John Prideaux

speaker

643 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 19 Jun

John Prideaux’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Tocqueville Road Trip: 1. Game of chance · 13 Jun 2026 podcast

And she told me about how she hustled her way up the career ladder, starting in the mid nineteen fifties.

Through a mixture of grit and talent, Barbara rose to become the editor of Bride's magazine in the mid-1960s.

Then, in the early nineteen seventies, she found her own perfect match, Donald Tober.

Donald was a businessman, and the sign of the Sugar Foods Corporation

If you've ever been to an American diner, you probably will have encountered one of their products, small pink sachets of a sugar substitute called Sweeten Low.

I imagine Tocqueville looking slightly bemused at the idea of a Park Avenue fortune based on tiny parcels of not sugar.

But he'd certainly have recognised the democratic forces that made it all possible.

Yes.

From the library where we're talking, a door leads through to another room that Barbara has redone since Donald's death five years ago.

There's a large table covered in trinkets, invitations and photographs.

Barbara has made a shrine to her late husband and to their previous lives.

Looking back, she sees a place of opportunity where wonderful things could happen.

Perhaps never more so than when an actual movie star was in the White House.

That was then, but the present moment feels quite different.

I'm sure that Tockville would see Barbara as a descendant of the New Yorkers he encountered, restless, outgoing, unapologetic about making money and spending it.

But there are also notes in this story that would be new to him, things that he didn't hear from Americans when he was here.

A gnawing sense that the present is worse than the past, and that some newly apparent flaw in American democracy has something to do with it.

A few days before I met with Barbara, Zoran Mamdani was inaugurated.

This is a strange moment for New York, the first time in the city's history that it has elected a socialist mayor.

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