated global economy. We meet the economists who created it (hello again, John Maynard Keynes) and those who tried to reform or replace it. Robert F Kennedy claimed in 1968 that GDP “measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile”. Is the number that rules the world really fit for purpose?

Then we explore our addiction to relentless growth and ask if there is a more sustainable way to thrive: green growth, slow growth or degrowth? Preserving our natural resources without risking economic and political disaster is the great challenge of our times.

Is growth essential to the survival of democracy or the cause of many of its problems? What fuelled the miraculous growth of previous eras and why isn’t it working anymore? Can advanced economies escape the low-growth trap or do we need to rethink our whole approach to growth and prosperity? Does GDP still tell us what we need to know? And are we valuing the right things?

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Reading list

• Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (1972)

• Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man & Technology (1971)

• Diane Coyle, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History (2014)

• Diane Coyle, The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters (2025)

• Ehsan Masood, GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change (2021)

• Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020)

• John Maynard Keynes, How to Pay for the War (1940)

• Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist (2017)

• Daniel Susskind, Growth: A Reckoning (2024)

Articles

• John Cassidy, ‘Can We Have Prosperity Without Growth’, The New Yorker (2020)

• Herman Daly, ‘The Canary Has Fallen Silent’, New York Times (1970)

• Editorial, ‘Pandemic Calls for a New Approach to Growth’, Financial Times (2020)

• Editorial, ‘Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50 year argument’, Nature (2022)

• Idrees Kahloon, ‘The World Keeps Getting Richer. Some People Are Worried’, The New Yorker (2024)

• Carolyn Kormann, ‘The False Choice Between Economic Growth and Combatting Climate Change’, The New Yorker (2019)

• Katy Lederer, ‘The End of G.D.P.?’, The New Yorker (2015)

• David Marchese, This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession with Growth Must End, New York Times (2022)

• Bill McKibben, ‘To Save the Planet, Should We Really Be Moving Slower?’, The New Yorker (2023)

• John Merrick, ‘The prophet of the new right’, The New Statesman (2025)

• Peter Passell, Marc Roberts and Leonard Ross, ‘The Limits to Growth’, New York Times (1972)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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The ancients associated the red planet with gods of war. With the invention of the telescope in the 17th century, astronomers began to understand Mars better and speculate about its inhabitants. Thanks to the amateur astronomer Percival Lowell, the romance of the red planet, and its alleged “canals”, became a craze in the 1890s. H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined the Martians as colonisers and colonised respectively, while luminaries like Nikola Tesla and Francis Galton hatched outlandish schemes to contact them.

Science played the killjoy. Even as a new wave of Mars mania swept the post-war world, NASA probes unveiled the reality of a cold, dusty, dead planet. But their findings allowed for a new breed of romance: the possibility of actually reaching and settling on Mars. 

Ray Bradbury compared Mars to a mirror. What does humanity’s fascination with it say about our own dreams and fears over the centuries? How did the fictional Martian turn from a friendly pacifist into a ruthless killing machine? Why is there such a thin line between fact and fiction? Is Elon Musk’s obsession with settlement really possible or just another delusion? And why exactly do so many people want to travel to a planet that makes the least hospitable places on earth look like Center Parcs?

It’s a mindboggling tale of scientific discovery and wild fantasy, with an all-star cast including Lord Tennyson, William Herschel, Thomas Edison, David Bowie and Arthur C. Clarke. Plus! Our first ever Origin Story playlist, with 23 songs about Mars. We have lift-off.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

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Reading list

• Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950)

• Albert Burneko, ‘Neither Elon Musk nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars’ (2025)

• Stuart Clark (ed.), The Book of Mars: An Anthology of Fact and Fiction (2022)

• Robert Crossley, Imagining Mars: A Literary History (2011)

• Marc Hartzman, The Big Book of Mars (2020)

• Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

• Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023)

• Nicky Jenner, 4 th Rock from the Sun: The Story of Mars (2017)

• Dorian Lynskey, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

• Lord Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886)

• Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963)

• Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (2023)

• H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)

• Robert Zubrin, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must (1996)

Audio and video

• Alternative 3, written by David Ambrose and directed by Christopher Miles (1977)

• The Bunker: Why Elon Musk’s plan for life on Mars is a terrible idea (2025)

• The Martian, written by Drew Goddard and directed by Ridley Scott (2015)

• A Trip to Mars, directed by Ashley Miller for the Edison Company (1910)

• The War of the Worlds, written and directed by Orson Welles (1938)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Desperate diplomacy culminates in the Munich Agreement but Chamberlain’s “triumph” is short-lived as opposition mounts across the country. The German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 destroys appeasement as a mainstream proposition, leaving only an uneasy alliance of fascists and pacifists. When Stalin chooses Germany over Britain and France, war is inevitable.

We look at the people who still wanted to make a deal with Hitler even once the war had begun, the fall of Chamberlain and the revenge of Churchill. We debunk the revisionist case for appeasement, explore how the legacy of Munich has been used and abused to justify military intervention ever since, and ask whether history is repeating itself over Putin and Ukraine.

Why did Munich’s popularity collapse so quickly? How did Chamberlain misread Hitler’s intentions so badly? What motivated the die-hard appeasers, and the historians who defend the policy even now? Are the lessons of appeasement a double-edged sword? And which of Chamberlain’s foes had the best zingers?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

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Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘A New Dawn’, The Times (1 October 1938)

• W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’ (1939)

• Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich’, New York Times (16 August 1936)

• Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to

War (2019)

• Cato (Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen), Guilty Men (1940)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, Fascism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (1966)

• Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (1980)

• Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922)

• Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘How the appeasement of Hitler played into his hands’, New Statesman (2019)

• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

• Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (2004)• James Levy, Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain 1936-1939 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)

• Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War (1998)

• Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain (1940)

• George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939, edited by Peter Davison (1998)

• ‘Policy of His Majesty’s Government’, day three of House of Commons debate on Munich, Hansard (5 October 1938)

• Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005)

• Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1937)

• Viscount Rothermere, Warnings and Predictions (1939)

• A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961)

• Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells and directed by William Cameron Menzies (1936)

• Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers (1971)

• Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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During the 15 years following the First World War, horror of conflict and a growing consensus that the Treaty of Versailles had immiserated Germany made appeasement a positive effort to ensure peace in Europe. Even Winston Churchill was on board. But the arrival of Hitler put paid to that. The question now became: how could a militarily weak Britain rein in an unpredictable dictator, not to mention Italy and Japan? And what did Hitler really want?

We move from the desperate fudging of Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin to the evangelical appeasement of Neville Chamberlain, and from crisis to crisis: Manchuria, Abyssinia, the Rhineland, the Anschluss. We meet the most fervent appeasers and their most furious opponents. As Chamberlain’s government begins to crack, Hitler sets his sights on Czechoslovakia…

How did appeasement transform from a benign peace-making strategy into a moral and diplomatic disaster? Why is Chamberlain’s reputation as a weak, indecisive leader so misleading? How did Hitler manage to fool so many powerful people? When could Britain and France have stopped him in his tracks? And what combination of good intentions, bad judgements and apocalyptic delusions led to catastrophe?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• Anonymous, ‘A New Dawn’, The Times (1 October 1938)

• W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’ (1939)

• Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich’, New York Times (16 August 1936)

• Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to

War (2019)

• Cato (Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen), Guilty Men (1940)

• Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, Fascism: The Story of an Idea (2024)

• Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (1966)

• Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (1980)

• Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922)

• Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘How the appeasement of Hitler played into his hands’, New Statesman (2019)

• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989)

• Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (2004)• James Levy, Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain 1936-1939 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006)

• Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War (1998)

• Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain (1940)

• George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939, edited by Peter Davison (1998)

• ‘Policy of His Majesty’s Government’, day three of House of Commons debate on Munich, Hansard (5 October 1938)

• Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005)

• Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1937)

• Viscount Rothermere, Warnings and Predictions (1939)

• A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961)

• Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells and directed by William Cameron Menzies (1936)

• Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers (1971)

• Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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The theme of the show is the American inferno and how to think about it. In part one, Normalisation, we use British responses to Hitler in the 1930s to explain how normality bias prevents much of the media from facing up to the crazed extremism of Donald Trump and rip into some of the spectacularly wrong predictions of the pundit class.

In part two, Complicity, we take on the politicians, commentators and voters who actively enable Trump and ask what the residents of one German town can tell us about MAGA’s fascist groupthink. But it’s not all bad news. We explore how Trumpism might fail and how Europe might emerge stronger.

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When did partition become truly inevitable? Was British incompetence to blame for the bloodshed? What, or who, brought an end to the violence? How does the legacy of partition continue to shape the subcontinent’s politics? And what can we learn about the dangers of identity-based politics today?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016)

• William Dalrymple, ‘The Great Divide’, The New Yorker (2015)

• Patrick French, ‘The Brutal “Great Migration” That Followed India’s Independence and Partition’, Life.com (2016)

• Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume One: 1889-1947 (1975)

• Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume Two: 1947-1965 (1979)

• Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World 1915-1948 (2018)

• Gandhi, written by John Briley and directed by Richard Attenborough (1982)

• Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (2015)

• Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985)

• George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Partisan Review (1949)

• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981)

• Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007)

Audio

• Empire: Mahatma Gandhi (2022)

• Empire: Muhammad Ali Jinnah (2022)

• Empire: The Last Viceroy of India (2022)

• Empire: Partition (2022)

• Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence Day speech (1947)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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We start by introducing the key players in India, all of them British-educated lawyers: Mahatma Gandhi, the spiritual leader who became an international icon through his use of nonviolent protest to demand independence; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who rebounded from numerous defeats to become the father of Pakistan; and Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted nothing more than to hold India together as a secular, multicultural state.

On the British side, Clement Attlee was determined to bring the Raj to a peaceful conclusion, Winston Churchill was equally obsessed with preserving it, and viceroys Lord Linlithgow and Archibald Wavell took very different approaches to Indian nationalism.

The story takes us from late Victorian London to the Amritsar massacre, and from Gandhi’s triumphant Salt March to the disaster of the Quit India campaign during the Second World War. We see Pakistan go from a utopian fantasy to a plausible reality while believers in a united India do everything they can to prevent it. And as negotiations falter, riots and pogroms begin to inflame the country. We end on the cusp of 1947 as Lord Mountbatten becomes the last viceroy and partition looks almost inevitable.

To what extent did the personalities of a handful of politicians in India and Britain dictate the course of world history? How did Jinnah bring Pakistan to life? Does Gandhi deserve his saintly reputation? And why don't we like to talk about it?

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016)

• William Dalrymple, ‘The Great Divide’, The New Yorker (2015)

• Patrick French, ‘The Brutal “Great Migration” That Followed India’s Independence and Partition’, Life.com (2016)

• Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume One: 1889-1947 (1975)

• Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume Two: 1947-1965 (1979)

• Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World 1915-1948 (2018)

• Gandhi, written by John Briley and directed by Richard Attenborough (1982)

• Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (2015)

• Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985)

• George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Partisan Review (1949)

• Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981)

• Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007)

Audio

• Empire: Mahatma Gandhi (2022)

• Empire: Muhammad Ali Jinnah (2022)

• Empire: The Last Viceroy of India (2022)

• Empire: Partition (2022)

• Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence Day speech (1947)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Success has turned Thatcher into a harsh, unbending autocrat, hated by half the country and increasingly alienated from her own ministers. Her stubborn belief in her own instincts leads to catastrophic hubris over Europe and the poll tax, turning allies into assassins. On 22 November 1990, she is forced to resign as prime minister. We wrap up by discussing Thatcher’s record and legacy, both of which are far messier than her acolytes claim.

Where did Thatcher succeed and fail in fundamentally changing Britain? Why did her strengths become fatal flaws? How did she sow the seeds of Brexit and Tory civil war? And what were Thatcherism’s unacknowledged contradictions? Is it just another world for neoliberalism or a far more eccentric bundle of beliefs, prejudices and mannerisms? Are her disciples in today’s Tory Party learning all the wrong lessons? Join us as we explode some myths and tell the real story of Thatcherism.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

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Reading list

• Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (2002)

• Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009)

• Andy Beckett, Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980-82 Made Modern Britain (2015)

• Brian and Maggie, written by James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears (2025)

• Ronald Butt, Interview with Margaret Thatcher, Sunday Times (1981)

• Conservative Central Office, ‘The Right Approach’ (1976)

• Iain Dale (ed.), Memories of Margaret Thatcher (2013)

• Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The lasting achievement of Thatcherism as a political project is that Britain now has three political parties of the right, instead of one’, LSE (2013)

• Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism (1992)

• Ipsos polling on the Falklands War, Ipsos (1982)

• John Harris, ‘Spare a thought for the late unlamented one nation Tory’, The Guardian (2013)

• John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, ‘Stepping Stones’ (1977)

• Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech (1990)

• Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (1994)

• The Iron Lady, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd (2011)

• Sir Keith Joseph, ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Policy’, Conservative Research Department (1975)

• Kwasi Kwarteng et al, Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Posterity (2012)

• Kenneth Minogue and Michael Biddiss (eds.), Thatcherism: Personality and Politics (1987)

• Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: Volume One (2013)

• Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘Letter from London’, New Yorker (1982)

• Robert Saunders, Yes! To Europe: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (2018)

• Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Party Conference’ (1975)

• Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Rally in Bolton’ (1979)

• Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (1993)

• Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (1995)

• Phil Tinline, The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of Political Nightmares (2022)

• D.R. Valentine, ‘Margaret Thatcher on History, Economics & Political Consensus’, University of Oxford (2013)

• Brian Walden, Interview with Margaret Thatcher after Nigel Lawson’s resignation (1989)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In part one we follow Thatcher from her birth in Grantham in 1925 to her triumph in the Falklands War 57 years later. We investigate the influence of her father, the Methodist grocer and local celebrity Arthur Roberts; her entry into the reformist wing of the Conservative Party at Oxford University; and her journey to becoming MP for Finchley in 1959. It’s only in the 1970s that Thatcherism really takes shape. Scarred by her vilification as the “Milk Snatcher”, and repelled by Ted Heath and the post-war consensus, she follows the likes of Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph to the right, finding intellectual ideas to match her instinctive

beliefs.

The Thatcher who becomes Tory leader in 1975 and prime minister in 1979 is more “Cautious Margaret” than “Iron Lady”, not yet allergic to advice and compromise. She even has nice things to say about Europe. But before long, she’s the most unpopular prime minister since polling began. As her radical monetarist experiment leads to recession, mass unemployment and civil unrest, she appears doomed but once she’s defeated both the Tory “wets” and Argentina’s General Galtieri, Thatcherism is unchained.

What were Thatcher’s formative influences? How did she grow to hate consensus politics and see herself as the antidote? Who were the other architects of Thatcherism? How close did she come to disaster and was it really the Falklands that saved her? And can Keir Starmer learn anything from her chaotic and unpopular first term?

Next week the story continues with the 1983 election, the miners’ strike and the Thatcherite revolution, before it all goes horribly wrong for Maggie. If you’re a Patreon, you don’t have to wait: you can hear it right now.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

• Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (2002)

• Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009)

• Andy Beckett, Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980-82 Made Modern Britain (2015)

• Brian and Maggie, written by James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears (2025)

• Ronald Butt, Interview with Margaret Thatcher, Sunday Times (1981)

• Conservative Central Office, ‘The Right Approach’ (1976)

• Iain Dale (ed.), Memories of Margaret Thatcher (2013)

• Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The lasting achievement of Thatcherism as a political project is that Britain now has three political parties of the right, instead of one’, LSE (2013)

• Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism (1992)

• Ipsos polling on the Falklands War, Ipsos (1982)

• John Harris, ‘Spare a thought for the late unlamented one nation Tory’, The Guardian (2013)

• John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, ‘Stepping Stones’ (1977)

• Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech (1990)

• Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (1994)

• The Iron Lady, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd (2011)

• Sir Keith Joseph, ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Policy’, Conservative Research Department (1975)

• Kwasi Kwarteng et al, Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Posterity (2012)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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As soon as Badenoch became an MP in 2017, she was tipped for big things: a black woman with a compelling backstory, a Thatcherite heart and a strong stomach for culture wars. But the messiness of her victory in last year’s leadership race illuminated MPs’ growing ambivalence about her, and her subsequent performance has only amplified those doubts. Even her allies admit that her weaknesses are more visible than her strengths. As she fights to win back right-wing voters from Reform while disdaining the moderates lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats, are her days numbered?

We start by examining Badenoch’s upbringing under military dictatorship in Nigeria, and the confusing stories she tells about it. She moves to London at the age of 16 and, after a rocky start, becomes a computer engineer. At 25, she joins the Conservative Party. At 30, she’s fighting her first election (unsuccessfully). We follow her through Coutts bank, The Spectator and the London Assembly to Westminster, where she acquires a mixed reputation. Diligent and nuanced in some areas, stubborn and lazy in others. Willing to stand up to the Brexit hardliners yet increasingly radicalised on cultural issues. Some Tory MPs hail her as the future of the right while others mutter that she is arrogant, bullying and unfriendly. And she does say some very odd things.

How did Nigeria shape Badenoch’s politics? When did she start talking like a right-wing podcast? Are her prejudices more powerful than her values? Can she really revive the Tory Party or simply drive it further down a hard right cul-de-sac? Why did Michael Gove lose faith in his protégé? And if Badenoch is trying to follow Margaret Thatcher’s playbook, does her copy have half the pages missing? The story is stranger than you think.

• Origin Story is live at Soho21 on the 16th of April. Tickets here

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Reading list

Articles

• Aubrey Allegretti and Nicola Woolcock, ‘Kemi Badenoch: “epidemic” of children being told they’re trans’ (2023)

• Richard Assheton, ‘Nigeria roots for Kemi Badenoch’s fighting spirit’ (2022)

• Kemi Badenoch, maiden speech in the House of Commons (2017)

• Kemi Badenoch, ‘I want to set us free by telling people the truth’, The Times (2022)

• Kemi Badenoch, ‘Gagging of the brave has let gender ideologues seize control’, Sunday Times (2024)

• Katy Balls and Michael Gove, ‘“I will die protecting this country’: Kemi Badenoch on where she plans to take the Tories’, The Spectator (2024)

• Conservative Home, ‘Speech of the year: Kemi Badenoch on critical race theory’, Conservative Home (2020)

• Rachel Cunliffe, ‘How Kemi Badenoch became the Tory front runner’, The New Statesman (2024)

• Annabelle Dickson, ‘Kemi Badenoch: The Conservative Party’s next leader but one?’, Politico (2022)

• Joe Murphy, ‘Kemi Badenoch: New vice chairman of the Conservatives talks about her fight to recruit a more diverse range of MPs’, Evening Standard (2018)

• Parliament Square, ‘Questioning “Kemi”’s Comments’, The Critic (2024)

Radio and podcasts

• Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, Radio 4 (2020)

• Kemi Badenoch’s Commons speech on Critical Race Theory (2020)

• Profile, Radio 4 (2022)

• Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, Radio 4 (2024)

• Honestly with Bari Weiss: Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher? (2024)

• Triggernometry with Kemi Badenoch (2025)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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The delusion of Cultural Marxism was made famous by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik in 2011 but it is not confined to neo-Nazis. As a pseudo-intellectual justification for the anti-woke backlash, it has been cited by Jordan Peterson, Paul Dacre, Viktor Orbán, Ron DeSantis and Suella Braverman, making it perhaps the clearest bridge between the far

right and “respectable” conservatism: a modern Red Scare for a cultural Cold War.

Dorian takes Ian through the evolution of the theory, from post-war fascist Francis Parker Lockey via conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche to the paranoid fringes of conservatism and ultimately the mainstream. Is Cultural Marxism just a rebranding of Hitler’s antisemitic obsession with “cultural bolshevism” or something more ornate? Who were the Frankfurt

School and what were they really trying to do? Why do conservative politicians keep using a phrase popularised by a fascist terrorist? And what does this have to do with the Beatles or A Nightmare on Elm Street? Join us as we unravel one of the most perniciously influential conspiracy theories in the world.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

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Reading list

• The History of Political Correctness (1999)
• Moses Apostaticus, ‘Cultural Marxism Is Destroying America’, The Daily Caller (2016)
• Hannah Barnes, ‘The Intolerant Age’, New Statesman (2024)
• Bill Berkowitz, ‘“Cultural Marxism” Catching On’, Southern Poverty Law Center (2003)
• Paul Gottfried, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (2021)
• Martin Jay, ‘Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe’, Salmagundi (2010)
• Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016)
• Stuart Jeffries, ‘Why Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School failed to change the world’, New Statesman (2021)
• William S. Lind, ‘Understanding Oklahoma’, Washington Post (1995)
• William S. Lind, ‘What Is Cultural Marxism?’ (undated)
• William S. Lind, ‘The Origins of Political Correctness’ (2000)
• William S. Lind (ed.), ‘“Political Correctness”: A Short History of an Ideology’ (2004)
• Sarah Manavis, ‘What Is Cultural Marxism? The alt-right meme in Suella Braverman’s speech in Westminster’, New Statesman (2018)
• Matt McManus, ‘On Marxism, Post-Marxism, and “Cultural Marxism”’, Merion West (2018)
• Michael Minnicino, ‘The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and “Political Correctness”, Fidelio (1992)
• Samuel Moyn, ‘The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old’, New York Times (2018)
• David Niewert, ‘The new age of chain terrorism: White far-right killers are inspiring each other sequentially’, Daily Kos (2019)
• Ari Paul, ‘“Cultural Marxism: The Mainstreaming of a Nazi Trope’ (2019)
• The Red Phoenix, ‘Debunking William S. Lind & “Cultural Marxism”’, The Red Phoenix (2011)
• Matthew Rose, ‘A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right’ (2021)

... reading list continues – full list available on Patreon

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Doctor Who was the brainchild of a group of outsiders and it maintains that provocative sensibility today under Russell T. Davies, with an increasingly pointed and explicit political agenda. What are its core values and ideas? How does it balance consistency with change? And how does one programme get away with promoting such a radically progressive message inside the otherwise anxious BBC? This is the story of one of the weirdest and most beloved characters in popular fiction, in all its timey-wimey goodness. Find yourself a decent spot behind the sofa and we’ll begin…

Reading list

John Higgs – Exterminate/Regenerate (2025)

Dorian Lynskey – ‘Once Upon a Time Lord’, Empire magazine (2013)

An Adventure in Space and Time, written by Mark Gatiss and directed by Terry McDonough, BBC (2013)

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In October 2022 Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and set about remaking it in his own image. He gutted the payroll, cluttered the timeline with crud, welcomed back trolls with open arms and rebranded the corpse as X. At the same time, his breakneck self-radicalisation made him the new lodestar of the international far right. In due course the “global town square” became a playground for conspiracy theorists, grifters and extremists.

Musk used to agonise that the Twitter takeover was a ruinous mistake but he’s ended up with a seat in the Trump administration and more billions than ever. It’s everyone else who’s paying the price.

Why was Musk so determined to own Twitter in defiance of all financial logic? What role did the platform’s eccentric founder Jack Dorsey play? Why does Musk’s professed love of free speech only cut in one direction? (Trick question.) How does all this play into his messianic delusion that he is the saviour of humanity? And can Bluesky redeem the failed experiment of social media?

NOTE: This episode was recorded in December, before Musk escalated his attacks on the Labour government and his support for Germany’s AfD, but he was already dreadful beyond belief.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

Axios – How It Happened: Elon Musk vs. Twitter (2023)

Kate Conger, Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu – ‘Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter’, New York Times (2023)

Kate Conger and Ryan Mac – Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed

Twitter (2024)

Sheon Han – ‘What We Lost When Twitter Became X’, New Yorker (2024)

Katie Harbath – ‘Elon Musk’s Takeover’, Lawfare (2024)

Walter Isaacson – Elon Musk (2024)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to part two of the story of the Daily Mail. We pick things up with the disastrous reign of Esmond Harmsworth and his wife Ann, aka “the Monster”. The paper loses direction, readers and money until, in 1971, Esmond’s eccentric son Vere proves his doubters wrong by relaunching the Mail as a tabloid under editor David English. English is young, brilliant and unpredictable: a charming bully with a flexible relationship to the truth. He perfects the winning formula of gravitas, fun and permanent outrage while getting so close to Margaret Thatcher that the Mail effectively becomes an arm of the Conservative campaign machine.

Enter Paul Dacre in 1992 — the Mail’s most long-lasting and divisive editor. Socially awkward and writhing with prejudice, he sees himself as the vessel for the aspirations and phobias of the middle classes — the voice of the ordinary man and woman despite his giant salary, multiple homes and Etonian sons. For 26 years, he terrorises staff, persecutes minorities, intimidates politicians and rails against institutions like the EU and the BBC. (Be warned: this episode contains a record number of beeped obscenities.) We close by talking about Dacre’s toxic legacy and how his peculiar ideas about Britain continue to shape the direction of the country even under his successors. But the Mail’s circulation is plummeting and even its cursed website has lost momentum. Almost 130 years after Alfred Harmsworth founded it, why does it remain the most venomously powerful newspaper in Britain?

How did the Mail reverse its decline and become what it is today? Do the editors or the readers decide its preoccupations? How did it influence both James Bond and the Beatles? What do Paul Dacre’s shoes tell us about this self-proclaimed voice of the people? And is the Mail really as plugged in as it thinks it is? Join us for the dramatic story of the newspaper that reveals Britain’s dark heart.

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

Books

Adrian Addison – Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail, the Paper That Divided and Conquered Britain (2017)

Richard Bourne – Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty (1990)

William E Carson – Northcliffe: Britain’s Man of Power (1918)

Tom Clarke – My Northcliffe Diary (1931)

James Curran and Jean Seaton - Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (1998)

Nick Davies – Flat Earth News (2008)

Stephen Dorril – Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (2006)

Roy Greenslade – Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda (2003)

Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth – Northcliffe (1960)

Martin Pugh – ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005)

... Full reading list can be found on Patreon

Journalism

Paul Dacre on Desert Island Discs (2004)

Paul Dacre – Cudlipp Lecture (2007)

Paul Dacre – Speech to the Society of Editors (2008)

Lauren Collins – ‘The Mail Supremacy’, New Yorker (2012)

... Full reading list can be found on Patreon

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Welcome to the season finale of Origin Story. We put it to the vote and Patreon supporters chose the Daily Mail — the newspaper that loves to hate, and be hated. We thought this would be just one episode but the story is so juicy that it ended up as two, so we’re releasing both parts on the same day as a festive bonus.

In part one we chart the rise of the Harmsworth dynasty. Alfred ‘Sunny’ Harmsworth (aka Lord Northcliffe) is a dynamic visionary whose understanding of the British public enables him to build the world’s biggest magazine empire while still in his 20s. In 1896 he launches the Daily Mail to give the newly literate and enfranchised middle classes exactly what they want: gossip, jingoism, punchy headlines and making stuff up. Snapping up venerable institutions like the Times and the Observer, Northcliffe soon owns half the market and uses it to promote his own views on issues like rearmament (good) and women’s suffrage (bad). 

By the First World War, he’s a formidable power-broker with the muscle to bring down a prime minister and bag himself a place in the war cabinet. But his mental health collapses and he dies in 1922, paranoid and lonely.

Alfred’s brother Harold ‘Bunny’ Harmsworth is the money man who dreams of becoming the richest man in the land and almost gets there. He’s also a right-wing zealot who boasts of toppling the Labour government with the infamous Zinoviev letter and considers Stanley Baldwin’s Tories “semi-socialist”. Inevitably, he is drawn to fascism. It’s not just his support for Oswald Mosley and that notorious headline, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ Enthralled by Mussolini and Hitler, Rothermere becomes Britain’s loudest cheerleader for fascism and appeasement. Hitler, in return, declares that the Mail is “doing an immense amount of good”. We pause the story in 1940, with Rothermere dead, his unremarkable son Esmond taking the reins and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express determined to steal the Mail’s thunder.

How did Northcliffe revolutionise British newspapers? Was his hatred of Germany really one of the drivers of the First World War? Which politician denounced his “diseased vanity”? And what led Rothermere to turn the Mail into a vehicle for fascist propaganda? It’s a tale of power, money, madness and extremism.

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory 

Reading list

Books

Adrian Addison – Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail, the Paper That Divided and Conquered Britain (2017)

Richard Bourne – Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty (1990)

William E Carson – Northcliffe: Britain’s Man of Power (1918)

Tom Clarke – My Northcliffe Diary (1931)

James Curran and Jean Seaton - Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (1998)

Nick Davies – Flat Earth News (2008)

Stephen Dorril – Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (2006)

Roy Greenslade – Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda (2003)

Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth – Northcliffe (1960)

Martin Pugh – ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005)

... Full reading list can be found on Patreon

Journalism

Paul Dacre on Desert Island Discs (2004)

Paul Dacre – Cudlipp Lecture (2007)

Paul Dacre – Speech to the Society of Editors (2008)

Lauren Collins – ‘The Mail Supremacy’, New Yorker (2012)

... Full reading list can be found on Patreon

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Under director general Hugh Carleton Greene, the BBC plugs into the revolutionary energy of the 1960s: Radio 1, Doctor Who, Cathy Come Home, That Was the Week That Was. Meanwhile, David Attenborough’s highbrow upstart BBC2 introduces the nation to colour TV and landmark documentaries. The 70s and 80s are a golden age for ratings, from Morecambe and Wise to Live Aid to EastEnders. Yet there’s also a looming existential crisis thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who loathes the corporation as the embodiment of the bloated state and centre-left groupthink. After the defenestration of DG Alasdair Milne, John Birt gives the BBC a Thatcherite makeover that fends off the Tory assault, but at what cost?

In the 21st century, the BBC has lived under the shadow of scandals, cuts and relentless salvos from the right — every blunder, from the Iraq War to Jimmy Savile, becomes another cudgel for its enemies to beat it with. Too successful and it’s accused of stifling competition. Not successful enough and it’s not worth the license fee. The crisis never ends. Yet more than nine in ten of us use it every week and would be devastated to lose it.

How has the BBC lived up to the Reithian imperative to inform, educate and entertain, and why did Reith himself end up hating it? How can an organisation so powerful be so vulnerable? Is its unruly pluralism a blessing or a curse? Is it really politically biased — and if so, in which direction? And who did Mary Whitehouse personally blame for Britain’s “moral collapse”? Tune in.

Reading list

Patrick Barwise and Peter York – The War Against the BBC (2020)

John Birt – The Harder Path: The Autobiography (2002)

Bill Cotton – Double Bill: 80 Years of Entertainment (2000)

Desert Island Discs with Sir Hugh Greene (1983)

Simon Elmes – And Now on Radio 4: A Celebration of the World’s Best Radio Station (2007)

Lionel Fielden – The Natural Bent (1960)

Grace Wyndham Goldie – Facing the Nation: Television and Politics 1936-1976 (1977)

David Hendy – The BBC: A People’s History (2022)

Charlotte Higgins – This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (2015)

Sam Knight – ‘Can the BBC Survive the British Government?’, New Yorker (2022)

Ian McIntyre – The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith (1993)

Eric Maschwitz – No Chip on My Shoulder (1957)

Hilda Matheson – Broadcasting (1933)

Joe Moran – Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (2014)

JCW Reith – Broadcast Over Britain (1924)

JCW Reith – Into the Wind (1949)

Jean Seaton – Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation 1974-1987 (2015)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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“Hullo, hullo, 2LO calling. 2LO calling. This is the British Broadcasting Company. Stand by for one minute please!” With those words, at 6pm on Tuesday 14 November 1922, the amiable wireless wizard Arthur Burrows introduced just tens of thousands of listeners to Britain’s first national broadcaster. Its founding director general, John Reith, defined its mission in three words: “Inform, educate, entertain.”

When Reith and his team set up shop in Savoy Hill in 1923, the BBC’s staff numbered just 31, including the cleaner. A century later, the BBC is the world’s most popular public broadcaster and most trusted news source. It is the heart of the UK’s soft power and one of our most beloved national institutions. It is the mirror of our tastes and concerns and the background to our lives. Yet it has always been a battleground, too, tormented by newspaper barons, rival broadcasters, suspicious politicians and its own internal tensions. As 1960s director general Hugh Carleton Greene observed, it is “the universal Aunt Sally of our day”.

The story begins with the utopian dreams of the wireless pioneers, and Reith’s own paternalistic idealism about the power of radio to elevate the nation. We meet such gamechanging talents as Hilda Matheson and Cecil Lewis as they develop the art of broadcasting — including one, inevitably, who becomes a fascist. In 1926, the BBC faced its first major crisis, the General Strike, and made its first sworn enemy, Winston Churchill. By

1939, the BBC had 34 million radio listeners and was pioneering the new medium of television. During the Second World War, it proved its worth as a morale-boosting, unifying force at home and an advertisement for democratic British values abroad. One French broadcaster called it “a torch in the darkness.” We end part one with the BBC preparing to enter the radically transformed post-war world and the age of television.

What are the origins of the BBC’s values and structures? Who were the shellshocked misfits who got it off the ground and why did they think it would change the world? Why did the General Strike almost bring it to its knees? How did it help win the war? Oh, and what did Reith have against television?

It’s a saga of bohemians, bureaucrats and bust-ups, with walk-on parts for George Orwell, HG Wells, the Bloomsbury set, JB Priestley, Ewan MacColl, Lord Haw-Haw and Mickey Mouse. And at the centre of it all is the prickly, domineering, inspirational figure of John Reith. Stand by for one minute please!

Reading list

Patrick Barwise and Peter York – The War Against the BBC (2020)

John Birt – The Harder Path: The Autobiography (2002)

Bill Cotton – Double Bill: 80 Years of Entertainment (2000)

Desert Island Discs with Sir Hugh Greene (1983)

Simon Elmes – And Now on Radio 4: A Celebration of the World’s Best Radio Station (2007)

Lionel Fielden – The Natural Bent (1960)

Grace Wyndham Goldie – Facing the Nation: Television and Politics 1936-1976 (1977)

David Hendy – The BBC: A People’s History (2022)

Charlotte Higgins – This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (2015)

Sam Knight – ‘Can the BBC Survive the British Government?’, New Yorker (2022)

Ian McIntyre – The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith (1993)

... Full reading list available on Patreon

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We pick up the story in 1996, with Netanyahu’s first term in office, clashing with both President Clinton and his hard-right coalition partners over the future of the Oslo peace process. We follow his subsequent decade in opposition, as the dwindling of hope and the misfortunes of his rivals enabled him to make yet another unlikely comeback in 2009.

Apart from 18 months of political chaos, he has been in power ever since, growing more hostile towards the Palestinians and Iran and more authoritarian at home — some say Netanyahu was Trump before Trump. The Israel that suffered the blow of October 7 was outwardly strong and prosperous yet more divided, corrupt and unpopular than ever. Its conduct of the subsequent wars demonstrates the costs of Netanyahu’s self-serving machinations, his embrace of the far right and his unforgivingly bleak worldview. Even as a majority of voters want him to step down, he hangs on.

Is Netanyahu just an extraordinarily canny operator or the true representative of a new Israel, a long way from its founders’ intentions? How did peace with the Palestinians go from a real possibility to a broken dream? Why does everyone from foreign leaders to members of his own cabinet have such contempt for Netanyahu? And how can Israel recover from his ruinous leadership? To understand where the country is now, you need to understand the man.

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

• Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Books

Neill Lochery - The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Benjamin Netanyahu - A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993)

Benjamin Netanyahu - Bibi: My Story (2022)

Anshel Pfeffer - Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu (2020)

Ari Shavit - My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel: Updated edition (2015)

Avi Shlaim - The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)

Articles

David Margolick - ‘Star of Zion’, Vanity Fair (1996)

David Remnick - ‘The Outsider’, New Yorker (1998)

Joshua Leifer - ‘The Netanyahu doctrine’, Guardian (2023)

David Remnick - ‘The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition’, New Yorker (2024)

Donald McIntyre - ‘How Netanyahu gambled with the Fate of Israel’, Tortoise (2024)

John Jenkins - ‘Netanyahu’s all-out war’, New Statesman (2024)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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We begin with the influence of Bibi’s father and grandfather and the flinty, paranoid doctrine of revisionist Zionism. Netanyahu’s aggressive, ultra-conservative worldview was also shaped by his studies in the US, his combat experience in Israel’s wars of survival, and the dramatic loss of his beloved older brother Yoni during the 1976 raid on Entebbe Airport. After the revisionist party Likud ended Labor’s three-decade hegemony, he found his calling as a great communicator, bullishly promoting Israel’s interests, from television to the United Nations, throughout the 1980s.

Netanyahu’s first eight years in the Knesset coincided with the First Intifada and the Oslo peace process. In a time of hope for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he offered cynicism and fear. When peacemaking prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Netanyahu was blamed for stoking the far right and he seemed finished politically. Yet within a few months, he was Israel’s youngest ever prime minister.

What has influenced Netanyahu’s bleak and spiky understanding of Jewish history and his role in it? How did such a widely disliked character achieve such surprising success? And how did Israel itself change during those tumultuous decades of frequent wars and elusive peace? To understand where the country is now, you need to understand the man.

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

• Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Books

Neill Lochery - The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu (Bloomsbury, 2016)

Benjamin Netanyahu - A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993)

Benjamin Netanyahu - Bibi: My Story (2022)

Anshel Pfeffer - Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu (2020)

Ari Shavit - My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel: Updated edition (2015)

Avi Shlaim - The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000)

Articles

David Margolick - ‘Star of Zion’, Vanity Fair (1996)

David Remnick - ‘The Outsider’, New Yorker (1998)

Joshua Leifer - ‘The Netanyahu doctrine’, Guardian (2023)

David Remnick - ‘The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition’, New Yorker (2024)

Donald McIntyre - ‘How Netanyahu gambled with the Fate of Israel’, Tortoise (2024)

John Jenkins - ‘Netanyahu’s all-out war’, New Statesman (2024)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

• Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams and Chris Jones. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

• Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams and Chris Jones. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We weigh up two arguments concerning existential risk. Some AI theorists believe the technology has the possibility of becoming sentient and then behaving against humanity's interests. Others worry that it will simply deliver disastrous outcomes on the basis of badly established requests. For instance, if you ask a highly advanced machine to create paperclips, with no additional restrictions, it might end up killing everyone in its relentless pursuit of its task. Are either of these ideas remotely believable? Are they remotely likely?

Then we look at the possible repercussions of more modest outcomes. What happens when everyone on earth is equipped with their own genius machine, which can assess global corporate law in seconds, or make millions on Amazon Marketplace? Will we use it for good or ill? (Spoilers: It'll be bad) 

How confidently can we accept the predictions of AI theorists? Are they really right that this is all inevitable? Or is history, and technological development, far more chaotic and unpredictable than their models allow?

Finally, we look at the impact on humanity as we are all suddenly enveloped in AI art. Will an AI song ever move us to tears? And if so, what does that say about who we are and what we look for in the world?

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Books

Susie Alegre - Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being human in the age of AI (2024)

Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Daniel Crevier – AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)

Pedro Domingos - The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake the world (2015)

Max Fisher - The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World (2022)

Walter Isaacson – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014)

Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

John Markoff - Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015)

David G. Stork (ed.) – HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997)

Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar – The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future (2023)

Michael Woolridge – The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI (2021)

Articles

Alan Turing – ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind (1950)

Brad Darrach – ‘Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person’, Life (1970)

Jeremy Bernstein – ‘A.I.’, New Yorker (1981)

Raffi Khatchadourian – ‘The Doomsday Invention’, New Yorker (2015)

For the full reading list join our Patreon.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why are conspiracy theories so alluring, how have they shaped history and how can liberal democracy survive if its citizens no longer inhabit a shared reality? Featuring JFK, David Icke, Princess Diana and the Wu-Tang Clan, this is our introduction to a weird and wild story. You can listen to Ian and Dorian read Conspiracy Theory: The Story of an Idea, along with its sister Origin Story publications Fascism and Centrism, on Audible, Spotify or your favourite audiobook platform. Or buy the physical books  on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory.

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In part two we’ll be exploring the possible ramifications of AI, from the utopian to the dystopian and all points in between. But first, we explain how humanity’s long, ambivalent fascination with artificial life has brought us here.

We start with premonitions of AI, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and Ada Lovelace, the original AI sceptic, to Alan Turing and his famous test. Artificial Intelligence itself — the term and the field of study — began in 1956, at a summer school at Dartmouth University. While most computer scientists were working on ways for machines to partner with human intelligence — the personal computer, the internet — AI researchers dreamt of replacing it.

For decades, AI development was a cycle of boom and bust. Extravagant claims attracted funding, talent and media attention, then their failure to materialise caused all three to collapse. AI became tarnished by its broken promises. But in the 21st century, the availability of vast troves of data and powerful new processors finally solved such stubborn challenges as image recognition and automatic translation, leading to the current AI gold rush. Along the way, we meet gamechanging scientists like Marvin Minsky and Geoffrey Hinton as well as landmark machines like ELIZA, the first chatbot, Shakey the robot and AlexNet, deep learning’s great leap forward.

Why does the prospect of machine intelligence enthral and unnerve us? Why has AI proved so much more difficult than its pioneers imagined? How have fictional AIs like HAL and Skynet shaped the mythology of AI? And are Large Language Models like Chat-GPT just glorified autocomplete or a historic turning point in our relationship with machines?

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Books

Susie Alegre - Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being human in the age of AI (2024)

Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Daniel Crevier – AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993)

Pedro Domingos - The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake the world (2015)

Max Fisher - The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World (2022)

Walter Isaacson – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014)

Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024)

John Markoff - Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015)

David G. Stork (ed.) – HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997)

Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar – The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future (2023)

Michael Woolridge – The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI (2021)

Articles

Alan Turing – ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind (1950)

Brad Darrach – ‘Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person’, Life (1970)

Jeremy Bernstein – ‘A.I.’, New Yorker (1981)

For the full reading list join our Patreon.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Was violence morally justified when peaceful solutions failed? Did it hasten suffrage or threaten to derail it? What might have happened if the war had not intervened? What do the strange and divergent afterlives of the suffragettes tell us about the movement? And what can modern activists like Just Stop Oil learn from the suffragettes?

Behind the sanitised, sentimentalised version of the story lies a thorny tale of the validity and efficacy of violence in a just cause, taking Edwardian Britain to the edge of chaos.

Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Diane Atkinson – Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018)

Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020)

Joyce Marlow (editor) – Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women (2015)

Glenda Norquay (editor) – Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (1995)

Christabel Pankhurst – Pressing Problems of the Coming Age (1924)

Christabel Pankhurst – Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-10 (1911)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931)

Mary R. Richardson – Laugh a Defiance (1953)

Fern Riddell – ‘Sanitising the Suffragettes’ (2018)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Who were the Pankhursts and their inner circle? How did they interact with Millicent Fawcett’s moderate suffragists? Why were Liberal politicians so determined to deny women the vote? And could it all have worked out very differently? 

It’s a fiery story of courage, conflict and missed chances, as British women found their political voice for the first time.

Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Diane Atkinson – Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018)

Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020)

Joyce Marlow (editor) – Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women (2015)

Glenda Norquay (editor) – Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (1995)

Christabel Pankhurst – Pressing Problems of the Coming Age (1924)

Christabel Pankhurst – Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-10 (1911)

Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931)

Mary R. Richardson – Laugh a Defiance (1953)

Fern Riddell – ‘Sanitising the Suffragettes’ (2018)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the first episode of season six, Dorian and Ian reassess Brand’s extraordinary rise to fame in the 2000s in light of recent allegations of sexual misconduct and explore how British culture gave him a free pass. In 2013 Brand swapped sex and fame for a new compulsion, reinventing himself as a flamboyant agitator to great acclaim. In the void between Occupy and Corbynism, his verbose mishmash of self-help and socialism briefly made him a lion of the left. During the pandemic Brand embraced a darker shade of politics, promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19, Ukraine and much more besides. After the allegations broke last year he went full crank, aligning himself with Robert F Kennedy Jr, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones in the paranoid space.

What does Brand’s journey to the fringes tell us about the shifting political landscape? Did he really switch sides or were the red flags flying all along? What can the left learn from its haste to turn a motormouth comedian into a radical icon? Is Brand’s latest incarnation sincere or opportunistic, and does it really matter? And which of his tomes makes for the most painful reading today: Revolution or My Booky Wook?

This is a bizarre story of celebrity and conspiracy, addiction and attention, which says a great deal about where we are now.

Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory – out 17th Oct

Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Books

Russell Brand - My Booky Wook (2007)

Russell Brand - Revolution (2014)

Anna Merlan - Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2019)

Naomi Klein - Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023)

Video and audio

Russell Brand at parliamentary select committee on drug addiction (2012)

Newsnight debate on drug addiction with Peter Hitchens (2012)

Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman (2013)

Newsnight interview with Evan Davis (2014)

Brand: A Second Coming, directed by Ondi Timoner (2015)

Russell Brand: In Plain Sight: Dispatches (2023)

Russell Brand podcast archive

Articles

Michael Kelly, ‘The Road to Paranoia’, New Yorker (1995) 

Piers Morgan, ‘Russell Brand’, GQ (2006)

Miranda Sawyer, Brand on the run, The Guardian (2008)

Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: “I always felt sorry for her children”, The Guardian (2013)

Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition”, New Statesman (2013)

Brian Logan, ‘Messiah Complex – review’, Guardian (2013)

Mark Fisher, ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, Open Democracy (2013)

Justin Gray, ‘The Sneaky Smarts of Russell Brand’, Vulture (2013)

David Runciman, ‘Revolution by Russell Brand review’, Guardian (2014)

For complete article list see Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here.

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Reading List

Revolution by Emmanuel Macron, Scribe 2017

Emmanuel Macron: Revolution Francais by Sophie Pedder, Bloomsbury 2018

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Dorian tells Ian the story of that landmark Sunday and its aftermath, from the points of view of protesters, police and politicians, and finds some surprising answers. 

Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions (first one coming next week) when you back Origin Story on Patreon.

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Jade Bailey. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio and video by Simon Williams, Chris Jones and Kieron Leslie. Live events co-ordinator Jill Pearson. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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Dorian and Ian tell the whole story from all angles: Rushdie’s decade in hiding, Iran’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia, community relations in Britain, divisions in the literary scene, and the conflicted responses of politicians around the world.

What exactly did The Satanic Verses say that made people so angry? Which public figures were on Rushdie’s side and which ones thought he had it coming? How did Rushdie get his life back, only to almost lose it decades later? And what is the cultural and political legacy of the affair today? It is a tale of artistic freedom colliding with religious dogma and political calculations to turn a work of fiction into an international incident for the first time.

Reading list

Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed. – The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (2007)

Christopher Hitchens – Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010)

Daniel Pipes – The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990)

Salman Rushdie – The Satanic Verses (1988)

Salman Rushdie – Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991)

Salman Rushdie – Joseph Anton (2012)

 Salman Rushdie – Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024)

Articles

John Cunningham – ‘Sentenced to the prison of the word’, The Guardian (1990)

Will Lloyd – How We Gave Up on Salman Rushdie, UnHerd (2022)

Dorian Lynskey – Salman Rushdie on Quichotte: “The world as I knew it seems to be coming to an end” the i (2019)

Sean O’Grady – The Satanic Verses 30 Years On review, The Independent (2019)

David Remnick – The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, New Yorker (2023)

Salman Rushdie – The Disappeared, New Yorker (2012)

Words for Salman Rushdie – New York Times (1989)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Ian and Dorian trace Starmer’s youthful journey from working-class Surrey socialist to indie-loving, centrist-bashing law student, explaining the legacy of a difficult childhood. He was the star human rights lawyer, at the heart of 1990s controversies from the McLibel case to policing in Northern Ireland, who became the country’s top prosecutor and then a knight of the realm. At the age of 52, he entered politics and soon found himself on the frontline of the Brexit wars, butting heads with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. We end with his leadership of the party and the price of victory.

Why is Starmer such a closed book in public? How did he go from radical socialist to centrist dad? What went down between him and Corbyn? Was he really an arch-remainer? When did he almost throw in the towel? And what are the core values that might define his premiership? Discover all this and more in the story of our next prime minister.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Tom Baldwin - Keir Starmer: The Biography (2024)

Oliver Eagleton – The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right (2022)

Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire – Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020)

Tim Shipman – Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem (2017)

Articles and podcasts

Emily Ashton, ‘Keir Starmer Is Not Who You Think He Is’, Buzzfeed (2020)

Elliott Chappell, ‘Interview with Keir Starmer’, Labour List (2020)

Desert Island Discs: Sir Keir Starmer (2020)

George Eaton, ‘What Is Starmerism?’, The New Statesman (2024)

Charlotte Edwardes, ‘“You asked me questions I’ve never asked myself”: Keir Starmer’s most personal interview yet’

The Guardian, ‘In Praise of… Keir Starmer’, The Guardian (2009)

Billy Kenber, ‘Keir Starmer: Radical who attacked Kinnock in Marxist journal’, The Times (2020)

Keir Starmer, ‘Sorry, Mr Blair, but 1441 does not authorise force’, The Guardian (2003)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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The drama accelerates with Dr Andrew Wakefield and the MMR panic of the 2000s, which swept up everyone for Oprah Winfrey to Private Eye, caused a public health disaster and set the stage for the full-blown mania of the backlash against Covid-19 vaccines. How did a rogue British gastroenterologist launch a global movement? How did vaccine scepticism mutate into a giant conspiracy theory? Is Bill Gates really implanting 5G trackers in our blood? (No.) And what’s the best way to get an anti-vaxxer to think again?

It’s a gripping story of science, journalism, paranoia, superstition and people who should know better.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• David Aaronovitch – Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History (2010)

• Jonathan M. Berman – Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (2020)

• Steve Brotherton – Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (2016)

• Brian Deer – The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines (2020)

• Peter Furtado - Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History (2021)

• Naomi Klein – Doppelganger (2023)

• Anna Merlan – Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2020)

• Seth Mnookin – The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy (2011)

• Tom Phillips and Jonn Elledge - Conspiracy: A History of Bxllocks Theories and How Not to Fall for Them (2022)

• Frank M. Snowden - Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (2019)

Podcasts and articles

• You’re Wrong About: The Anti-Vaccine Movement (2021)

• Maintenance Phase: RFK Jr. and the Rise of the Anti-Vaxx Movement (2023)

• Isaac Chotiner, ‘The Influence of the Anti-Vaccine Movement’, The New Yorker (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In part two, Ian and Dorian tell the story of Lemkin’s invention of genocide and his efforts to make it an international crime. They explain how legal wrangling during the Nuremberg trials led to the 1948 Genocide Convention, and why it took so long for anybody to be charged with the crime, let alone brought to justice. Why do so many of the twentieth century’s most horrendous offences not qualify as genocide? Why did international condemnation fail to prevent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and the former Yugoslavia? And why is the case against Israel so contentious?

It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the limits of international law, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2013

• Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 1998

• Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, 2007

• Norman N. Naimark – Genocide: A World History, 2016

• Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002

• Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In this two-part episode Dorian and Ian tell the story of genocide as a legal and political category. What exactly does it mean? How is it different from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing? Why is it so hard to prove? And how did it become seen as the ultimate crime?

In part one, Ian and Dorian chart the prehistory of genocide — the ancient desire of groups to utterly eradicate their enemies. They go from the vengeful massacres of the Old Testament and Greek myth to the destruction of Carthage and the Holy War of the Crusades. Then they enter the age of empire, from the crimes of the Conquistadors to the elimination of the Tasmanians. Modern genocide began with the slaughter of the Herero in East Africa and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, setting the stage for the Nazis.

It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the difference between reckless violence and targeted destruction, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies,

2013

• Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our

Families, 1998

• Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta

to Darfur, 2007

• Norman N. Naimark - Genocide: A World History, 2016

• Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002

• Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history.

In part two, Ian and Dorian talk about the single most important liberal book ever written, track the ups and downs of the couple's tumultuous affair, and show how Mill became a woke warrior in his old age, fighting against racism and sexism and destroying his carefully-built Victorian reputation in the process.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

• Ian Dunt – How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?)
• Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) – The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998)
• John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) – On Liberty (1859)
• John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) – The Subjection of Women (1869)
• John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham – Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987)
• Richard Reeves – John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history.

In part one, Ian explains Mill's devastating childhood, Taylor's cutting social commentary, their love affairs which rocked Victorian London, the evidence for her co-authorship of several key liberal books, and how they delivered some of the earliest works of British feminism.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Ian Dunt - How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?)

Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) - The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998)

John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - On Liberty (1859)

John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - The Subjection of Women (1869)

John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham - Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987)

Richard Reeves - John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In part two of George Orwell, Dorian picks up the story in 1941, with Orwell taking a job at the BBC. The war grinds on, and so does George, until his anti-Stalinist fairy tale Animal Farm changes everything. We’re on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four but it is littered with obstacles: grief, madness, bombs, tuberculosis. After the war, Orwell is writing his finest essays but his life is mayhem so he escapes to the Scottish island of Jura with his baby son to write the novel that, little does he know, will make him a legend.

It's the story of a writer reaching the height of his powers while everything around him seems to be falling to bits. How did a sick man on a lonely island write perhaps the most influential novel of the twentieth century? Why is his strange masterpiece so widely misunderstood? What were Orwell’s blindspots? Would he have been a good hang? And are taking the right lessons from his life and work? All this, plus Nye Bevan, HG Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley and the atomic bomb.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Image: Peter Cushing (Winston Smith) with Yvonne Mitchell (Julia) and André Morrell (O’Brien) in the 1954 BBC production of George Orwell’s 1984. (Getty)

Reading list

Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984)

Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006)

Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971)

Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019

Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975)

John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989)

William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023)

Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In this opening two-parter Dorian bows to the inevitable and tells the story of the subject of his book, The Ministry of Truth. When George Orwell died on 21 January 1950, at the age of 46, the phenomenal success of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it international news. The obituaries hailed him as a beacon of decency, sanity and wisdom during the darkest years of the twentieth century — “the wintry conscience of a generation” in VS Pritchett’s ringing phrase. To this day, his moral authority is claimed by people across the political spectrum. Behind the myth, Orwell was a complicated man, full of flaws and contradictions. His road to success was long, painful and ridiculously eventful.

In part one, Dorian explains how Eric Blair became George Orwell, from Eton to Burma to Paris to Wigan. We then follow Orwell to the Spanish Civil War, where he is shot by fascists and hounded by Stalinists, and finally to Blitz-torn London. It’s the story of a man working out who he is, as a writer and a moral agent, in a world tumbling towards catastrophe. How did Orwell become a socialist? Why did he wind up the other socialists? Why was Spain the great turning point in his life? Are his early novels any good? And was his wife Eileen the queen of deadpan one-liners? All this and more in the return of Origin Story.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984)

Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006)

Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971)

Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019

Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975)

John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989)

William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023)

Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Following Dorian’s bonus episode about the birth of end of the world fiction, based on his new book Everything Must Go, Ian goes deep on a topic from his bestselling book How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t. He explains how a house built on marshland by a 17th century scoundrel gradually became the prime minister’s official residence, and how its cramped, chaotic floorplan still influences how vital decisions are made. Why does tradition trump efficient governance? How do wily advisers exploit the layout to increase their influence over the PM? Is the door more important than the rest of the house put together? And is it finally time to say goodbye to Number 10?

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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This time: The Illuminati were a group of Enlightenment idealists who existed for just a few years in 1780s Bavaria. Or were they? The Illuminati have since been blamed for everything from the French Revolution to communism to 9/11. How did a powerless club of intellectuals become reimagined as the secret rulers of the world? And how did the myth of the Illuminati become the template for every megaconspiracy theory about plots to put humanity under the heel of a one-world government?

Dorian and Ian unravel this amazing yarn, which takes in America’s Founding Fathers, British fascists, the Knights Templar, David Icke, Jay-Z and the Playboy letters page. The truth is in here.

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Drawing on his new book Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, Dorian explains how that season of confusion and gloom led to not just Frankenstein but Byron’s revolutionary poem Darkness. And how the deaths of her companions led Mary to write The Last Man, the first ever novel about a world-destroying pandemic.

It’s a story of personal tragedy, temporary climate change, shocking new ideas about the past, present and future of life on earth, and the summer that kicked off two centuries (and counting) of apocalyptic fiction.

Buy Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Dorian and Ian explain how two maverick young Oxford philosophers ended up creating a multi-billion-dollar movement, explore the ideas behind it, and track its journey towards long termism: the philosophy of safeguarding the future of the human race from threats such as hostile AI. Are the principles of EA sound? Did the influx of billionaires and the obsession with existential risk knock it off course? Was Bankman-Fried a true believer who blew it or just a grifter who took the idealists for a ride? And can EA survive one of the biggest financial scandals of this century? When big ideas collide with big money and big tech, things get messy.

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Reading list

Books:

Carol J.Adams, Alice Crary, Lori Gruen, (eds.) — The Good it Promises, the Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Alturism, (2023)

Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković (eds.) — Global Catastrophic Risks

(2008)

Nick Bostrom — Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Zeke Faux — Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering

Fall (2023)

John Leslie — The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human

Extinction (1996)

Michael Lewis — Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023)

William MacAskill — Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You

Can Make a Difference (2015)

William MacAskill — What We Owe the Future (2022)

Toby Ord — The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

(2020)

Online:

Core EA Principles, Centre for Effective Altruism

Peter Singer — Famine, Affluence and Morality, 1971

Peter Singer — TED talk, 2013

William MacAskill — The history of the term ‘effective altruism’, Effective

Altruism Forum, 2014

Raffi Khatchadourian — The Doomsday Invention, New Yorker, 2015

Gideon-Lewis Krauss — The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism, New

Yorker, 2022

Charlotte Alter — Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned

About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed, Time, 2023

Sophie McBain — Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion,

New Statesman, 2023

Podcasts:

80,000 Hours: Sam Bankman-Fried, 2022

80,000 Hours: Toby Ord, 2023

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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After the Second World War, the name of eugenics was discredited but many of its leading thinkers and institutions kept going under the more acceptable guise of genetics. How was eugenics quietly rehabilitated by IQ fetishists and population-control advocates? Why has it become so popular in Silicon Valley? And does it even make scientific sense or is it really a pseudo-science designed to formalise bigotry? Despite its association with historic atrocities, the belief that biology is destiny and procreation is political has not gone away.

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits including an extended version of the podcast. www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Reading list:

Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds) - The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010)

Edwin Black — War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003)

Elof Axel Carlson — The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001)

GK Chesterton — Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)

Charles Darwin — The Descent of Man (1871)

Lyndsay Andrew Farrall — The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1865-1925 (1969)

Francis Galton – Hereditary Genius (1869)

Henry H Goddard – The Kallikak Family (1912)

Stephen Jay Gould — The Mismeasure of Man (1981/1996)

Madison Grant – The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Philippa Levine — Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017)

Gina Maranto — Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996)

Adam Rutherford — Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022)

Lothrop Stoddard – The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920)

HG Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) 

Online:

Quinn Slobodian — ‘The rise of the new tech right’, The New Statesman (2023)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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Dorian and Ian explore how Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer’s fascination with inherited characteristics was supercharged by Victorian science, from Darwin’s theory of evolution to early breakthroughs in genetics. They talk about how Galton’s voluntary “positive eugenics” led to the authoritarian “negative eugenics” of compulsory sterilisation, and how hardcore American eugenicists drew up a blueprint for Hitler. Also: the birth of scientific racism, the sinister history of IQ tests, how GK Chesterton helped save Britain from eugenics laws, and, yes, the people who thought you could identify criminals by the shape of their skulls. It’s a disturbing and complicated story which mangles your political preconceptions.

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits.

Reading list

Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds) - The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010)

Edwin Black — War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003)

Elof Axel Carlson — The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001)

GK Chesterton — Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)

Charles Darwin — The Descent of Man (1871)

Lyndsay Andrew Farrall — The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1865-1925 (1969)

Francis Galton – Hereditary Genius (1869)

Henry H Goddard – The Kallikak Family (1912)

Stephen Jay Gould — The Mismeasure of Man (1981/1996)

Madison Grant – The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Philippa Levine — Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017)

Gina Maranto — Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996)

Adam Rutherford — Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022)

Lothrop Stoddard – The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920)

HG Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) 

Online:

Quinn Slobodian — ‘The rise of the new tech right’, The New Statesman (2023)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey follow the trail of the walking dead from the Caribbean to Night of the Living Dead and the global outbreak of zombiemania in the 21st century. What does the zombie tell us about life, death and civilisation? How can it contain so many different meanings? And why do the living dead remain uniquely disturbing after all these years?

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits including bonus chat about how Ian and Dorian make each episode: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Resources:

Books

Kyle William Bishop — American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, 2012

Kyle William Bishop — How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking Dead in the 21st Century, 2015

Max Brooks — World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, 2006

Greg Garrett — Living with the Living Dead: The Wisdom of the Zombie Apocalypse, 2017

Zachary Graves — Zombies: The Complete Guide to the World of the Living Dead, 2011

Peter Haining, ed. — Zombie!: Stories of the Walking Dead, 1985

Richard Matheson – I Am Legend, 1954

Kim Paffenroth — Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, 2006

George Romero & Susanna Sparrow — Dawn of the Dead, 1979

Jamie Russell — Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, 2014

Colson Whitehead — Zone One, 2012

Tony Williams — The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, 2015

Films, TV and games

White Zombie, 1932

I Walked with a Zombie, 1943

The Last Man on Earth, 1964

Night of the Living Dead, 1968

Dawn of the Dead, 1978

Day of the Dead, 1985

Resident Evil, 1996

28 Days Later, 2002

Shaun of the Dead, 2004

28 Weeks Later, 2007

I Am Legend, 2007

Dead Set, 2008

The Walking Dead, 2010-22

The Last of Us, 2022

Online

Doug Gross, Why we love those rotting, hungry, putrid zombies, CNN, 2009

https://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/10/02/zombie.love/index.html

Torie Bosch, First Eat All the Lawyers, Slate, 2011

https://slate.com/culture/2011/10/zombies-the-zombie-boom-is-inspired-by-the-economy.html

Thomas Jones, Les zombies, c’est vous, London Review of Books, 2012

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n02/thomas-jones/les-zombies-c-est-vous

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Max Brooks Is Not Kidding About the Zombie Apocalypse, New York Times, 2013

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/max-brooks-is-not-kidding-about-the-zombie-apocalypse.html

Interview with Alex Garland, 2015

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-director-alex-g_b_7038618

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast 

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“We are all Keynesians now,” declared Time magazine in 1965, but 10 years later a global economic crisis was opening the door to the neoliberal counter-revolution, led by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Were the Keynesians more Keynesian than Keynes himself? Should he be credited with the post-war boom and blamed for its dramatic implosion? Is the relationship between Keynesian and neoliberal visions more complex than it appears? And are Joe Biden and Keir Starmer taking us into a new age of Keynes?

Reading list for both episodes

Books

Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman — Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes, 2011

Bradley W. Bateman, Toshiaki Hirai and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, eds. — The Return to Keynes, 2010

Zach Carter — The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, 2020

Peter Clarke — Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, 2010

Roy Harrod — The Life of John Maynard Keynes, 1951

John Maynard Keynes — The Essential Keynes, 2015

Robert Skidelsky — John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, 2004

Nicholas Wapshott — Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, 2011

Online:

John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, 1930

https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/Economic_Possibilities_for_our_Grandchildren.htm

We Are All Keynesians Now, Time, 1965

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,842353,00.html

Tides of History podcast with Zach Carter

https://podcasts.apple.com/bg/podcast/john-maynard-keynes-and-his-legacies-interview-with/id1257202425?i=1000476041925

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  

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In part one Dorian and Ian track Keynes’ remarkable life in the fifty years leading up to his game changing “general theory” in the 1930s. They talk about his gilded youth at Eton and Cambridge, his complicated friendship with the Bloomsbury Group, his sensational journalism, his rivalries with classical economists, and his rise to wealth and influence. But for all his achievements, his policy prescriptions were usually ignored, from the Treaty of Versailles to the Great Depression. His failures made him Mister Told-you-so. Why was Keynes such a remarkable figure and why wouldn’t politicians listen to him? Was he an arch-centrist in an age of extremes? Along the way we meet Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Oswald Mosley and zingers galore. Next week: the rise and fall (and rise again) of Keynesianism.

Reading list for both episodes

Books:

Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman — Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes, 2011

Bradley W. Bateman, Toshiaki Hirai and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, eds. — The Return to Keynes, 2010

Zach Carter — The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, 2020

Peter Clarke — Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, 2010

Roy Harrod — The Life of John Maynard Keynes, 1951

John Maynard Keynes — The Essential Keynes, 2015

Robert Skidelsky — John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, 2004

Nicholas Wapshott — Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, 2011

Online:

John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, 1930

https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/Economic_Possibilities_for_our_Grandchildren.htm

We Are All Keynesians Now, Time, 1965

https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,842353,00.html

Tides of History podcast with Zach Carter

https://podcasts.apple.com/bg/podcast/john-maynard-keynes-and-his-legacies-interview-with/id1257202425?i=1000476041925

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast 

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But does it really make sense to generalise about a cohort which extends from Dolly Parton to Donald Trump, and Theresa May to Prince? And what is a generation anyway? Ian (early millennial) and Dorian (late Gen X) discuss the roots of generation theory, track the boomers’ rise to power and assess the charges that boomers and millennials throw at each other across the divide. Is the generation gap bigger than ever or a phoney war cooked up by politicians and the media?

Reading list

Books:

Helen Andrews — Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, 2020

Jennie Bristow — Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict, 2015

Bobby Duffy — The Generation Divide: Why We Can’t Agree and Why We Should, 2021

Jill Filipovic — OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind, 2020

Bruce Cannon Gibney — A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, 2017

Landon Y Jones — Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, 1980

Joseph Sternberg — Theft of a Decade: Baby Boomers, Millennials, and the Distortion of Our Economy, 2019

William Strauss and Neil Howe — Generations: The History of America’s Future 1584 to 2069, 1991

Jean M Twenge — Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silent — and What They Mean for the Future, 2023

David Willetts — The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future — And Why They Should Give It Back, 2010

Online:

Karl Mannheim — ‘The Problem of Generations’, 1928

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjln8-IiteBAxU2XUEAHcSICu4QFnoECA4QAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu%2Fclasses%2F201%2Farticles%2F27MannheimGenerations.pdf&usg=AOvVaw37Wl_dRsSZ_rDdODQ0fMbd&opi=89978449

Richard Lorber and Ernest Fladell — ‘The Generation Gap’, Life, 1968

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BVUEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Neil Howe and William Strauss, ‘The New Generation Gap’, The Atlantic, 1992

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/12/the-new-generation-gap/536934/

Louis Menand — ‘It’s Time to Stop Talking about “Generations”’, The New Yorker, 2021

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-generations

Justin E Smith — ‘My Generation’, Harper’s, 2023

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  

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Do his ideas add up to a coherent view of how to live? How does he reconcile mythology with zoology? What on earth is “postmodern neo-Marxism”? And what is it with Peterson and Pinocchio? 

Dorian and Ian discuss how the man with so many rules for life wound up at the end of his tether in a Russian hospital, and how to reconcile his books with his increasingly eccentric and extreme social media presence. Is he really an intellectual at all?

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod

Reading list for both episodes:

Books:

Ben Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, Matthew McManus and Marion Trejo — Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, 2020

Jordan B Peterson — Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, 1999

Jordan B Peterson — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018

Jordan B Peterson — Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, 2021

Sandra Woien, ed. — Critical Responses to Jordan Peterson, 2022

Online:

Jason McBride — ‘The Pronoun Warrior’, Toronto Life, 2017

https://torontolife.com/city/u-t-professor-sparked-vicious-battle-gender-neutral-pronouns/

David Brooks — ‘The Jordan Peterson Moment’, The New York Times, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html

Dorian Lynskey — ‘How dangerous is Jordan Peterson, the rightwing professor who “hit a hornets’ nest”?’, The Guardian, 2018

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest

Kelefa Sanneh — ‘Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity’, The New Yorker, 2018

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity

Pankaj Mishra — ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, The New York Review of Books, 2018

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/

Nellie Bowles — ‘Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy’, The New York Times, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html

Vinay Menon — ‘Jordan Peterson is trying to make sense of the world — including his own strange journey’, Toronto Star, 2018

https://web.archive.org/web/20191219104703/https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2018/03/16/jordan-peterson-is-trying-to-make-sense-of-the-world-including-his-own-strange-journey.html

Bernard Schiff — ‘I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous’, Toronto Star, 2018

https://web.archive.org/web/20200115120600/https:/www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html

Johanna Thomas-Corr — ‘Jordan Peterson, Agent of Chaos’, The New Statesman, 2021

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/02/jordan-peterson-agent-chaos-psychology

James Marriott — ‘Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson review’, The Times, 2021

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/beyond-order-by-jordan-b-peterson-review-qnhtgs2zj

Helen Lewis — ‘What Happened to Jordan Peterson?’, The Atlantic, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/what-happened-to-jordan-peterson/618082/

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast

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To kick off Series 4 Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey turn their sights on Jordan B Peterson, the bestselling author, diehard culture warrior and, allegedly, the most influential intellectual in the western world. In part one they discuss Peterson’s life up to the publication of 12 Rules for Life in 2018, from his childhood in rural Canada to his first book, Maps of Meaning, his role as a star professor at the University of Toronto and his first taste of public controversy. 

How did an obscure academic come to the brink of global celebrity? Why did a young left-leaning activist grow into a ferocious conservative? And what ideas led him to his multi-million-dollar 12 rules? Featuring Nietzsche, Karl Jung, the absence of God and nightmares about the end of the world. Buckle up, bucko.

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Reading list:

Books:

Ben Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, Matthew McManus and Marion Trejo — Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, 2020

Jordan B Peterson — Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, 1999

Jordan B Peterson — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018

Jordan B Peterson — Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, 2021

Sandra Woien, ed. — Critical Responses to Jordan Peterson, 2022

Online:

Jason McBride — ‘The Pronoun Warrior’, Toronto Life, 2017

https://torontolife.com/city/u-t-professor-sparked-vicious-battle-gender-neutral-pronouns/

David Brooks — ‘The Jordan Peterson Moment’, The New York Times, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html

Dorian Lynskey — ‘How dangerous is Jordan Peterson, the rightwing professor who “hit a hornets’ nest”?’, The Guardian, 2018

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest

Kelefa Sanneh — ‘Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity’, The New Yorker, 2018

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity

Pankaj Mishra — ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, The New York Review of Books, 2018

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/

Nellie Bowles — ‘Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy’, The New York Times, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html

Vinay Menon — ‘Jordan Peterson is trying to make sense of the world — including his own strange journey’, Toronto Star, 2018

https://web.archive.org/web/20191219104703/https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2018/03/16/jordan-peterson-is-trying-to-make-sense-of-the-world-including-his-own-strange-journey.html

Bernard Schiff — ‘I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous’, Toronto Star, 2018

https://web.archive.org/web/20200115120600/https:/www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html

Johanna Thomas-Corr — ‘Jordan Peterson, Agent of Chaos’, The New Statesman, 2021

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/02/jordan-peterson-agent-chaos-psychology

James Marriott — ‘Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson review’, The Times, 2021

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/beyond-order-by-jordan-b-peterson-review-qnhtgs2zj

Helen Lewis — ‘What Happened to Jordan Peterson?’, The Atlantic, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/what-happened-to-jordan-peterson/618082/

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  

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Here's what they had to say…

Support Origin Story on Patreon for more bonus episodes: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Reading List: 

Luis Alvarez – Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist 

Martin Amis – Einstein’s Monsters 

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin – American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer 

David C. Cassidy – J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century 

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn 

Herman Kahn – On Thermonuclear War 

William Lanouette – Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard 

William L. Laurence – Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb 

Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk - Indefensible Weapons 

Ronald Reagan – An American Life 

Jonathan Schell – The Fate of the Earth 

P.D. Smith – Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon 

H.G. Wells – The World Set Free 

The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, by Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Alex Rees, music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast 

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They look at the idea of The Elite. What the hell does it mean? Where did it come from? How has it changed over the years? And why does it always seem to refer to whoever you happen to disagree with? 

For their sins Dorian and Ian read Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics by Matthew Goodwin and pick apart the case against the so-called “new elite".

Reading list:

Matthew Goodwin - Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics

Charles Wright Mills - The Power Elite

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast

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In a first for Origin Story, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt focus on a living figure: the ubiquitous and divisive richest man in the world, Elon Musk.

In the past two years the public perception of Musk has changed dramatically, from Time's Man of the Year and “real-life Iron Man" to radicalised right-wing troll and destroyer of Twitter. Ian and Dorian trace his journey from sci-fi obsessed child prodigy in Apartheid-era South Africa to dotcom entrepreneur to the self-appointed techno-messiah at the helm of SpaceX and Tesla, and ask what happened to the man who said he wanted to save the world. They discuss what his career says about the arc of Silicon Valley and 21st-century capitalism, the cult of technocracy and the dangers of believing your own hype.

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

• “He doesn’t seem that interested in money. The choices he’s made have not been your regular ‘rich guy’ choices.” – Dorian Lynskey
• “On Twitter some of the disinformation has been morally abysmal. You think, how could you be a person who would even write these words?” – Ian Dunt
• "He said it was the duty of the educated to reproduce so ‘we don’t devolve into a not very literate, theocratic and unenlightened future.’ It’s low-level eugenics.” — Dorian Lynskey

Reading list:

Eric Berger – Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX

Agustin Ferrari Braun – The Elon Musk Experience: Celebrity Management in Financialised Capitalism

David S. Kidder – The Startup Playbook

Hamish McKenzie – Insane Mode: How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil

Ashlee Vance – Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future

Douglas Coupland, ‘The smartest person in any room anywhere:’ in defence of Elon Musk, The Observer, 2021

Tad Friend, Plugged In, The New Yorker, 2009

Jordan Liles – What We Know About Elon Musk and the Emerald Mine Rumor, Snopes, 2022

Linette Lopez, Elon Musk Doesn’t Care About You, Business Insider, 2018

David J Roth, Burning Down the House, Defector, 2023

Neil Strauss – Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow, Rolling Stone, 2017

Matthew Sweet, Why Jeff Bezos and Elon’s Musk real business inspiration is science-fiction, The Times, 2021

The Elon Musk Show, BBC documentary, 2022

I Do Not like Elon Musk Very Much, Behind the Bastards podcast

Elon Musk: The Techno Shaman, Decoding the Gurus podcast

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast 

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In another two-parter, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt break down the long, THORNY history of Zionism. In part two, the horror of the Holocaust persuades the international community to mandate a Jewish state in Palestine, with the surprising endorsement of Stalin, but Zionism remains divided. 

In the year of Israel’s 75th anniversary, Ian and Dorian discuss how successive governments lost the left and courted the right, what happened to Theodor Herzl’s utopian vision, and what people really mean when they say they are anti-Zionist.

Hear the next episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

• "In 1948 Israel is one of the most popular countries in the world, perhaps the only country supported by both sides of the Cold War." – Dorian Lynskey
• "Ultimately if you restrict Zionism to the oldest idea of a homeland for Jews for safety and identity, that is a really provocative, radical and interesting idea.” – Ian Dunt

Reading list:

Steven Beller – Herzl

Lenni Brenner – Zionism in the Age of Dictators

Walter Laqueur – A History of Zionism

Alex Ryvchin – Zionism: The Concise History

Avi Shlaim – The Iron Wall

Michael Stanislawski – Zionism: A Very Short Introduction

Melvin J. Urofsky – American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust

Jeff Walker – The Revisionists and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism

Geoffrey Wheatcroft – Churchill’s Shadow

Paul Bogdanor’s critique of Lenni Brenner

https://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/

The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, by Shlomo Avineri

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  

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In another two-parter, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt break down the long thorny history of Zionism. 

In part one, covering the 1890s to the 1930s, they explain how Theodor Herzl single handedly created a movement for a Jewish nation, Chaim Weizmann won over Churchill and Balfour, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky sowed the seeds of Likud. Utopian dreams wrestle with hard-nosed pragmatism as the Zionists clash with the world’s great powers, and each other, about what a Jewish nation should be. 

Hear Part Two right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

• “Herzl didn’t see the Holocaust coming but he was a realist about the durability of antisemitism.” — Dorian Lynskey
• It’s a very communistic, very socialistic, very politically radical community that ends up in Palestine.” — Ian Dunt
• “At the time of Herzl’s death, only about one per cent of the world’s Jews were Zionists.” — Dorian Lynskey

Reading list:

Steven Beller – Herzl

Lenni Brenner – Zionism in the Age of Dictators

Walter Laqueur – A History of Zionism

Alex Ryvchin – Zionism: The Concise History

Avi Shlaim – The Iron Wall

Michael Stanislawski – Zionism: A Very Short Introduction

Melvin J. Urofsky – American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust

Jeff Walker – The Revisionists and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism

Geoffrey Wheatcroft – Churchill’s Shadow

Paul Bogdanor’s critique of Lenni Brenner:

https://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/

The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, by Shlomo Avineri

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast 

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In part two of the story of climate change denial Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey take a closer look at the techniques of the “merchants of doubt" who took the denial of man made global warming into the mainstream. Ian tells the real story behind 2009’s phoney scandal “Climategate”, while Dorian reads Michael Crichton’s crank thriller State of Fear and watches the controversial Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle to explain how denial became a kind of conspiracy theory.

A tale of wild claims, false balance, scientists under siege and the giant mess that the deniers have left behind.

Hear the next episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

• “It’s the most malicious, cynical, unrepresentative assault on good science that you can imagine” – Ian Dunt
• "It’s apparently a conspiracy between corrupt scientists, hippies, neo-Marxists and Margaret Thatcher. I would love to have been at the meetings." – Dorian Lynskey
• “Science operates within doubt, that’s how it moves forward” – Ian Dunt

Reading List: 

Michael Crichton – State of Fear

Ross Gelbspan – The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s Threatened Climate

Clive Hamilton – Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change

Bjorn Lomborg – The Skeptical Environmentalist

Chris Mooney – The Republican War on Science

Thomas Gale Moore – Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway – Merchants of Doubt

Nathaniel Rich – Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change

Peter Stott – Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial

The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhCQv5tNsQ

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  

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This time: Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey try to cool their tempers as they take on climate change denial. They trace denial’s journey from fossil-fuel lobbyists and neoliberal think tanks into the heart of the mainstream media and lay out the dire consequences.

In this first part Ian and Dorian discuss how global warming grew from a minor nineteenth-century hypothesis into the consensus scientific position by the eco-conscious 1970s. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House and even Margaret Thatcher was worried about carbon emissions. Starting in 1988, though, contrarian scientists, lobbyists and right-wing politicians weaponised scepticism to ensure that nothing was done about it. Also: how discredited panics about overpopulation and a new ice age helped to fuel the politics of denial.

Conspiracy theories, culture wars, pseudo-science and media credulity come together in the story of one of the greatest scandals of modern times.

Hear Part Two right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Tickets for the Origin Story live show are available now: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ZwCihZbENZ

• “It is extraordinary how far back this goes…there’s cross-party recognition of man-made climate change in the 1960’s.” – Ian Dunt
• “It’s incredible that the Clean Air Act actually makes global warming worse.” – Dorian Lynskey
• “It’s the same technique as McCarthy, used again and again.” – Ian Dunt

Reading List: 

Michael Crichton – State of Fear

Ross Gelbspan – The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s Threatened Climate

Clive Hamilton – Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change

Bjorn Lomborg – The Skeptical Environmentalist

Chris Mooney – The Republican War on Science

Thomas Gale Moore – Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway – Merchants of Doubt

Nathaniel Rich – Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change

Peter Stott – Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial

The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhCQv5tNsQ

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast 

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Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey pick up the story of nuclear war in the 1950s with the arrival of the H-bomb, and travel from the deadly face-off the Cuban Missile Crisis to the theory of nuclear winter and the place of nuclear weapons in a post-Cold War world.

Kennedy and Khrushchev contemplate the abyss, Ronald Reagan frets about Armageddon, and Dr Strangelove brings the twisted psychology of nuclear deterrence to the screen. Plus the dark allure of the Cobalt Bomb, the Doomsday Machine that never existed.

It’s a story of threats, war games and hair-raising close shaves. Did the strategists get it right in the end or were we just very lucky?

Listen to next week’s episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod

• “In the US there was a recognition over and over by presidents stating…we know that if we fire, we get fired back on.” – Ian Dunt
• “(the Cuban Missile Crisis) brought the world to the abyss of destruction and the end of mankind.” – Robert Kennedy
• “Distrust almost destroyed the world” – Dorian Lynskey

Reading List: 

Luis Alvarez – Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist 

Martin Amis – Einstein’s Monsters 

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin – American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer 

David C. Cassidy – J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century 

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn 

Herman Kahn – On Thermonuclear War 

William Lanouette – Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard 

William L. Laurence – Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb 

Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk - Indefensible Weapons 

Ronald Reagan – An American Life 

Jonathan Schell – The Fate of the Earth 

P.D. Smith – Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon 

H.G. Wells – The World Set Free 

The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, by Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast 

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This time: the ‘genocide machine’ – nuclear war. With Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer on its way and anxieties about Putin’s nuclear arsenal in the air, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey take us through how the human race learned to live with the first weapon that could potentially spell global annihilation.

From the invention of the atomic bomb in a novel by HG Wells to the triumph of the Manhattan Project and the horror of Hiroshima, a modern Pandora’s Box opens. Einstein calls his role in the story his “one great mistake”, Oppenheimer says he has blood on his hands, and an anxious world wonders if it will be blown up tomorrow.

This one has the lot: fear, guilt, paranoia and a glimpse of the end of the world.

Listen to Part 2 right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

• “It wasn’t just a weapon. It’s an angry god. It’s Godzilla.” – Dorian Lynskey
• “The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish… The atomic bomb has spelled [these words] out for all to understand.” – J Robert Oppenheimer   
• “There should be a statue of Vasili Arkhipov in every town in the world. His refusal to fire stopped a nuclear war.” – Ian Dunt

Reading List: 

Luis Alvarez – Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist 

Martin Amis – Einstein’s Monsters 

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin – American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer 

David C. Cassidy – J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century 

Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn 

Herman Kahn – On Thermonuclear War 

William Lanouette – Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard 

William L. Laurence – Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb 

Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk - Indefensible Weapons 

Ronald Reagan – An American Life 

Jonathan Schell – The Fate of the Earth 

P.D. Smith – Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon 

H.G. Wells – The World Set Free 

The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, by Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels

The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  

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What’s the difference between atheism, agnosticism, secularism and deism? What does it stand for? Can it explain the world while also satisfying the need for meaning and community? Was totalitarianism the monstrous zenith of atheism or just a substitute religion?

Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Percy Shelley, Albert Camus, Richard Dawkins and more feature in the story of the fight for the right not to believe in God.

Listen to next week’s episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

• “Every day around the world it is incalculable the amount of damage done by religions saying; you can’t go there, you can’t marry them, you can’t say that.” – Ian Dunt
• “Declaring oneself an atheist is still a bold claim.” – Dorian Lynskey
• “It’s quite a humbling experience to think it’s taken us 1,500 years to get back to the position we were in in 300AD.” – Ian Dunt

Reading List:  

Julian Baggini – Atheism: A Very Short Introduction 

David Berman – A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell 

Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus 

John Gray – Seven Types of Atheism 

Christopher Hitchens – God Is Not Great 

Christopher Hitchens (ed.) – The Portable Atheist 

Susan Jacoby – Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism 

Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Necessity of Atheism 

James Thrower – A Short History of Western Atheism 

Tim Whitmarsh – Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Episode art by James Parrett. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  

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This time: part 2 of their Winston Churchill deconstruction. The pair chronicle the turbulent decade that defined Churchill's political legacy. From Munich and his unexpected elevation to power, from the Bengal Famine to victory over Hitler, his surprise defeat in the 1945 election and his long, gloomy decline, they look at a life which still casts a shadow over Britain. And they even read Boris Johnson’s Churchill book, so you don’t have to.

Churchill craved greatness. Did he live up to his ideal? There’s only one way to find out…

Listen to next week’s episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

• “I think what he did was primarily journalism, rather than being a prime minister.” – Ian Dunt
• “People think they can look at Churchill like a lifestyle guru they can replicate without the nuance.” – Dorian Lynskey 
• “Churchill personifies the European confusion that has lasted in this country to the present day” – Ian Dunt

Reading List:

Churchill by Roy Jenkins

The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson

Churchill: Military Genius or Menace? By Stephen Napier

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks

Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts

Oblivion or Glory: 1921 and the Making of Winston Churchill by David Stafford

Churchill’s Shadow by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Free Thinking: Churchill's Reputation – BBC Radio 3

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast 

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This time: Winston Churchill is caricatured as either a bigoted villain or a stainless hero. Is he neither… or both? Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt take on a Churchillian task: to avoid reducing the legacy of Britain’s war leader into a simple binary. 

In part one they look at Churchill’s complicated childhood, his military adventures, his surprisingly progressive time as Home Secretary, his role in the Gallipoli disaster and his journey from the Tories to the Liberals and back again, leaving him on the brink of the 1930s. And they weigh up the allegations against him, from racism to sending troops to fire on striking miners at Tonypandy. Between the myths and the countermyths there’s a fascinating mess of a man.

Get Part Two of our Churchill exploration right now – and all of our episodes a week early – when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

• “Yes, he is a racist imperialist warmonger. He’s also the most important antifascist of human history.” – Ian Dunt
• “He had no followers. No ‘Churchillites’. Nobody in politics would sacrifice a thing for him.” – Dorian Lynskey 
• “At this point he’s Woke Winston. He's a liberal, supports votes for women, nationalising the railways and restrictions on monopolies.” – Dorian Lynskey 

Reading List:

Churchill by Roy Jenkins

Walking With Destiny by Andrew Roberts

The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson

Churchill: Military Genius or Menace? By Stephen Napier

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks 

Oblivion or Glory: 1921 and the Making of Winston Churchill by David Stafford

Churchill’s Shadow by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Free Thinking: Churchill's Reputation – BBC Radio 3

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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Seasoned spotters of bad faith arguments Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt examine a gala week of political nonsense, obfuscation, straw-manning and plain old bullshit.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In this first episode: Few newspaper editors wield as much power as the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre. Feared and courted by politicians, he’s imposed his singular vision of Britain on successive governments – while sometimes stretching the law in pursuit of justice. But what makes Dacre tick? What does he want? And how might this epic career end?

Like this excerpt? Hear the complete episode on all platforms right now here. And subscribe for new episodes every Monday.

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Episode One: Every Day Is Like D-Day. How did Britain’s dreams of a new postwar world go unfulfilled? And what does that mean for us today? In the first of a new documentary series from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, Ros Taylor looks at the legacy of the War itself. Ιdeals of the Blitz Spirit and dreams of wartime heroism still shape everything from pop culture and entertainment to the Brexit debate. But the truth of the War is more complex and less comforting. What will it take for us to see the Second World War – and ourselves – clearly?

•  “If you’re going to have a foundation myth it might as well be one where you destroy Nazism.” – Al Murray

•  “If the response to air raid wasn’t stoicism there was a fear that morale would break down.” – Lucy Noakes

•  “The Keep Calm And Carry On poster was designed for a type of war that never arrived.” – Henry Irvine

•  “Britain went into the war not alone but at the head of the world’s biggest empire… When Britain went to war, so did vast part of the world.” – Lucy Noakes

Written and presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Jade Bailey. Voiceovers by Imogen Robertson. Original music by Dubstar. Lead producer: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Jam Tomorrow is a Podmasters production.

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Dorian Lynskey and Ian delve back in time from the printing press and its early “paper bullets” via the surprisingly racy life of John Stuart Mill right up to the First Amendment of the US Constitution and our current panics over woke, hate speech and cancel culture. How did shouting “free speech” become an instant way to shut down debate?

Support Origin Story to get extra episodes and more at https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod

• “If somebody tries to make their point about freedom of speech by using a cartoon on the internet, they’ve probably simplified it a bit.” – Dorian Lynskey
• “There is a choice not between order and liberty, it is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.” – Justice Robert H Jackson
• “The whole story of free speech is the story of doubt.” – Ian Dunt

Reading List

From Ian

Jacob Mchangama – Free Speech: A Global History From Socrates To Social Media

John Rees – The Leveller Revolution

John Stuart Milll – On Liberty

The Complete Works Of Harriet Taylor Mill – Editor Jo Ellen Jacobs

Richard Reeve – John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand

From Dorian

Anthony Lewis — Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment

Suzanne Nossel — Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All

Nat Hentoff – Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other

Stanley Fish — There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech

Samuel P Nelson — Beyond the First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech and Pluralism

Karl Popper — The Open Society and Its Enemies

Flemming Rose — Tyranny of Silence

PE Moskowitz — The Case Against Free Speech

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic — Must We Defend Nazis?: Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy

Henry Louis Gates Jr — Let Them Talk

George Orwell — Freedom of the Park

Herbert Marcuse — Repressive Tolerance

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Support Origin Story to get extra episodes and more at https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod

Thank you to drugs expert Steve Rolles for his assistance with this episode.

• “This is about as profound a policy failure as any you can find anywhere on Earth.” – Ian Dunt
• “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face-to-face with the monster Marijuana he would drop dead of fright.” – Harry J Anslinger, Federal Bureau of Narcotics director
• “When they say ‘war on drugs’ what they mean is, war on some things we don’t like.” – Ian Dunt
• “By accident or design, the drugs war had evolved into a race war.” – Mike Gray, author of Drug Crazy
• “Drugs function like pornography or the military do with technology. They drive forward rapid change.” – Ian Dunt

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get next week’s episode right now when you back us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod

• “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when told they are superior.” – Kurt Vonnegut
• “Except in struggle there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.” – Filippo Tomasso Marinetti
• “The fist is the synthesis of our theory.” – Italian fascist, 1920
• “Germans would even dream of the state interfering in their lives. The Nazis had infiltrated even their sleep.” – Ian
• “You can’t have a violent rebirth without the sense that you’ve been oppressed and put upon.” – Dorian

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Help Ian and Dorian develop Origin Story by backing us on Patreon. You’ll get the show early and without ads, plus extra good stuff too.

• “Wait… this word that I’ve been using all of my life, nobody knows what it means?” – Dorian Lynskey
• “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” – Jonathan Swift
• “Satire tells you more about its era than any other literature.” – John R Clarke
• “Laughter is a response to frustration, just as tears are. And it solves nothing, as tears do.” – Kurt Vonnegut
• “Audiences like to think satire is doing something but mostly it’s making them satisfied – rather than angry, which is what they should be.” – Tom Lehrer

Picture: The Thick Of It, BBC

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Get next week’s episode right now, and help Ian and Dorian develop the series, when you back Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod

• “Culture war is not about victory. It’s about perpetual rolling grievance.”
• “The rhetoric of culture war is absolutist. Your opponents are the absolute worst. They are morally evil and must be stopped.”
• “The Republicans manage to unhook class conflict from economics and took it to culture. Which was genius.”

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Will Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey be won over to Rand’s theory of Objectivism by her surprisingly strong writing? Who enjoyed The Fountainhead? Is Rand a fascist? Think for yourself. No-one can make up your mind except YOU.

Get next week’s episode right now and help moochers Ian and Dorian develop the series when you back Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod

• “When you look at the ruins of Rand’s life, it’s a moral parable of the danger of believing in complete systems.” – Ian Dunt
• “You can see why millionaires like her, but there’s also a huge appeal to losers… to people who want to be Howard Roarke and never will.” – Dorian Lynskey
• “Her version of capitalism is exactly what you’d expect from a young old girl trapped in Communist Russia, watching Hollywood movies.” – Ian Dunt
• “For Rand the idea that the world is complex is a scam that the second-handers pull on you.” – Dorian Lynskey
• “Atlas Shrugged reads like the novel Lex Luthor would have written.” – Ian Dunt

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Neoliberalism: A Reading List

From Ian:

Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiment by Adam Smith. Both of these can be read in their own right, they're not as tough-going as you think

History of Economic Thought by Lionel Robbins. One of the greatest economics books ever written. Or spoken rather, given that they're basically transcripts of Robbins’ lectures at the LSE. Masterful. 

The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. Quite completely insane. Rather fun.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World by Adam Tooze. Arguably the best single account of the financial crash. Can be tough going, but it’s worth it.

From Dorian:

Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics by Daniel Stedman Jones. It gets a little dry towards the end but it’s still a valuable attempt to ground an intellectual history of a movement in the combative personalities of the people who created it.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey. Does what it says on the tin from a left-wing perspective. He’s not a fan.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Her thesis might be overstated but Klein shows how the economists of the Chicago School teamed up with authoritarian leaders such as Pinochet to turn entire countries into experimental laboratories for neoliberalism.

A reading list and whistle-stop history from the academic and author of The Limits of Neoliberalism, William Davies. 

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• “What you see here is the fetishisation of economics above all other concerns. An anatomised view of humanity as economic agents and very little else.” – Ian 
• “One of the big problems with the term neoliberalism is that it gets applied equally to Barack Obama and General Pinochet.” – Dorian 
• “Friedman didn’t even believe in certificates for doctors. He thought the market would protect everyone. So this guy chopped up your auntie? That’s OK, the market realises he should no longer practice…” – Ian 
• “These guys embarked on a 20 year process of legitimising these ideas. They trained people so that when things start to go wrong in the late 60s, they were ready.” – Dorian 
• “Sometimes Hayek sounds like he’s having a religious experience. The market is unknowable. It’s almost like it really is the hand of God.” – Ian 

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Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Ian and Dorian investigate another world-changing concept you thought you knew. 

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Woke: A Reading List

From Dorian:

The War of the Words by Sarah Dunant. Fascinating 90s collection of essays about political correctness from writers across the political spectrum. We are still having many of the same arguments.

Debating PC by Paul Berman. As above but American.

Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture by Geoffrey Hughes. A serious attempt at a history of PC.

The Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes. Extremely opinionated and entertaining 1994 polemic against censors and heresy-hunters on both left and right.

The Myth of Political Correctness by John Wilson. This forensic examination of the original anti-PC backlash reveals how many of the key case studies were exaggerated or invented, and the role that right wing think tanks played in drumming them up. Sounds familiar.

The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Of historical interest only. The cranky jeremiad that became a colossal bestseller and kickstarted America’s obsession with political correctness.

And from Ian:

Wake Up by Piers Morgan. Don’t read this.

Welcome To The Woke Trials: How Identity Killed Progressive Politics by Julie Burchill. Don’t read this.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Heidt and Greg Lukianoff. Don’t read this, but if you’re really going to insist on reading one of these, I guess make it this one.

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• “Even racists seem to want to appropriate MLK. Maybe if you’re woke and dead you’re OK?” – Dorian Lynskey

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Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey and Alex Rees. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. 

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Join Dorian and Ian on a senses-shattering odyssey that takes in socialist Superman, juvenile delinquents, the polyamorist roots of Wonder Woman, the Nazis (again), the great lost horror comics of the 50s, Stan Lee, how Churchill and FDR inspired Spider-Man… and which one of the X-Men was based on Menachem Begin. 

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Superheroes: A Reading List

From Ian:

American Comics by Jeremy Dauber. Really comprehensive and full of love for the genre. But maybe a bit too comprehensive. Dauber covers absolute everything, so it can feel a bit too thinly spread.

The Ten Cent Plague: The great comic book scare and how it changed America, by David Hajdu. Absolutely masterful retelling of the 50s moral outrage against comics. Impeccably researched, brilliantly written, and full of striking insights.

Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison. If you were to read these three together, even as a non-comics fan, you would get a really good crash course in the different approaches taken to the genre since the 80s.

From Dorian:

Supergods by Grant Morrison. One of the all-time great comic-book writers has also the written the most entertaining and provocative history of the superhero.

Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe. Essential reading for anyone interested in the people who built the Marvel universe. Howe has all the stories. I’ve given this book as a gift more than once.

All Of The Marvels by Douglas Wolk. The Marvel Universe as explained by somebody who has read all 27,000 comic books. While Howe covers the creators, Wolk digs into the evolution of the characters and ideas.

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman. Juicy and unflinching biography of Mr Marvel.

The Comic Book Heroes by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones. Dated but interesting 1985 encyclopaedia of superheroes.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. New Yorker writer’s eye-opening history of the love triangle that gave us Wonder Woman.

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“Even by thinking about superheroes, you’re thinking about politics. What is politics about but power and how you use it?” — Dorian

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Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Help Ian and Dorian move NOT LEFT, NOT RIGHT, BUT FORWARD by supporting their Origin Story research on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod

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Centrism: A Reading List

From Ian:

The Oxford History of the French Revolution by William Doyle. The single best all-in-one history of the French revolution. And one of my favourite history books of all time – a rare instance in which the author combines pace, thoroughness and impeccable research.

John Stuart Mill, Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves. Decent, if slightly pedestrian biography of the great liberal philosopher.

John Maynard Keynes trilogy by Robert Skidelsky. The best work on Keynes.

The Third Way by Anthony Giddens. Nowhere near as good as it should be, nor as I expected it to be. Surprisingly vacuous.

From Dorian:

The Vital Centre by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Fascinating post-war argument for the importance of the radical centre

Trotsky on centrism 

Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics by John Avlon. Solid history of those who sought to occupy the centre of American politics.

Toward a Radical Middle by Renata Adler. New Yorker writer’s 1969 manifesto for radical centrism in a fractious time.

Life in the Centre by Roy Jenkins. The arch-centrist’s juicy memoir.

Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann. A first-draft history of New Labour from 1997.

Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution. Satisfying BBC documentary series on iPlayer, with contributions from all the key players.

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• “When centrism is so hard to define, like nailing jelly to the wall, you have to ask does it even deserve to be called an ism at all?” – Ian
• “Trotsky says Centrism is parasitic, opportunistic, vain, uninterested in theory, and harder on the left than the right… and those criticisms are still levelled at centrists today.” – Dorian
• “The thing is, Centrism is often popular with voters but unpopular with people who are very interested in politics. Because it’s not passionate.” – Ian 
• “I myself am an ideologue, an ideologue for liberalism, so it’s possible I feel threatened by something which essentially isn’t ideological.” – Ian 

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Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Alex Rees. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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And chillingly, they explain why the tinfoil fringe isn’t just on the fringe any more. 

Help Ian and Dorian DO THEIR RESEARCH by supporting Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod

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Conspiracy Theory: A Reading List

From Dorian:

Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch. Sharp and readable overview of the history and psychology of conspiracy theories.

The United States of Paranoia by Jesse Walker. A provocative history which argues that paranoia permeates mainstream American politics, not just the fringes.

Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay. A reporter’s journey through contemporary conspiracy theories.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter. This brilliant diagnosis of the conspiracist mentality still holds up.

The Hitler Conspiracies by Richard J Evans. Evans uses case studies including the Reichstag fire and the stab-in-the-back myth to illustrate the importance of conspiracy theories to the Nazi era. Very good on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the difference between event theories and systemic theories.

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The classic novel of American paranoia and the only Pynchon novel you can read in less than a week.

The Coming Storm. Superbly reported BBC podcast series, presented by Gabriel Gatehouse, explores the 90s roots of QAnon.

On JFK the movie:

JFK: The Book of the Film by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar. The heavily annotated screenplay plus reams of press coverage of Stone’s movie, much of it hostile.

Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi. Elephantine takedown of every single JFK conspiracy theory. There are no survivors.

Christopher Hitchens on JFK and conspiracy theories in general.

And from Ian:

Conspiracy Theories by Quassim Cassam. The case for a political analysis. Worthwhile, but flawed.

The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories by Jan-Willem van Prooijen. Decent little overview of the psychological work into the area. Also worthwhile, also flawed.

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• “The very fact that it’s not proper scholarship makes conspiracy theory so much more exciting to read — and satisfying to write.” – Dorian
• “JFK is the most powerful argument I’ve seen yet that you should be able to sue for libel after you’re dead.” – Ian
• “According to Hitler, the fact that the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion had been called fake proved they were true…” – Dorian
• “Certain people believe that the CIA invented conspiracy theory in order to discredit people who criticised the Warren Commission. So that means that conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory…” – Dorian

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Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey and Alex Rees. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. . Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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