David Runciman has many titles: professor of politics at Cambridge, contributing editor at the London Review of Books, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford. But he is best known as co-host of the popular podcast Talking Politics, which ran from 2016 until March of last year. There he reflected on current affairs in his reassuring Eton baritone: parsing the headlines, never taking too strident a position, throwing softball questions to his guests – from Thomas Piketty to Nick Timothy – and recycling conventional north London wisdom on all the hottest topics of the time: Brexit, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Covid. Meanwhile, in its companion History of Ideas series, the don synopsised the work of canonical thinkers through the ages, providing bite-sized summaries of Hobbes or Hayek that one could digest on one’s morning jog.
All this made for easy listening. It promised analysis that transcended the daily news cycle yet demanded no extra mental effort. Reading Runciman, however, is a somewhat different experience. On the page, his chatty, impressionistic style betrays a lack of intellectual rigour. His attempts to affect nuance (“On the one hand… On the other…”) come across as evasive. And his lordly tone – staying coolly detached when discussing war, inequality or climate breakdown – sounds less like critical distance and more like political quietism. Runciman’s journalistic writing can sometimes thrive off such insouciance, but when he tries to tackle loftier questions, the limits become obvious.
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