David and Chris Clark continue their conversation to explore how the great powers stumbled into war in the summer of 1914. Could the Austrians have backed away from war? Could Russia, Germany or France have de-escalated the crisis? Why in the end did Britain feel obliged to join in? How might the disaster have been avoided?

David discusses Michel Houellebecq’s explosive political and intellectual satire Submission (2015). Published seven years before the French Presidential election of 2022 it imagines what might happen if that contest were won by the Muslim Brotherhood candidate. Does the book deserve its toxic reputation? Is it an attack on French politics, religion or academia (or all three)? And how can its miserable narrator be so insightful and so repulsive all at the same time?

David talks about Philip Roth’s counterfactual fictional masterpiece The Plot Against America (2004), which imagines an alternative America after the election in 1940 of the fascist-sympathising Charles Lindbergh as President. Is the book really a prophecy of politics in the age of Trump? Who are the true heroes and villains in this story? And what does the plight of the fictional Roth family in Newark, NJ, tell us about the shadow history of America?

Historian Robert Saunders, our guide to past UK general elections, talks about one of his favourite political fictions: George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, set around an election that took place after the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832. Robert explains how Eliot captured the chaos and possibility of a new kind of politics and how a book set 200 years ago still speaks to our political imaginations today.

A bonus episode for our elections series on the epochal contest of 1924, the last time one of the major parties got wiped out never to return. David talks to historian Robert Saunders about the turbulent first half of the 1920s, with four prime ministers, three general elections, red scares and political landslides. How did Labour get into and out of government? How did the Liberals destroy themselves? How did the Tories pick up the pieces? And what are the parallels with the turbulent first half of the 2020s?

David answers your questions about the books and authors in the latest part of our fictions series: How good-looking are the characters in Middlemarch meant to be? Whatever happened to the disestablishment of the Church of England? If everyone is gay, where do the women in the film version of Jekyll and Hyde come from? And is Ayn Rand really the presiding spirit behind the current US Supreme Court? Plus, for these authors and their characters: Kiss, Marry, Kill?