Joel Whitney’s book Finks is a seminal book about American intellectuals and American security agencies, mainly because it illuminates the real story behind the CIA’s involvement with the founding of a little magazine called The Paris Review which hit the scene in the early 1950s at the height of the Cold War.

In Joel Whitney’s new book Flights, he continues his historical excavations - more stories about writers intellectuals and activists who found themselves in the cross hairs of American security agencies like the CIA and the FBI.

Your host discusses both books with Joel Whitney and the discipline of secret history itself.

Forty years ago in 1984 your host was twelve years old and like George Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, he kept a diary, for the citizens of the future. For this special installment of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything we travel back in time and give this diary a soundtrack. TV commercials, radio spots, movie clips – all sound from 1984 (the year, not the book). Find out what totalitarianism really sounds like.

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We now have many ways to tell the story of America's tilt towards authoritarianism, but for your host one image sums up the whole sordid business: a mashup of Donald Trump and the Marvel comic book character The Punisher. In this episode we talk with Kent Worcester, author of a new cultural history of the Punisher. It's a conversation about America's fascination with, and attraction to, a black and white vision of justice and vengeance.