A Point of View

Sara Wheeler reflects on the valuable perspective offered by out-of-date guide books. They shed light on the life of the early traveler - advised to pack an iron bedstead and a portable bath tub - and reveal how destinations may have evolved or be frozen in time.

'The chief question I ask the old guides is whether the spirit of a place - the genius loci - can survive the upheaval of the years. Is the spirit of the place immutable or can it change?' asks Sara.

Producer: Sheila Cook

In the last of his essays reflecting on America's search for meaning, James Naughtie recalls a meeting a year ago with General Michael Hayden - the former head of the CIA - who, without fanfare, expressed concern for the future of US Democracy.

'I don’t know that we’ll come through this,’ he said. ‘Right now I think it’s about 50-50.’

James reflects on past presidents, such as Jimmy Carter, and his dedication to the promotion and protection of democracy around the world, and compares it to the present, as we enter the final days of the 2024 campaign.

What might a tight result might mean in the coming months? 'The system will be on trial,' he writes, recalling the legal battles over the 'hanging chads' of 2000 in which the fate of the nation was decided on just 537 votes.

Producer: Sheila Cook

James Naughtie argues that a common American identity will be achieved - one day - despite the heightened political rhetoric around immigration, that is making it one of the most contentious issues in this year's presidential election.

He recalls Ronald Reagan's 'homely evocation of an American character'. For Reagan, James says, the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses', had real contemporary power.

For many Republicans today, he says, it's a very different story.

But he sees signs of change. On a recent visit to the US border in Arizona, he met a 'cattleman of resolute conservative views in his 80s', who tells James that although he's fed up with armed drug runners using his land, he believes most people cutting through the fence are 'good people, in search of new lives'.

'The huddled masses will be absorbed... eventually', James writes. 'But the question right now is how much damage will be done in getting there - to the principles of their democracy, and perhaps to their precious belief in themselves.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

From the description of Alexander Hamilton as 'the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar', to Lyndon Johnson's depiction of Gerald Ford as a man who 'couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time', James Naughtie argues that American political language has long been teeming with insult.

He recalls as a student in 1974, queuing at the back door of the White House one evening and coming away with transcripts of the Watergate tapes, full of 'expletive deleted' notes 'that blacked out various Nixon explosions.'

But in our own time, James says, something quite different is at play. The language of politics today, he says, 'instead of being punctuated by insults, it's become enslaved to them. And the more exaggerated political language becomes, the more it is devalued - because it has lost its true purpose.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

James Naughtie presents the first of four personal essays exploring America's 'wild search for meaning' in the run-up to November's presidential election.

From the freezing waters of Nantucket Sound in Moby Dick, via sunken levees of the Mississippi and the railroad blues of New Orleans, to the ‘raucous expeditions into an underworld of…richly wounded humanity’ in contemporary crime novels, James contemplates this moment in the United States through its fiction.

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Adam Gopnik revisits two famous American essays from the 1960s and finds a remarkably contemporary vision - and one 'that seems to have an application to our own time and its evident crisis.'

He couples Richard Hofstadter's 1964 essay, 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' with Daniel Boorstin's 1962 classic on 'image' and America's tenuous relationship with facts.

'It is the admixture of Hofstadter's political paranoia with Boorstin's cult of publicity,' writes Adam, 'that makes Trump so very different from previous political figures.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

From Kamala Harris' 'word salads' to her views about wealth redistribution, Zoe Strimpel finds little to like in a Harris presidency.

But it's her views on Israel that Zoe finds particularly hard to stomach.

'In those halcyon days of my youth,' says Zoe, 'our family's concerns that the leader of the free world protect Israel was normal, uncontroversial and, with Clinton and Bush at the helm, not a particular worry... But Kamala's hazy demands for instant deals and ceasefires,' she writes, 'are like nails on a chalkboard to me.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong

With the help of certain Conservative politicians, form number 48879-2039-876/WC and a rabbit hutch, Howard Jacobson takes a wry look at the advantages of a nanny state.

Producer: Adele Armstrong

Three of Megan Nolan's close friends have given birth in the past year. Another two are doing IVF. And anyone who can afford to, Megan says, is freezing their eggs.

Megan reflects on how attitudes to having children have changed profoundly in Ireland in the space of a generation.

Producer: Adele Armstrong

As America gears up for next week's debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Sarah Dunant looks at the seismic shift in sexual politics in the US since Trump debated with Hillary Clinton.

'Looming, threatening, even the word stalking was used' to describe that encounter, Sarah remembers.

But when this presidential debate gets underway in the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time, Sarah thinks it will be a very different story.

'An encounter worth losing sleep for,' she reckons.

Producer: Adele Armstrong