TALKING POLITICS

After another tumultuous week, we look back on the fall-out from the second debate and the Trump tape. Plus: who is Sidney Blumenthal? We discuss the paranoid style in American politics.

Theresa May says she will make a success of Brexit - but what does that mean? What might happen economically or politically to blow her off course? Plus what we learned from the VP debate, and we talk about politics in Colombia - are there wider lessons from the extraordinary vote on ending the civil war there?

24 hours on, we know Trump lost the debate, but what does that mean any more? We consider whether the old rules still apply to presidential politics and we ask what is going on inside Donald's head. Plus, Jeremy Corbyn has been re-elected leader of the Labour Party, but is it still the same party?

Yuval Noah Harari talks about what technology means for the future of the human race and the future of politics. If Facebook knows better than you do how you are going to vote, what's left for democracy? The author of Sapiens and Homo Deus on consciousness, intelligence and Donald Trump.

Corbyn! Trump! Brexit! Politics has never been more unpredictable, more alarming or more interesting. From next week (22ND September 2016), a brand new podcast called TALKING POLITICS will be launched to try to make sense of it all. Each week, David Runciman will talk to the most interesting people around: novelists, comedians, historians, philosophers - and even a few politicians - and ask them what they think is going on. Democracy is feeling the strain everywhere. What might happen next? How bad could it get? As the crazy stuff happens, TALKING POLITICS will be on it. It’s the political conversation everyone is having: please join us.

David Runciman talks to Glen Rangwala on the day after the publication of the Chilcot report, about what's in it and what's missing. Glen exposed the 'dodgy dossier' at the time of the Iraq war and is a leading expert on the politics of the region. They discuss what are the real lessons to learn from Chilcot and why the problems extend beyond a few individuals. They also examine Tony Blair's claims about what Iraq would be like if Saddam were still there. Plus, was Jeremy Corbyn the right person to apologise?

On the morning Gove joins the race (and just before Boris drops out) we try to catch up with the news. The panel discusses the civil war in the Labour party, the Theresa May project, and what the referendum means for politics in Northern Ireland. We also take a step back to ask how serious things now are: just how bad could it get?

The panel reassembles on the morning after the night before to start sifting through the implications of this momentous decision: What does it mean for Labour? For UKIP? For Scotland? For the rest of Europe? And why did the betting markets get it so wrong? More next week.

Now we know it's Trump, David Runciman and the panel reassembles to discuss what comes next. How ugly will the contest with Hillary get? Will Cleveland make it through July? Plus we talk the UK elections this week and the ongoing saga of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. How can they get rid of him?

Democracies ancient and modern: just how far have we come from the ancient Athenian idea of democracy and what can we do to get back to it? Are we still really democracies at all? We speak to classicist and historian Paul Cartledge about what the ancient Greeks meant by democracy and what it should still mean to us. Plus we ask the panel for their views about the current state of democracy in the age of Trump and Brexit: how bad is it? In this bumper final episode we also get their predictions for the US presidential election and the EU referendum.