Podcasts about Reith Lectures

What a pleasure it was to talk to Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, about the great man himself, who was born four hundred years ago this month. Aubrey is best know for his splendid Brief Lives but he preserved a huge amount of knowledge which historians still rely on. There are many things we only know because of Aubrey—things about people Hobbes and Hooke, Stonehenge, architectural history. We also talked about Janet Malcom, the genre of biography, and modern fiction.HENRY OLIVER: Today I'm talking to Ruth Scurr. Ruth is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, where she specializes in the history of political thought. But more importantly, she is the biographer of John Aubrey, one of my favorite writers, who is celebrating 400 years of his birth this year. Ruth, hello.RUTH SCURR: Hi, Henry.OLIVER: Can you begin by giving us a brief life of John Aubrey?SCURR: So born in 1626, 17th-century antiquarian, collector, early fellow at the Royal Society. Well connected to scientific and the literary circles of his day. Someone who sees himself more as a whetstone: a person who could help sharpen other people's ideas. As a recorder, someone who treasured the details, the minutiae of the lives he encountered, and pass those details on to posterity.He's nonjudgmental, witty, kind, inventive. Very, very sociable. Very good friend. But he's hopeless at self-advancement. Begins his life as a gentleman, but he inherits debts from his father and he can never really achieve financial stability.Never marries, ends up homeless and worried about being arrested for his debts. And he has to sell his precious collection of books periodically through his life to raise some much-needed cash, but he keeps his manuscripts safe. And he does this at the end of his life by putting them into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, afterwards known as the Bodleian, and where they still are today.OLIVER: So how many manuscripts did he save for us?SCURR: Of his own manuscripts or other people's manuscripts?OLIVER: Other people's. Because he was collecting all sorts of precious things.SCURR: Oh, absolutely. He was the person who, when someone died, would go round if he could to their house and ask what was happening about the manuscripts. He's particularly concerned, obviously, with his friends. So he had a close relationship with Robert Hooke and he wanted to make sure that Hooke's many inventions and scientific contributions were recorded.And he has this wonderful line in the life of Hooke where he says, “It's so hard to get people to do right by themselves.” And in his childhood, he had seen the fallout from the dissolution of the monasteries. He'd become very troubled by the habit of using manuscript pages which had been displaced in the dissolution. He saw them being used in schools to cover textbooks. He saw them being used to—or he heard about them at least being used—to wrap up gloves or to create stoppers in bottles. And this really troubled him from, from a very early age.And I think he has another beautiful line where he says after the dissolution of the monasteries, whereas these manuscripts had been kept safe, they flew around like butterflies. And he wanted to catch them and preserve them and to stop people letting the papers and the precious manuscripts of their relatives do the same. So he was very instrumental in rescuing manuscripts, other people's manuscripts. And then fortunately with his own, he knew Ashmole and they had the shared astrology interest.Ashmole was a very different sort of person who basically said to Oxford, look, I'll give you my collections, but there has to be a museum for them. And luckily Aubrey was able to use that museum as a safe place for his own manuscripts.OLIVER: So we know things about Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes and all these other luminaries of the 17th century, thanks to Aubrey. What else do we know, thanks to him?SCURR: We know what Stonehenge looked like in his day because he was a very good draftsman. He drew pictures of Stonehenge. He'd grown up in Wiltshire, he'd known those stones from childhood. He understood that Avebury nearby was a comparable monument, and he took Charles II to see it, and persuaded the king to get the locals to stop breaking up the stones, to reuse the stones, which was the practice.He also made drawings of windows because he was possibly the first person as a historian of architecture to realize that you could date buildings by the style of their windows. So we have those drawings. He was also interested in the history of costume. He did a survey of Surrey, of Wiltshire.So these are all sort of focuses in his manuscripts and people who've used them come to really appreciate how pioneering Aubrey was. But of course he doesn't finish them. He doesn't publish those manuscripts. So it's very easy really to overlook the innovation and the contribution and the wonderful imagination that he had.OLIVER: You mean if he'd published a book, he would have a much bigger reputation?SCURR: Well, I think there's two things. Yes, but in a sense, you know, the Brief Lives have been published after his death in various forms. But I think one of the most engaging things about Aubrey is that he's a modest and self-effacing person. And I already mentioned the idea he had of himself as a whetstone to other people's talents.There aren't that many people—certainly not in my life, maybe there are in yours—but who would effortlessly describe themselves as a whetstone to other people's talents. Most people want to be at the center. They're happy to have clever and literary friends, but they want a place there at the table as well.And Aubrey really was very, very invested in helping other people to do right by themselves, as he said about Hooke. And he very movingly—this is one of the inspirations really for my book that I wrote about him—he spent all that time collating the information about other people's lives. And for his own life, he puts down a few lines, a couple of facts and everything.He says, well, this could be used as the binding of a book. You know, it's sort of waste paper really. So he doesn't write his own life. Other people's lives he's going to convey to posterity. He doesn't see his own life as really being at that level of needing the attention that he gave, for example, to Milton or to Harvey or Hobbes, as you mentioned.OLIVER: He's born the year after Charles I comes to the throne. So he obviously lives through a fairly terrible period of history and very tumultuous, changeable in lots of different ways. The new world, the new learning, new religion, new politics, everything is changing. And he's obsessed with the old ways. How did these historical events—is he reacting against his time? Is he just born in a lucky time in a way?SCURR: So he was a student in Oxford during the Civil War. And you are right. The upheaval is very disturbing for his generation. It means he gets called back from Oxford by his father because it's dangerous to be there. And he's really, really upset by that because, it's like us, when we were students or our students today. You finally get away from your family and there you are in this place with all these exciting peers and access to books that you've never had before or at least to that extent, libraries, et cetera.And suddenly there's a war on and you've got to go home. So there's that disturbance. Then there is the fact that actually he was close to Hobbes. Hobbes actually was a Malmesbury man, so Wiltshire, very near Aubrey. And had come back to visit the school where Hobbes had been, which was where Aubrey was at school. And so they had met in Aubrey's childhood, and then he would've been aware of Hobbes having to go into exile. And then Hobbes coming back, of course. And that's a very important time in his life.And it's not an accident that Hobbes asks Aubrey to write his life because Hobbes knows how careful Aubrey is. And he knows that Aubrey has information that he can convey in the life. So that is really the first life that he writes. And it's different from the others. There's a different sort of origin. And it's after he's done that, that he starts to think, well, actually, you know, I can think of at least 50, 55 other people's lives. And now I've got my hand in, I might start on those as well.So in that period of upheaval there are wonderful stories. Maybe we'll look at some of the Brief Lives, but there's this amazing story that he captures in the life of William Harvey, which is a description of Harvey having been at the battlefield in Edgehill and recording one of the people who had been fighting and wounded, surviving by having the good sense to pull a dead body on top of himself, to keep himself warm on the battlefield. Things like that, which make the war very much alive. This is brutal, this civil war. It's a long time ago and we think we passed over it, but the really brutal reality of war is captured in the Brief Lives through the anecdotes and the stories of that generation that Aubrey preserves.OLIVER: How English is he?SCURR: Well, as opposed to what?OLIVER: Welsh.SCURR: Okay. Well he goes to Wales often and is very interested in Wales. I think he sees himself as English. I think he's very invested in English customs and stories and people. He's not nationalistic in any sense like that. What he's interested in is the inherited ways of living.And he's very interested in language and different dialects. That's one of the other things; he starts to collect different words. He was very aware of the Cornish dialect, for example. So I'd say it's a very decentered England that's rooted in customs, traditions, inherited stories.And there's a big place there for both the future and the past. Huge excitement about The Royal Society, English science, what can be achieved through the sharing of knowledge. But again, Aubrey's not an insular person in that respect. So, he wished he could go on the Grand Tour when he was a student. He would really have loved to have done that. It's one of the things that he actually talked to Harvey about, going and traveling as his contemporaries, for example, John Evelyn did.But Aubrey actually says—this is very typical of Aubrey—that his mother persuaded him out of it. His mother didn't want him going off on the Grand Tour. She was afraid for him. And he regretted it later in life. But it's so typical of Aubrey that he would pay attention to his mother and her anxieties.OLIVER: This interest in the present and the past—so he loves all the history, but he's in the Royal Society. One thing I like in your book is the way he talks about, oh, my grandfather still dresses in the old ways, like he's an Elizabethan, but at the same time he's doing a very sort of Baconian project. He's influenced by Bacon. Is Aubrey a sort of paradox? Does this make sense in a way?SCURR: Only in so far as lots of other people are as well. I was just looking at the Harvey life, and there's a story there about how when Harvey was a student he was meant to be setting sail with some friends. And he's stopped and told, “No, you can't get on this boat. You have to wait.” And he says, “Well, what have I done wrong? Why can't I get on this boat?” He said, “No, honestly, we need to have a word with you. You are not going on the boat.” And then the boat sinks, everyone dies. And this is apparently because the guy who stopped him had a dream that he needed to stop Harvey going. Harvey told Aubrey that story.Harvey also is—as Aubrey sort of slightly inaccurately puts it, is the inventor of the circulation of the blood. And you think, well, that's going a little bit far, perhaps not actually the inventor, but certainly the first person to discover, to understand about circulating blood.So there's another example of someone's life includes, I wouldn't be alive unless somebody had had this premonition and dream that I was about to die. Which is from a completely different world, from the rational, scientific understanding of the body or the other scientific advances that are going on at the time.OLIVER: And Aubrey's happy to just sort of coexist with both of those because of his interest in astrology?SCURR: And not just astrology. He's very interested in astrology and nativities, as he called it. In some of the Brief Lives, you see the sort of recording of the information that would be needed to cast an astrological shape for the life.But he is also interested in the fact that people believe in fairies and ghosts. He doesn't look down on those beliefs. Nor does he say that he necessarily believes in the presence of fairies or the interventions of the supernatural. But he's got a very open mind in relation to that. And certainly being simultaneously interested in early astronomy and astrology together is, to us, very striking. But then I think it was much more normal.OLIVER: Why do you think he resisted ordination?SCURR: Because he said the cassock stinks. He considered ordination several times because he knew it would be a living, it would be a way of being able to have some income, probably not very onerous duties. Some of his friends say to him, “Come on, Aubrey, it really won't be that much work. You'll just get a curate who'll do it all, and you'll get the living, and then you won't have to be worrying all the time about your paycheck. You haven't got a paycheck. It would be a living coming to you.”And on one occasion, one of the reasons he gives for not doing that is he thinks well, what if there's another religious upheaval and I have to change sides again? What if Roman Catholicism comes back and I ended up on the wrong side of it?And, again, would it really have been that difficult to go with the flow? But I think, in his own way, he had found his way of living, which was intensely sociable. And perhaps he didn't want that constraint of being a member of the clergy around him.OLIVER: Do you think he was a nonbeliever?SCURR: Well. I don't know the answer to that. I don't think so at all. I think he probably was a straightforward Christian believer. I think perhaps he'd seen enough of the religious conflicts and wars to be afraid of fanaticism on both sides. And that would fit certainly with his relationship with Hobbes.I don't have any reason to think he's an atheist. He's got a beautiful way of writing about death and there's this wonderful line he has when he says, “God bless you and me in our in and out world.” So the fact that we refer to his works as the Brief Lives because they're short, but everybody's life is brief.And even those who live, as he did, into his 70s, it feels brief. And there's these very moving descriptions of him at funerals. I was thinking about this the other day because he often records where someone's buried. And I recently wrote my first entry for the Dictionary of National Biography. I did the one for Hilary Mantel, which was a great honor and extremely interesting.And when I came back to the Brief Lives, I thought, gosh, I wish I'd put at the end of that DNB entry where she's actually buried, that would've made sense to do that. And I didn't do it because the DNB is quite formalized; they've got their formula and you need to stick to it.But maybe I'll add it in. Because it seems to me very moving to record where people are actually buried. That would fit I think with her religious sensibility, with a regard for the afterlife, and with the rites of passage at the end of life.OLIVER: What is it that makes Aubrey such a good biographer?SCURR: So I think the modesty that is in his spirit, the noticing, the minutiae that he both notices and values and his wit. He has a sensitivity to these funny and revealing quirky stories about the people that he knows. Or he finds them in the stories he's told by people who did know them.There's an eyewitness account aspect to it as well. Or at least it's an oral history. “I was told this by . . .” He's extremely precise. He'll try to assemble the facts so far as he can, and then he'll tell you what people's close friends said about them, and he will do so very, very carefully so that you know this is a story that he's been told that he's passing on.And then he doesn't pass moral judgment. He doesn't adjudicate. And finally, he thinks of himself as doing all of this for posterity and that posterity, i.e. us or the people who come after us, will find things there and he's not going to tell them what to find. He's not going to shape the life and say, this is what you should think about it.He will give you the raw materials, he'll give you the stories, he'll give you a flavor of the details of the life, and then posterity can look there and can see, for example, the disagreements between Hobbes and Isaac Newton. There are people who've written lives of Hooke and Newton. And there are people who've written lives and you can be team Newton or team Hooke. Interestingly, Aubrey is team Hooke. He doesn't write a life of Newton. And he wants, as I said, to do well by Hooke. But his way of doing that isn't to say Mr.Hooke was fantastic and Newton robbed him of lots of his ideas. He says, let me show you, let me assemble and make a catalog, if I can, of all these hundreds of contributions that Hooke made.OLIVER: When did you discover Aubrey?SCURR: So I discovered Aubrey because I was reviewing for the LRB, The Biographer's Tale, and I had come across a really interesting—and it's still in the introduction to my book—a really interesting reflection on the difference between Aubrey and Lytton Strachey, a reflection made by Anthony Powell, and I had quoted it or alluded to it in my review. And I had gone and started to read Aubrey as a result of that. So I was led to it through reviewing, via Anthony Powell, and then into the Brief Lives.But then another very strange thing happened, which is I met for the very first time, Janet Malcolm, who is someone who became very important in my life. And because she knew or had been told that I'd written this review, she read the review before we met. And she said to me, she said, “Ruth, I read your review”—and I doubt Janet Malcolm was a massive fan of A.S. Byatt, to be absolutely honest. We never really discussed that further, but she said, “I read your review and I was really interested in this Aubrey. I was so interested in what you quoted about Aubrey and the difference between his biographical approach and Lytton Strachey.”And then it sort of stuck in my mind and suddenly as I was coming toward the end of my first book, which was a totally different book on Robespierre and the French Revolution, I just knew I wanted to write about Aubrey. And I think at the time my then-husband really thought I'd gone mad actually, because you're not supposed to do that, are you?I mean, you're supposed to stick in your period and certainly build on it. So, you know, a book on Marra or even Napoleon would've been okay, that would've made sense. But to circle back to the 17th century and write about Aubrey seemed extremely eccentric.OLIVER: Well, what was Janet Malcolm like?SCURR: Oh, Janet was absolutely wonderful. She has this reputation of being sort of terrifying. And, of course, I was extremely interested in her forensic examination of biography which we had very interesting conversations about. She was a deeply kind person, extremely nurturing of younger writers, and extremely funny as well.That's the other thing that you don't associate with her sometimes from this sort of public image of a very austere interviewer, The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives, et cetera. Actually, she was a really warm and extremely witty person.OLIVER: A lot of historians don't think biography is real history. Why do you take biography seriously?SCURR: Well, Michael Holroyd writes Works on Paper—and I love Michael Holroyd so much. And he has this wonderful line—I won't remember it exactly—but it's about biography being the b*****d offspring of history and the novel, and both are ashamed of it.And I think some of those distinctions actually have broken down. I know lots of historians who are very interested in biographical writing. I think it depends. There are certain historical schools that maybe are not so interested in lives.And to be fair, the history of ideas is—which I belong to, and in a sense I'm a rebel from—is one of those. I remember there coming a point where I had spent so much time thinking about the constitutional ideas for the representative republic in the middle of the French Revolution, that actually the French Revolution could have been happening on Mars for all it mattered about the actual sequence of events. What mattered was the structure of the ideas.And it's difficult because the school I belong to in Cambridge wants to put the ideas into context all the time. But again, by context you don't really mean people's lives; more the discourses and the conversations and the ideas of the time that are the landscape, the intellectual landscape, if you like.So I rebelled at a certain point and I was like, well, you know, I'm actually going to go through the revolution day by day because that period is short. And I think it really matters, the lived experience there. I think many, many history books quote Aubrey with enormous respect and say, “as Aubrey says,” or, “according to Aubrey,” and pull those details forwards.I suppose some history is quite instrumental in its use of biography, so it wants to draw the reader in with a few anecdotes and a little bit of what does somebody wear on their head? And who was their first love, that kind of thing. But it's perhaps not very engaged with the real work of trying to capture the shape or the feel of a life.OLIVER: And of a temperament, right? I think one thing biography gives us is that sense that a lot of these big decisions or events in history are quite temperamental. As well as being based in ideas and events.SCURR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.OLIVER: Your life of Aubrey, at one point you tried to write as a novel.SCURR: Yeah. I had to stop that quite fast.OLIVER: Why?SCURR: Because Aubrey is too important. I didn't want to make up things for him. As someone who's come right up to that line of the history and the novel, I do think it's very clear to be on one side or the other. And again, going back to Hilary Mantel, she wrote those wonderful Reith Lectures on historical fiction.And, like her, I think that it's not about ignoring the facts or embellishing the facts. It is about the gaps. It's about imagining what isn't in the record and should have been, and trying to reconstruct that inside the novel. But at the time, I felt that the gaps with Aubrey didn't actually matter that much.There was so much there that I could pull together to give a sense of him and his sensibility. Now actually, scholars in this field will all be very, very keen to advance our knowledge of those gaps. And that's wonderful. You know, what exactly was Aubrey doing when he visited France? You know, at the time I wrote my book that seemed very unclear.I think my colleague in Oxford, Kate Bennett, knows that now and will write her own biography. And she will fill in many of these gaps that I sort of happily included in the form that I'd found for his life because giving him that first person voice, I was able to focus on the evidence that I thought had been very underused at that point.OLIVER: Now Kate Bennett did a wonderful edition of the Brief Lives with lots of excellent footnotes and investigations. And you wrote that it gave us a new understanding of Aubrey.SCURR: Absolutely. And of the lives themselves. And Kate and I got to know each other and became friends while we were both writing our books. And people we knew before we met were very keen to sort of set us against each other. So they would wind us up. I would meet someone and they'd say, “Ruth, there you are. You've written a book about the French Revolution and now you are going to write a book about Aubrey. But don't you know there is a scholar in Oxford who spent her entire academic life working on Aubrey?” And it built up a picture of fear that you shouldn't trespass on somebody else's ground.And then people would do a sort of reverse thing to her that they would say, “Oh, Kate, gosh, you've been working a long time on Aubrey and where is your Clarendon edition after all? And did you know there's somebody in Cambridge who's going to write this popular book about Aubrey?”Anyway, finally we met at a conference and we really actually just liked each other and we decided it's fine. I was doing my thing. She's doing something very different. And we became friends, and I see that as a triumph over a sort of more traditional, maybe even dare I say, male and territorial approach to academic life and to knowledge in general actually.OLIVER: Yeah. Because the two books are great complements to each other. They're not rivalrous in that sense.SCURR: Absolutely not. Kate's book, it's not just an addition. It's as much as you can ever do. It's a reconstruction of the manuscript as Aubrey left it and intended it with all the gaps and the notes to himself to fill this in. And his changes of mind and his deletions and all of that. And so it's an astonishing thing. Because it's not just a copy of it. It takes you in, it helps you understand what he was intending with those collections, as you called them, my pretty collections.And so that edition that she had been working on for a very long time came out in 2015, the same year as my book came out. And it felt like an amazing year for Aubrey. And now, we'll be celebrating the 400th anniversary of his birth. But that year, 2015, was a very special, obviously for us, but I think for Aubrey more broadly.OLIVER: How much of an influence has Aubrey had on English biography?SCURR: As we know, there's the huge influence in terms of “Aubrey says.” Open any book on the 17th century, and it will be “Aubrey says,” “according to Aubrey,” et cetera. So a huge influence in that respect. With regard to the actual form, I think it's very, very pervasive and important, and we have to look at it very carefully.I mentioned earlier the very important difference between what Aubrey does and what Lytton Strachey did. There are some similarities in so far as Strachey will go for the vivid detail. He give you these powerful anecdotes. But actually he spins them as well.And that's what Anthony Powell so brilliantly showed. And the example was of Francis Bacon, the life of Francis Bacon who Aubrey has a description of Bacon right at the end of his life, the circumstances leading up to Bacon's death where he is on Highgate Hill and he decides to conduct an experiment to see if snow will preserve a chicken or a hen as well as salt. So he is stuffing this carcass of the hen with snow. Catches a cold, ends up having to stay with a friend, sleeps in a bed that hasn't been aired for a long time, and dies. And that's the end of Lord Bacon.So Aubrey gives us all this, and then along comes Lytton Strachey. And he takes it, and he says an old man disgraced, shattered, alone on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead foul with snow, which makes it sound like he's lost his mind at the end of his life. And then Anthony Powell examined that and he said, look, the story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey's.Bacon was certainly an old man at the time of the incident. He was disgraced. He may have been shattered. No doubt at times he was alone. But Aubrey's story of stuffing the foul on Highgate Hill shows Bacon accompanied by the king's physician, conducting a serious experiment to test the preservative properties of snow and, on becoming indisposed, finding accommodation in the house of the Earl of Arundel.And so you take that same story and, as Anthony Powell says, you combine the story, the fragment preserved by Aubrey with some epithets, and you convey an oblique point. It's a biographical method for actually building up a picture of the person. And it really matters what you do with those fragments.So I think the fact that Aubrey is pretty pure about this, he gives you the fragments and another biographer might come along and think, okay, what's going on here with Venetia Stanley and dying in her bed after drinking Viper wine? Let's build up a story about that. And there was a rumor at the time that her husband had murdered her, et cetera. Aubrey doesn't comment. He just gives you the fragment. And I think afterwards, people have not only used the fragments in their own work, but they've also developed a technique of working up those fragments into whatever picture you decide as a biographer you are going to draw.OLIVER: Now as well as a historian, you are a literary critic. You review novels. You are a Hilary Mantel admirer. Who else among the modern fiction writers do you admire?SCURR: Amongst the modern fiction writers? I'm getting quite old, Henry. Lots of my people are dead now. Alice Monroe is someone I'm extremely interested in. Hilary Manel, obviously, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I love the fact Penelope Fitzgerald was a biographer simultaneously with becoming a novelist.And I was thinking back to this actually, that Charlotte Mew and Her Friends—that's the title. And then the Anthony Powell is John Aubrey and His Friends. And I was thinking, is there something about these people who have a lot of friends and the biographical genre? It's interesting.In terms of younger people writing, I just read a wonderful short story by Gwendoline Riley in the latest Paris Review. “A–Z” it's called—very disturbing. Very, very good story. And Gwendoline has a novel coming out later this year, which I shall read with enormous interest. It's going to be called Palm House. I absolutely revered George Saunders, although I haven't yet read Vigil. I'm only on Substack for George Saunders and you Henry. That's it, basically.OLIVER: That shows very good taste.SCURR: Very good taste. Yeah. And a couple of others. My friend Danielle Allen's The Renovator, I also subscribe to, but very few. But George Saunders wrote a wonderful post on his Substack about maybe a year and a half, maybe more even ago, about how he found the solution to the beginning of Lincoln in the Bardo. And he wanted to find a way to tell the story of the death of Lincoln's son. It's so typical of him—and I love this—he said he didn't want the ghosts. He knew it was going to be narrated by the ghosts in the morgue. And he couldn't have them coming home one evening saying, “Oh, you know, I just popped over the wall and had a look in through the White House window. And guess what I saw?” So how was he going to get the voices in?And then he said he'd got these extracts from the letters and from the literature that he needed. And he ended up putting them all on the floor and thinking, what order shall I put them in? And that reminded me of when I was struggling to find a way to write about Aubrey. I suddenly had the idea that I could just put them as diary entries without comment.I would sort of curate these entries and things like that. So, that was a very interesting moment for me about sort of the construction and the choices that go in both to writing a novel and to writing, in my case, a sort of experimental biography.OLIVER: So Hilary Mantel, Lincoln in the Bardo, Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl Bainbridge—there's a lot of historical fiction here. This is the genre you most enjoy. It's been a sort of golden age for historical fiction.SCURR: But those people aren't just historical fiction writers. It's very important. They have all written historical fiction, but actually they write other novels as well. It doesn't matter the order in their careers, they go in and out of it. So I would say that actually it's those people as writers and sensibilities that attract me.Anita Brookner is another example. I love Anita Brookner's novels. I also love her book on David, the revolutionary painter, that she wrote—Jacques-Louis David—that's a fantastic book. So there's a sense in which I see them as writers and the genre of historical fiction, you are right, it does cut across, but I don't think that's what I'm following. I think I'm following what I find on the page from a particular sensibility and of course a command of language, which is in all of those cases, absolutely extraordinary.OLIVER: Because they're all quite innovative as historical novelists as well. And it's not the main part of what is recognized as their achievement in a way.SCURR: No, no.OLIVER: It's been quietly a second great period of the historical novel. It seems crazy to say Hilary Mantel is our Walter Scott, but that is quite high praise.SCURR: So I think you deal much more definitely than I do with these sort of epoch-defining ideas. I think I'm just more intermittently focused on particular things that I like. I used to do an enormous amount of reviewing. I've had to stop it because—talk about being the whetstone.I was constantly reviewing when I was in my 30s and much of my 40s actually. And I don't regret it in the least. And one of the reasons I don't regret it, especially with novels, was because I would never have read all those novels if I hadn't been reviewing them.And even some of the nonfiction, I wouldn't. But here's an example: Because I'd been reviewing so much, I ended up quite early 2007, becoming a Booker judge. And part of that process is that anyone who's been on the list before they automatically get entered by the publisher—McEwen and Barnes, et cetera. Fine.And then the publisher can put forward two books they choose and they can be anything. And then they assemble a list of so-called call-ins. And those are the books where the publisher says, “Oh, please, please call this in. I mean, we didn't make it one of our two, but we think it's absolutely amazing and you must read it.” And you think, well, if it's so amazing, what were you doing not making it one of your two. But anyway, whatever, we call it in. And on that call-in list there was actually, Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, and that ended up winning the year I was a judge.And I knew Anne Enright's writing because I had reviewed several of her earlier books, especially one called What Are You Like?, which is quite obscure. It's not the book people think of when they think about Anne Enright. But I knew because I'd done all that time in the reviewing trenches, as it were, how extraordinary Anne Enright is as a writer. And we were able to say, well, absolutely go ahead and call this in. And then sure enough it won.OLIVER: What about biography? Modern biography? You like Michael Holroyd?SCURR: Well, we've already talked about Janet Malcolm. She's a sort of anti-biographer in some respect, sort of subversive of the entire genre. I very much like and respect Antonia Fraser's historical biographies and especially her one of Marie Antoinette which, again, came out very close to when my Robespierre book came out. And it's like seeing the other side of the story and that was absolutely extraordinary.And one of the biographies I go back to over and over again I'm extremely interested in Virginia Woolf. You are obviously a fan with The Common Reader. I was looking at it, preparing for this, that she's got this absolutely hilarious short biography of John Evelyn, and it is called Rambling Round Evelyn. Do you know it?OLIVER: Yes.SCURR: It's so beautifully constructed. It's got the butterflies landing on the dahlias pretty much throughout the actual text of the short biography. But then it's got this brilliant bit where she sort of makes fun of John Evelyn. And she says, the difference between then and now is, if we saw a red admiral, we would admire it, but we wouldn't—and this is very mean of her—we wouldn't rush into the kitchen and get a kitchen knife in order to dissect the red admiral's head. Right? It's so ridiculous and it so makes fun of Evelyn.I was listening to the podcast you made with Hermione Lee. And Hermione was saying that she thought what made Woolf such a good critic was that she was very empathetic. But I also think she's capable of that kind of sharp, wicked distance as well, where she goes, I see you, John Evelyn, you are so proud of your garden, and you're actually—looked at from my point of view—a bit of an idiot in some respects as well.OLIVER: I like her because she's so judgmental, which is not a very popular thing to say, but she is. She is really capable of saying that, you know, as long as prose will be read, Addison will be read. But on the other hand, he's boring and rambling and not very good in many ways. Absolutely cutting.SCURR: No, totally, totally. Yeah.OLIVER: What about some of the sort of big names: Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin?SCURR: Yeah. Oh, Claire, absolutely. I mean, goodness, they've been such influences on me, both of them. Absolutely Richard and his Footsteps and then of course, and those other books, The Ratters of Lightning Ridge and then The Age of Wonder. That's so important, so wonderful.Claire, I revere, I loved and still recommend to my students her book on Mary Wollstonecraft. I also, by the way, love Virginia Woolf's essay on Mary Wollstonecraft. I think that's a different sort of thing where Woolf describes Mary Wollstonecraft pursuing her lover like a dolphin. She won't let him go. He thought he'd hooked a minnow. He wasn't expecting a dolphin to come after him. It was Mary Wollstonecraft. So, Claire Tomalin, her Peyps, Hardy, absolutely hugely important books and deeply, deeply humane actually.And that's the other thing, I think biography, by definition, you do get the sharpness of Woolf or Strachey, but I think to put someone else's life at the center of your book, that's a humane act. It's to say, no, I'm going to spend this number years of my life preserving and communicating this other person's life. And that's a very wonderful thing to do.OLIVER: What do you think of the sort of standard criticism of biography, that it's just not accurate enough? So, for example, Austen Scholars will point to various things in the Tomalin biography where she's deleted the facts or said things to make the narrative flow, but it's just not really accurate enough. The novelistic tendency overwhelms the historical one or whatever. You've obviously avoided that with various decisions you made in the Aubrey book, but as a genre.SCURR: I'd never say that. That would be a real hostage to fortune, wouldn't it?OLIVER: Well, you know what I mean?SCURR: And saying, look at, look at this—OLIVER: Page 28.SCURR: —at this piece of nonsense you introduced. Well, accuracy is extremely important. What I think about that is it all contributes to knowledge. If someone comes along and finds a mistake or wants to bring in some other evidence—And actually Kate Bennett, she does this with Aubrey as well. She says that, oh, Aubrey's really got this wrong, or he's gotten in a muddle about that. She's not saying, and therefore let's just chuck it out because it's inaccurate. You need to see this as well as that. So I think of it more as a collaborative relationship about adding to knowledge and if somebody corrects a previous book or previous claim or something, or point something, then that's fine actually.Again, going back to Holroyd, he thought that that biography was an art form constrained by the facts. So he's got a place for art in it. And I know what he means by that. And I think ultimately that's probably why I couldn't write a novel about a biographical subject because of being constrained by the facts. And yet Hilary Mantel has written many historical novels that are absolutely constrained by the facts. It's just what they're doing besides the facts, alongside the facts. So perhaps some people are going to come along and contribute other information and other people will come along and contribute some imaginative answer to the whole. And both are fine. I think we should be liberal broad church here.OLIVER: Is the genre dying?SCURR: Not so far as I'm aware. We are always doing this about genres dying, aren't we? Those things are always dying.OLIVER: People talk about biography dying a lot.SCURR: Well, perhaps they do. I haven't been listening to that. Why do they say it's dying?OLIVER: Because you can't sell these 700-page lives of people.SCURR: We can't sell most books. I mean, if we're going to go buy sales . . .OLIVER: This, yeah. Well, this story in The Times recently as well, that all the nonfiction that sells now is trash and that the serious books aren't there. And the whole civilization's dying routine.SCURR: Well if it is, we just have to carry on doing what we are doing.OLIVER: Yeah. What do you think is going to be the future of biography? Because I think more than a lot of other nonfiction genres, it's so changeable, it's so flexible. If you look at any decade, you see so much variety in structure and form. What do you think is coming next?SCURR: I'm like Aubrey; I think that's going to be for posterity to decide. As long as there are human beings, we will tell stories and we will want to tell stories about ourselves, and we will want to tell stories about the people we have loved and or hated, or the people who we think matter, for whatever reason, in science, in art, in literature. There will always be a need for the story of the human life.I think it will inevitably change enormously in ways that we couldn't possibly imagine. Just as Aubrey knew that he couldn't possibly imagine what posterity was going to make of the information that he had collected, and he didn't think that was something that he should be constrained by. He thought it was about passing it on.OLIVER: And what will Ruth Scurr do next?SCURR: I'll ask her. I think she's supposed to be writing about Rousseau and is very excited about that, but has been massively distracted by the Royal Society of Literature and becoming chair of that. So, I'm trying to pull myself back into my project. And I was very excited actually, because again, when I was looking at The Common Reader I saw Woolf refer to the Montaigne, Pepys, and Rousseau as people who had provided these spectacular portraits of themselves. And I was very excited by that. So I'm going to write a book about Rousseau and his time in England.OLIVER: Very exciting. I look forward to it. Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, thank you very much.SCURR: Thank you, Henry. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

The Reith Lectures are one of the most anticipated broadcasts in the radio year, and the conversation around this year's iteration, presented by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman on the theme of 'Moral Revolution', has been making headlines. Bregman complained on social media that one of his lines was edited out of the broadcast of the first lecture - and it set your tongues wagging. Andrea Catherwood catches up with the lectures' commissioner Hugh Levinson to ask about the decisions behind this year's series.And it's 70 years since From Our Own Correspondent - or FOOC = was first broadcast on the BBC, giving a space for long-form, single-voice reports from correspondents all over the world. Editor Richard Fenton-Smith and Today presenter Anna Foster joins us to hear your thoughts on the programme as it celebrates a big birthday. Presenter: Andrea Catherwood Producer: Pauline Moore Assistant Producer: Rebecca Guthrie Executive Producer: David PrestA Whistledown Scotland production for Radio 4

We discuss the importance of sharing and its many benefits with Tom Llewellyn, the Executive Director of Shareable, which collaborates with others to imagine, resource, network, and scale cooperative projects. Tom helps communities develop Libraries of Things (LoTs) and other forms of low-cost, environmentally friendly social infrastructure that help people meet their material needs. Tom's current work includes expanding these sharing initiatives into housing developments, universities, and post-disaster recovery areas. He also serves as executive producer and host of the award-winning documentary film and podcast series The Response, producer of the Cities@Tufts Podcast, and communications lead for the Rural Power Coalition. Tom has co-founded several community- and sharing-based initiatives, including: A PLACE for Sustainable Living, Asheville Tool Library, REAL Cooperative (Regenerative Education, Action & Leadership), and the worker collective Critter Cafe. Shareable wants to see a just, connected, and joyful world where sharing is daily practice and communities flourish. Its current focus is on sharing hubs & infrastructure, Mutual Aid projects, and supporting and strengthening democratic, community-controlled cooperative businesses and organizations. We covered a lot, and so the conversation is split into two episodes. In Part 1, we hear why Shareable has pivoted from storytelling to engagement and support for groups to replicate successful sharing solutions. We discuss some of the key challenges and barriers to sharing, and what we can gain from sharing and other forms of mutual support We talk about a few different types of sharing initiatives, including community infrastructure projects. Tom explains the importance of storytelling, particularly in the context of disasters, and how the media often uses narratives that undermine our natural resilience and willingness to support each other. In Part 2 (available now), we cover the How To Guides, which cover a vast range of topics from how to reduce food waste to starting mutual aid funds, and Tom's tips on how to get things started. You can hear my takeaways at the end of each section. International speaker, author and strategic advisor, Catherine Weetman helps people discover why circular, regenerative and fair solutions are better for people, planet – and prosperity. Catherine’s award-winning book: A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business includes lots of practical examples and tips on getting started.  Stay in touch for free insights and updates…  Read on for more on our guest and links to the people, organisations and other resources we mention.  Don’t forget, you can subscribe to the podcast series on iTunes, Google Podcasts, PlayerFM, Spotify, TuneIn, or search for “circular economy” in your favourite podcast app.  Stay in touch to get free insights and updates, direct to your inbox… You can also use our interactive, searchable podcast index to find episodes by sector, by region or by circular strategy. Plus, there is now a regular Circular Economy Podcast newsletter, so you get the latest episode show notes and links delivered to your inbox on Sunday morning, each fortnight. The newsletter includes a link to the episode page on our website, with an audio player. You can subscribe by clicking this link to update your preferences. Links we mention in the episode: Links for our guest: Shareable's website: https://www.shareable.net/ Shareable on social media: https://www.facebook.com/Shareable   https://twitter.com/shareable   https://www.instagram.com/shareable_gram/   https://bsky.app/profile/share-able.bsky.social   https://www.linkedin.com/company/shareable/   https://www.youtube.com/@ShareableNet Books, people and organisations we mentioned Episode 154 Loic Le Fouest of Clarasys: creating circular customer experiences https://www.rethinkglobal.info/154-loic-le-fouest-of-clarasys-designing-circular-customer-experiences/ Rutger Bregman, historian and best-selling author is this year's BBC Radio 4 Reith lecturer. Titled Moral Revolution, the lectures will delve into the current ‘age of immorality’, explore a growing trend for unseriousness among elites, and ask how we can follow history's example and assemble small, committed groups to spark positive change. The Reith Lectures are available on your favourite podcast app, more info here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/v78MKsCWHxw0l0PwMn4R0R/bbc-reith-lectures-2025-moral-revolution Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind and others books: https://rutgerbregman.com/ Guest bio Tom Llewellyn is the Executive Director of Shareable, an organization that collaborates with organizers and allies to imagine, resource, network, and scale cooperative projects. He helps communities develop Libraries of Things (LoTs)—low-cost, environmentally friendly social infrastructure that enables people to meet their material needs. Tom's current work includes expanding these sharing initiatives into housing developments, universities, and post-disaster recovery areas. He also serves as executive producer and host of the award-winning documentary film and podcast series The Response, producer of the Cities@Tufts Podcast, and communications lead for the Rural Power Coalition. A dynamic speaker, Tom has presented at more than 200 events across five continents. He is the co-editor and author of several influential publications, including Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons (2018), The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019), and Lessons from the First Wave: Resilience in the Age of COVID-19 (2020). He has co-founded several community- and sharing-based initiatives, including: A PLACE for Sustainable Living, Asheville Tool Library, REAL Cooperative (Regenerative Education, Action & Leadership), and the worker collective Critter Cafe. Tom currently lives in California's Santa Cruz Mountains, in Amah Mutsun Tribal Band territory, with his wife, Ellie, where they’re rejuvenating an old Boy Scout Camp into a community hub. Shareable collaborates with organizers and allies to imagine, resource, network, and scale cooperative projects. We envision a just, connected, and joyful world where sharing is daily practice and communities flourish. Shareable's organizing work is currently focused on: Sharing Hubs & Infrastructure – We're working to establish sharing hubs like Libraries of Things in every community. Whether it is a simple how-to guide; our comprehensive Library of Things Toolkit; incubating the Tool Library Alliance; or partnerships to scale Libraries of Things in universities and affordable housing, we're developing useful tools so every community can create infrastructure for sharing. Mutual Aid – We're working to build capacity and to network mutual aid projects across the US and around the world. Whether it is our popular how-to guides; sharing stories on our podcast The Response; our ongoing Mutual Aid 101 learning series and toolkit; or partnerships to build capacity for mutual aid disaster resilience, we're developing resources and networks to build communities of care. Co-op Sector – We're working to support and strengthen democratic, community-controlled cooperative businesses and organizations. Whether it is educational partnerships like the Social Co-op Academy; piloting food assistance co-ops; fighting to modernize and democratize local electric co-op utilities, the second largest co-op sector in the US; or restructuring our own organization as a worker self-directed nonprofit, we're shifting the narrative toward cooperative governance. Shareable continues to publish articles, podcasts, and how-to guides that amplify the people and ideas shaping a world where sharing is a daily practice and communities flourish. Please let us know what you think of the podcast – and we'd love it if you could leave us a review on iTunes, or wherever you find your podcasts.  Or send us an email… Click here to search for previous episodes

Cameron Lallana of The Slavic Literature Pod joins host Ally Pitts for a special episode on this short but hard-hitting novel about a Russian journalist whose life is thrown into chaos when a figure from his past suddenly comes back into his life as the leader of a terrorist group. The premise sounds run-of-the-mill, but the execution is anything but as the situation causes our protagonist to dig into his memories of the past few decades to try to figure out what has happened to Russian society during that time. Links mentioned/alluded to in the episode: https://slaviclitpod.com/ https://europaeditions.co.uk/book/9781787704879/not-russian  https://www.europaeditions.com/author/337/mikhail-shevelev  https://letterboxd.com/ally_pitts/list/noirvember-2024/detail/ Not Russian By Mikhail Shevelev (uk.bookshop.org affiliate link)  A Very Short Introduction to Film Noir (uk.bookshop.org affiliate link) - Film Noir https://ko-fi.com/russiansovietmoviepod https://patreon.com/ally_pitts_movies_etc BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Geoffrey Hosking - The Rediscovery of Politics https://herheadinfilms.com/  Contact us/socials: All the links for a Russian & Soviet Movie Podcast and Ally Pitts you're ever likely to want or need: linktr.ee/russiansovietmoviepodcast linktr.ee/ally_pitts  We changed the name of the show a little while back, but the social handles/contacts are a bit of a mishmash. Email: russophilesunite@gmail.com Letterboxd: letterboxd.com/Ally_Pitts/ Instagram: instagram.com/russiansovietmoviepodcast/  instagram.com/ally_pitts_movies_etc/  Listen to Ally's other podcast appearances on Podchaser

Pressure on the BBC has continued after a line about Donald Trump was removed from the Reith Lectures on legal advice. Dame Caroline Dineage, Chair of the Culture Media and Sport Committee, and Lionel Barber, Former Editor of The Financial Times discuss the implications. Also on the show, Dr Alice Enders of Enders Analysis explains why The Telegraph has been sold to the owners of the Daily Mail in a £500m deal. And CNN correspondent Donie O'Sullivan on his new documentary investigating why claims about white farmers in South Africa continue to circulate in US politicsProducer: Lisa Jenkinson Content producer: Lucy Wai Production Coordinator: Ruth Waites Technical Coordinator: Craig Johnson Sound: Robin Schroder

The Herle Burly was created by Air Quotes Media with support from our presenting sponsor TELUS, as well as CN Rail, and Fidelity Investments Canada.Alright you curiouser and curiouser, Herle Burly-ites. I love it when we have a guest who comes back to the podcast. Especially one who gave us such a fascinating hour the first time around.Just about 4 years ago, deep into COVID, the noted historian and author Margaret MacMillan joined me here. We talked about the pandemic, Trump in his first term, and the relevant historical lessons we could use to understand the context we were in at the time. Well now, here we are again.Trump 2.0. Emboldened in every way that could matter. And I use the term “emboldened” almost euphemistically. Everything we thought about the world order in the latter half of the 20th century and first 2 decades of the 21st ... seems to be dissolving in front of our eyes.THAT is the rather large discussion I want to have with Ms. MacMillan today. And who better?She is emeritus Professor of History at University of Toronto and emeritus Professor of International History at Oxford University.  Her publications have been translated into 26 languages, and she gave the CBC's Massey Lectures in 2015 and the BBC's Reith Lectures in 2018.Thank you for joining us on #TheHerleBurly podcast. Please take a moment to give us a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts or your favourite podcast app.Watch episodes of The Herle Burly via Air Quotes Media on YouTube.The sponsored ads contained in the podcast are the expressed views of the sponsor and not those of the publisher.

Jonathan Sumption, Lord Sumption, isn't afraid of hard work or an intellectual challenge. He's combined a high-profile legal career with a passion for medieval history, and his books include a five volume, 4000 page account of the Hundred Years War, widely described as ‘monumental.' For much of his career he was a very successful barrister working on commercial law, constitutional law and human rights cases, with clients ranging from the British government to Roman Abramovich. Then in 2012 he made history when he was appointed to the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, without ever having served as a full time judge. In 2019, he gave the Reith Lectures, under the title Law and the Decline of Politics, examining how the courts are taking on more of the role of making law. It's a topic he follows up in his most recent book, The Challenges of Democracy and the Rule of Law. Jonathan's musical choices includes Berlioz, Schumann, Britten and Mozart.

Crime Time Inc: Season 3 Review and Upcoming Charles Manson SeriesIn this episode of Crime Time Inc, hosts Simon and Tom dive into an in-depth review of Season 3, discussing the show's past episodes, themes, and variety. They explore notable subjects like serial killers, massacres, kidnappings, and historical cases, reflecting on the different approaches and techniques used in investigations. Additionally, they share insights on famous assassinations and the impact of global events. The episode also introduces the upcoming deep dive series on Charles Manson and his notorious crimes. Stay tuned for more gripping true crime stories and fascinating discussions.00:00 Introduction and Season Three Overview00:43 Introducing the Charles Manson Series03:17 Upcoming Live Shows and Events04:35 Reflecting on Past Seasons and Serial Killers11:38 Challenges in Long-Running Investigations18:22 Massacres, Slaughters, and Kidnappings21:52 School Shootings and Firearm Regulations23:22 Tiger Kidnappings: A Personal Experience24:43 The Unarmed Police Force: A Cultural Contrast28:33 Community Policing: The Lost Art31:57 The Reith Lectures and Notorious Crimes32:47 Assassinations: Patterns and Conspiracies38:34 Book Release and Historical Reflections39:50 Final Thoughts and Upcoming Topics Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In her final 2024 BBC Reith Lecture, forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead assesses how we deal with violent offenders, and assesses the effectiveness and impact of therapeutic interventions with offenders in prisons. *The Reith Lectures originally aired on BBC Radio 4.

With very rare access, forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead gives her third Reith Lecture inside Grendon prison, in England, where she talks to a small number of prisoners and staff, and asks the question: Does trauma cause violence? Does being a victim of violence, in some circumstances, make you more likely to become a perpetrator of violence? *The Reith Lectures originally aired on BBC Radio 4.

In a career spanning over 30 years, Dr. Adshead has heard many of her patients ask: "I have done evil things, but does that mean I am evil? In her second BBC Reith Lecture, Adshead asks if there is such a thing as evil. She argues we all have capacity for 'evil' and says we need to find ways to cultivate societal and individual 'goodness.' *The Reith Lectures originally aired on BBC Radio 4.

This month, IDEAS features the 2024 BBC's Reith Lectures by forensic psychiatrist Gwen Adshead. Her four lectures address pertinent questions she has faced in her career. To start, she asks if violence is a normal part of human life — whether we are all capable and tempted by violence — or whether it is an aberration in just some people. *The Reith Lectures originally aired on BBC Radio 4.

Understanding Violence: Dr. Gwen Adshead's First Reith LectureIn this episode of Crime Time, Inc., we delve into the first of four Reith Lectures by Forensic Psychiatrist Dr. Gwen Adshead. Titled 'Is Violence Normal?' this lecture explores the complexities surrounding human violence. Dr. Adshead, who has extensive experience working in prisons and high-security hospitals like Broadmoor, argues that violence is a part of human nature and is influenced by various social and individual factors. She challenges the conventional notion of profiling typical killers and urges us to understand the relational contexts and risk factors that lead to violence. Using the analogy of a bicycle lock, she explains how different risk factors combine to unlock violent behaviour. Dr. Adshead highlights the importance of responsibility and the dangers of normalising violence through media and societal narratives. The discussion also touches on the role of mental illness, the potential for rehabilitation, and the need for nuanced approaches to preventing violence. Tune in for a thought-provoking episode that pushes us to reconsider our assumptions about violence and its perpetrators.00:00 Introduction to the Reith Lectures00:42 Overview of Dr. Gwen Adshead's Lectures00:54 Is Violence Normal?01:40 Understanding the Roots of Violence03:30 The Bicycle Lock Analogy04:28 Neutralization and Responsibility06:19 Challenging the Concept of Evil13:41 Rehabilitation and Change15:24 Final Thoughts and Takeaways Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Simon and Tom discuss a range of topics including Tom's upcoming book on the bombing of Edinburgh, the infamous FIFA corruption scandal, and its implications on global football governance. They dive deep into high-profile cases examined by their 'Deep Dive' team, such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the 'Ice Man' hitman Richard Kuklinski, and the mysterious D.B. Cooper heist. They also explore historical events like the Rosenberg espionage case and the Assyrian genocide, touching on themes of system failures, historical justice systems, and the complex nature of evil. The episode concludes with a look into future episodes and live events featuring special guests.00:00 Introduction and Greetings00:32 Tom's Upcoming Book on WWII01:55 FIFA Corruption Scandal04:36 American Law Enforcement and FIFA14:17 Sandy Hook and Gun Control Debate20:32 The Ice Man: Richard Kuklinski21:43 The Hitman's Double Life23:03 The Reith Lectures on Evil24:33 The D.B. Cooper Mystery28:45 The Rosenberg Espionage Case34:49 Understanding Genocide: The Assyrian Case39:07 Reflections on Historical Conflicts41:58 Upcoming Events and Announcements Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Andrea Catherwood presents the programme that hears your views on BBC audio. A new series of The Reith Lectures is underway, presented by forensic psychologist Dr Gwen Adshead. She poses four questions about violence and the prison system - and so two listeners who work in prison services and have lived experience of being in prison visited our VoxBox to give their thoughts on the broadcasts. Paula Harriott, Chief Executive of the charity Unlock, and Marc Conway, CEO of Fair Justice, give their assessment on how Gwen answered her own questions.And following last week's episode of Feedback many listeners jumped to the defence of a recent Archers storyline featuring a holiday lets scam. But why did some say that it was getting them in the Christmas spirit?We also heard from more listeners on the end of Short Cuts, the programme that highlights short and experimental audio documentaries by makers from around the world. Presenter: Andrea Catherwood Producer: Pauline Moore Executive Producer: David PrestA Whistledown Scotland production for BBC Radio 4

Artificial intelligence could make some of us rich — but leave some behind. In part two of the BBC Reith Lectures, Oxford professor Ben Ansell argues that AI can increase inequality, while appearing to increase prosperity, leading to skepticism about democracy.

IDEAS presents the first of the BBC Reith Lectures delivered by Ben Ansell. The Oxford professor and author of Why Politics Fails examines the threats facing modern democracy, how artificial intelligence can distort its integrity, and how politicians can invest in a democratic future.

The Reith Lectures are an annual tradition, started in 1948 by the BBC's first director general. In a special edition, we hear your thoughts on the programme, and we're joined by the man who gave this year's address. We also talk to the BBC executive who commissioned it.Presenter: Rajan Datar Producer: Howard ShannonA Whistledown production for the BBC World Service

Hap-py New Year! We welcome our first guest of the Chatteroo-era, and what a guest: This year's BBC Reith Lecturer, Professor Ben Ansell - political scientist and former teaching assistant to Ed Miliband (as Ed mentions 5,000 time during the conversation.)Listen to/read Ben's Reith Lectures: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9Buy Ben's book, 'Why Politics Fails': https://www.pagesofhackney.co.uk/webshop/product/why-politics-fails-ansell-ben-w/Visit Ben's website: https://benwansell.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More than two billion people go to the polls next year in elections across the world. So, with that in mind, Adam catches up with political scientist Ben Ansell. Professor Ben Ansell delivered this year's BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures, following in the footsteps of Robert Oppenheimer, Hilary Mantel and Stephen Hawking. They're called: Our Democratic Future and in this episode, Adam and Ben discuss how we can make politics work for all of us in the 21st century. Listen to all the Reith Lectures here on https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9 You can join our Newscast online community here: https://tinyurl.com/newscastcommunityhere Today's Newscast was presented by Adam Fleming. It was made by Chris Gray with Gemma Roper. The technical producer was Matt Dean. The senior news editors are Jonathan Aspinwall and Sam Bonham.

We are honoured to have as our guest in this episode Professor Stuart Russell. Stuart is professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the traditional way to introduce him is to say that he literally wrote the book on AI. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, which he co-wrote with Peter Norvig, was first published in 1995, and the fourth edition came out in 2020.Stuart has been urging us all to take seriously the dramatic implications of advanced AI for longer than perhaps any other prominent AI researcher. He also proposes practical solutions, as in his 2019 book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control.In 2021 Stuart gave the Reith Lectures, and was awarded an OBE. But the greatest of his many accolades was surely in 2014 when a character with a background remarkably like his was played in the movie Transcendence by Johnny Depp. The conversation covers a wide range of questions about future scenarios involving AI, and reflects on changes in the public conversation following the FLI's letter calling for a moratorium on more powerful AI systems, and following the global AI Safety Summit held at Bletchley Park in the UK at the beginning of November.Selected follow-ups:Stuart Russell's page at BerkeleyCenter for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI)The 2021 Reith Lectures: Living With Artificial IntelligenceThe book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of ControlMusic: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the theoretical physicist Armen Sarkissian returned home and became first the Prime Minister and then the President of the newly reformed state of Armenia. In his book, The Small States Club: How Small Smart States Can Save the World, he argues that successful smaller nations have had to learn to be more agile, adaptive and cooperative, compared to the world's ‘greater' powers.The world map has changed considerably, especially in the 19th and 20th century, as empires fell apart and smaller nations fought for independence. The Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan looks back at this time, and considers how small states survive during times of conflict. In 2018 she presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, The Mark of Cain, on the tangled history of war and society. The BBC's Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet is no stranger to conflict in the world, as she has covered all the major stories across the Middle East and North Africa for the past two decades. But she is also interested in the way small states have been instrumental in mediating world conflicts, and punching above their weight on international issues like the climate crisis.Producer: Katy Hickman

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast – for the second time! – is Dame Professor Marina Warner, one of the leading historians on this planet! A writer, lecturer, author of almost 40 books, and former president of the Royal Society of Literature, Marina Warner, according to the New Yorker, is an authority on things that don't actually exist – from magic spells, monstrous beasts, to pregnant virgins. A world specialist on myths, fairy tales and stories from ancient times, Warner has written indefatigably for the last five decades on how these tales – some thousands of years old – still speak to our culture today and allow us to appreciate how they are shaped by the societies that tell them. I have poured over her books, from Alone of All Her Sex, her study of the cult of the Virgin Mary, to my favourite, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, that so pertinently looks at how women are represented as allegories, bringing about ideas of actual power vs perceived power – for example, while Lady Liberty might be ubiquitous, how much power does she, a woman, actually have? Warner's list of accolades is extensive: a distinguished fellow at All Souls College, Oxford; an honorary fellow at many more; the giver of the BBC's Reith Lectures in 1994; and awarded doctorates of eleven universities in Britain, such as King's, the Royal College of Art, Oxford University, and more. But it's stories and the power of imagination that fascinate her, and has what led me to be so captivated by her work. She has written – inside stories was the place I wanted to be, especially stories that went beyond any experience I could live myself at first hand. The very first stories I heard were saints' lives: the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries of the Virgin Mary, the terrible gory violence of the martyrs' ends … When I first encountered myths and fairy tales, the wonder I felt was pure wonder. But as I have grown older, wonder has taken on its double aspect, and become questioning too. And that is why I couldn't be more excited to be, instead of looking at a woman artist, investigate the representation of female figures that we so often see across history and art history – Eve and Lilith from the Bible, and Medusa and Athena from mythology. MARINA'S BOOKS: https://www.marinawarner.com/ https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520227330/monuments-and-maidens https://www.waterstones.com/book/forms-of-enchantment/marina-warner/9780500021460 https://www.waterstones.com/book/joan-of-arc/marina-warner/9780198718796 https://www.waterstones.com/book/alone-of-all-her-sex/marina-warner/9780198718789 THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION: https://www.instagram.com/famm.mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037 ENJOY!!! Follow us: Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic Music by Ben Wetherfield https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

The AI Asia Pacific Institute (AIAPI) has hosted a series of conversations with leading artificial intelligence (AI) experts to study ChatGPT and its risks, looking to arrive at tangible recommendations for regulators and policymakers. These experts include Dr. Toby Walsh, Dr. Stuart Russell, Dr. Pedro Domingos, and Dr. Luciano Floridi, as well as our internal advisory board and research affiliates. The following is a conversation with Dr. Toby Walsh and Dr. Stuart Russell.  Dr. Toby Walsh is Chief Scientist at UNSW.ai, UNSW's new AI Institute. He is a Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW Sydney, and he is also an adjunct fellow at CSIRO Data61. He was named by the Australian newspaper as a "rock star" of Australia's digital revolution. He has been elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a fellow of the ACM, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has won the prestigious Humboldt Prize as well as the NSW Premier's Prize for Excellence in Engineering and ICT, and the ACP Research Excellence award. He has previously held research positions in England, Scotland, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland and Sweden. He has played a leading role at the UN and elsewhere on the campaign to ban lethal autonomous weapons (aka "killer robots"). His advocacy in this area has led to him being "banned indefinitely" from Russia. Dr. Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI and the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public. He is a recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and Research Excellence Award and held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. In 2021 he received the OBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and gave the Reith Lectures. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with a current emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons. *** For show notes and past guests, please visit https://aiasiapacific.org/podcast/ For questions, please contact us at contact@aiasiapacific.org or follow us on Twitter or Instagram to stay in touch.

The BBC Reith Lectures return and this year's theme is The Four Freedoms. In the first lecture, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi-Aidichie analyzes the state of free speech today, including the phenomenon some call “cancel culture.” She argues that moral courage is required to resist threats to freedom of speech, be they political, legal or social.

In this one-off episode we discussed the late Richard Rogers, particularly his Reith Lectures, given for the BBC in the mid-90s on the subject of the 'Sustainable City'. We compare and contrast his rhetoric and his design work, try to decipher his vision for the future of the city, and think about the ways in which architectural culture has and hasn't changed in the intervening decades. You can listen to the Reith lectures here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00gxnzz This is a one-off episode, our first in a little while! Next we'll be talking about the 'Primitive Hut' as voted for by our Patreon subscribers. Edited by Matthew Lloyd Roberts. Support the show on Patreon to receive bonus content for every show. Please rate and review the show on your podcast store to help other people find us! Follow us on twitter // instagram // facebook We're on the web at aboutbuildingsandcities.org

In this Intelligence Briefing, the guys go over Edward Said's book Representations of the Intellectual, which was based on his 1993 series of Reith Lectures.  This book focuses on the conceptions of intellectuals and the roles that they should play within society.  A very fun conversation, on a very important work!  Part 2 of this conversation will be coming out as a Patreon Exclusive episode very soon. You can listen to Said's series of Reith Lectures for free here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gxr1s  Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

By some measures, the last two years have seen a surge in demand for consumer learning platforms like Masterclass, CreativeLive and Skillshare. Often, these platforms position themselves as an alternative to streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime. Is this part of a broader trend towards learning as entertainment? If so, what does that mean for learning in the workplace?  In this week's episode of The Mind Tools L&D Podcast, Ross D, Owen, Nahdia and Ross G discuss: whether there truly is increased demand for 'edutainment' the difference between entertainment and 'fun' the role of entertainment in the design of workplace learning Show notes At the start of this week's show, Ross G challenged the premise of Ross D's opening question by citing data from the ONS. You can find these data here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/satelliteaccounts/bulletins/coronavirusandhowpeoplespenttheirtimeunderrestrictions/28marchto26april2020 In WILTW, Ross D recommended Stuart Russell's Reith Lectures on artificial intelligence: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001216k/episodes/player The Netflix series Nahdia mentioned was School of Chocolate: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81207686 Ross G discussed the history of the burpee, created by Royal Huddleston Burpee Sr. You can find out more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burpee_(exercise) For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit mindtoolsbusiness.com. There, you'll also find details of our award-winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work. Connect with our speakers If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter: Ross Dickie - @RossDickieMT Owen Ferguson - @OwenFerguson Ross Garner - @RossGarnerMT Nahdia Khan - @_nahdia_khan 

In part two of the BBC Reith Lectures, professor Stuart Russell examines the future of work, as Artificial Intelligence takes over more of the economy. People have been worried about robots displacing workers since at least Aristotle. But in this lecture, Russell argues there's reason for optimism.

The founder of University of California Berkeley's Artificial Intelligence lab Stuart Russell is this year's presenter of the BBC Reith Lectures. His series examines how AI is rapidly becoming integral to the economy, military, and daily life. He argues that we have a responsibility to put moral limits on AI as we continue to cede ethical decision-making to machines.

In the last of our Machine Learning Trilogy and final episode of Season Two, we talk about applying ML in the context of Power BI. We once again try to trick the algorithm with mentions of Excel, and end with a summary of our thoughts on Machine Learning. Artificial Intelligence in a more general sense is also the topic of this year's Reith Lectures.  Just to prove how important and topical The Clearly Podcast really is.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

Our highly anticipated Part Two to our Season Two Grand Finale on Machine Learning!This week we discuss how to decide if machine learning is the right choice for you; Do you have enough data? Are you prepared to be transparent about how you analyse customer data? Will your data create an AI monster?!  Next week, in the last of our mini-series, we will look at how you can use Machine Learning inside Power BI and other tools. Artificial Intelligence in a more general sense is also the topic of this year's Reith Lectures.  Just to prove how important and topical The Clearly Podcast really is.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

As a big finale to Season 2, we thought we'd bring you a mini sub-series on possibly the biggest buzz word of the year: Machine Learning.This week, we look at what machine learning is, and where you might have come across it in your day to day life.  We go on to discuss why business might want to use Machine Learning and the sorts of problems it can solve.Next week we will go on to talk about the considerations you will need if you want to use Machine Learning and in the final episode we look at using ML components inside Power BI and other tools.Artificial Intelligence in a more general sense is also the topic of this year's Reith Lectures.  Just to prove how important and topical The Clearly Podcast really is.If you already use Power BI, or are considering it, we strongly recommend you join your local Power BI user group here.To find out more about our services and the help we can offer, contact us at one of the websites below:UK and Europe: https://www.clearlycloudy.co.uk/North America: https://www.clearlysolutions.net/

The CBC has its Massey Lectures. The BBC has its Reith Lectures. And ABC Australia has its Boyer Lectures. This year's speaker is acclaimed Australian actor and theatre director, John Bell. He illustrates how Shakespeare's life and works have profound relevance to issues we're facing today: political self-interest, gender inequality and the growing need for good governance.

The CBC has its Massey Lectures. The BBC has its Reith Lectures. And ABC Australia has its Boyer Lectures. This year's speaker is acclaimed Australian actor and theatre director, John Bell. He illustrates how Shakespeare's life and works have profound relevance to issues we're facing today: political self-interest, gender inequality and the growing need for good governance.

Laura chats to Adam about reports that Christmas parties were held in Downing Street at the height of last year's lockdown. The BBCs Hugh Pym and Branwen Jeffreys join Adam to discuss whether festivities and school nativities will go ahead this year. We hear views from the picket line as university staff go on a three-day strike over pay, working conditions and pensions. Adam brings you Newscast's very own – and very brief – version of Radio 4's ‘The Reith Lectures'. It's all about AI. And as advent calendars are opened, Adam invents his own version, ‘the badvent calendar', a collection of the most cringeworthy moments of 2021. Please share yours: newscast@bbc.co.uk This episode of Newscast was made by Ros Jones with Georgia Coan, Ben Cooper, Alix Pickles and Sally Abrahams. The editor was Jonathan Aspinwall. The studio manager was Michael Regaard

Programming Note: We are brewing another writing project. Since it demands some undivided attention (haha, so naïve!) we will not be posting for the next five weeks. We will republish a few of our older posts, maybe a few links and brief notes every week till then. Regular programming resumes on 23rd October 2021. Global Policy Watch #1: 9/11, Toynbee and Civilisations Bringing an Indian perspective to global issues— RSJI write this on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Like most adults, I have a clear memory of that day. I was in Bombay then. Just about getting my bearings straight in my first job. I left work early that evening (those were the days). Nariman Point, where I worked, to Warden Road, where I lived, was a half an hour commute then. I got into a ‘kaali-peeli’ and went past Marine Drive smoking a B&H. Quite posh. Especially, for someone who grew up in a small industrial township in eastern India and smoked unfiltered Charminar in college. I usually got off at the intersection of Napean Sea Road and Warden Road. The Shemaroo (‘circulating’) library was located right opposite the Jogger’s Park. It was a dingy little place, packed with books, kids borrowing Harry Potters and a familiar musty smell of libraries that mixed with the salty Arabian Sea breeze blowing in from across. The proprietor spoke in a lazy Sindhi drawl (‘helloo, Shemaaarooo’) while keeping his eye all the time on a small TV that was mounted high on the wall on one end. On the other side of the street, further up the Napean Sea Road, was the famous Shemaroo video library. Another landmark of those times in south Bombay. Between these two establishments, my life in Bombay was a pleasant whirl of books and world cinema. And there was the paani-puri waala at the start of the Sophia College lane. Sorry, I digress.Back to that evening. I had picked up a John Updike and was checking out from the library when the man at the counter with his eyes on the TV drawled - “yeh(hh) dekho(oo)”! So, I turned right, looked up and saw the second plane crashing into the South Tower (2 WTC). Things weren’t the same again. A couple of weeks back I saw the forlorn image of the last US soldier leaving Afghanistan. A grainy night picture enveloped in a ghostly, greenish hue. And I couldn’t help thinking of the contrast to that clear, blue fall day when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. Those two images - one clean but ominous and the other blurry and defeated - bookend perhaps the most significant period of post-Cold War history whose echo will play out through this century. 2001 was a different time though. My life was good. India was shining. The western liberal democratic order had won the battle of superpowers. Nations, long suffering under communist dictatorships, were embracing democracy all around. Free market was in vogue. China was about to enter WTO. Borders were becoming meaningless. The end of history was nigh. We could feel it in our bones.And here we are in 2021. After many meaningless campaigns in Middle East and Afghanistan, the US is on a retreat with no interest in playing the global policeman. The global financial crisis (GFC) and the Covid-19 pandemic have dealt a body blow to globalisation. Borders have become more meaningful than ever as Brexit and the backlash against immigration have shown. The anger against the elite has seen the rise of right-wing nationalism and a retreat into authoritarian setups across the many fledgling democracies in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. China turned prosperous but it didn’t turn into a liberal, open society as many had expected. Instead, it is mounting its own threat to the liberal order offering its model of a one-party regime that draws upon its civilisational memory as an alternative. India is not exactly shining now. And for me? Well, I’m writing this newsletter. Who could have imagined this in 2001? There have been epochal events in history that changed its course. But none that lasted fewer than 20 minutes with a mere two buildings collapsing. We didn’t know it then. But they may have brought down a civilisation. In the past few years, I have found greater meaning in the essays of the great 20th-century historian, Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), while trying to make sense of the change around us. This might seem surprising. Toynbee is hardly read any more in colleges. His last years where he made a distinct turn to the spiritual, his academic style that bypassed the factual for the ‘total human experience’, his rejection of Eurocentrism and his championing of Asian civilisational values made him an academic pariah by the end of his life. Yet, about half a century after his death, I see in his works a useful framework to appreciate the events that have unfolded in the past 20 years. I will take up two elements of this frame in this edition.Cultural Homogenisation versus Plurality of CivilisationThe idea that a dominant culture will impose its hegemony of ideas and beliefs through political will over other cultures seemed incongruous to Toynbee as he studied 19 successful and 9 abortive civilisations. That study yielded his 12-volume masterpiece, A Study of History. The two-volume abridged version by D.C. Somervell is easier to read and more accessible. For Toynbee, the dominant civilisation will export its way of life and cultural artefacts and they might even be accepted by others in a sign of apparent homogenisation. But it will be naïve to believe this acceptance and imitation of another culture signals the subsuming of a civilisation into the other. There’s a great anecdote in Toynbee’s essay Islam, The West, And The Future (as part of his 1948 book Civilisation on Trial) which illuminates this idea (reproduced below):“This state of mind may be illustrated by a conversation which took place in the nineteen-twenties between the Zaydi Imam Yahya of San’a and a British envoy whose mission was to persuade the Imam to restore peacefully a portion of the British Aden Protectorate which he had occupied during the general War of 1914-1918 and had refused to evacuate thereafter, notwithstanding the defeat of his Ottoman overlords. In a final interview with the Imam, after it had become apparent that the mission would not attain its object, the British envoy, wishing to give the conversation another turn, complimented the Imam upon the soldierly appearance of his new-model army. Seeing that the Imam took the compliment in good part, he went on: ‘And I suppose you will be adopting other Western institutions as well?’ ‘I think not,’ said the Imam with a smile. ‘Oh, really? That interests me. And may I venture to ask your reasons?’ ‘Well, I don’t think I should like other Western institutions,’ said the Imam. ‘Indeed? And what institutions, for example?’ ‘Well, there are parliaments,’ said the Imam. ‘I like to be the Government myself. I might find a parliament tiresome. ‘Why, as for that,’ said the Englishman, ‘I can assure you that responsible parliamentary representative government is not an indispensable part of the apparatus of Western civilization. Look at Italy. She has given that up, and she is one of the great Western powers.’ ‘Well, then there is alcohol,’ said the Imam, ‘I don’t want to see that introduced into my country, where at present it is happily almost unknown.’ ‘Very natural,’ said the Englishman; ‘but, if it comes to that, I can assure you that alcohol is not an indispensable adjunct of Western civilization either. Look at America. She has given up that, and she too is one of the great Western powers.’ ‘Well, anyhow,’ said the Imam, with another smile which seemed to intimate that the conversation was at an end, ‘I don’t like parliaments and alcohol and that kind of thing.’ (emphasis mine) It is difficult for the Imam to put his finger on what “kind of thing” of the western civilisation is he dead against. There’s no definition of it. You could learn the western ways, read their great texts, trade with them, watch their films and grow prosperous following their lead; and yet, you would reject ‘that kind of thing’. There’s no logic to this. It is what it is. It’s always been this way. As Toynbee continues: The Englishman could not make out whether there was any suggestion of humour in the parting smile with which the last five words were uttered; but, however that might be, those words went to the heart of the matter and showed that the inquiry about possible further Western innovations at San’a had been more pertinent than the Imam might have cared to admit. Those words indicated, in fact, that the Imam, viewing Western civilization from a great way off, saw it, in that distant perspective, as something one and indivisible and recognized certain features of it, which to a Westerner’s eye would appear to have nothing whatever to do with one another, as being organically related parts of that indivisible whole. This is the Gandhian equivalent of accepting outside influences but on our own terms (“open your windows and let the winds blow in”). And not the isomorphic mimicry of the dominant culture that the elites of weaker nations often end up doing. Eventually, the plurality of civilisation asserts itself to redress the balance. Civilisation isn’t a destination. It is ever-changing and ever assimilating. As Toynbee memorably wrote:“Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.” This is what the past 20 years have shown us. “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” The other idea that Toynbee spent a great deal of time on was what causes civilisations to decline and fall. For Toynbee, civilisations didn’t break down because of a loss of control over their territory or human environment. Or a decline in military might or technology prowess. These are proximate causes but not the underlying reason. For Toynbee, the real decline is rooted in the social. Civilisations build and grow because of ‘creative response’ of a minority to difficult circumstances. This creative minority that battles the odds is the genesis of all civilisations. Over time, they overcome the external material threats through their military and economic might and build a stable platform for it to flourish. And then begins their focus on challenges that arise from within which require, what Toynbee calls, an inner or spiritual response. This is when a civilisation turns inwards, introspects deeply about itself and creates cultural markers that stand the test of time. The decline comes because the creative minority (the elites as we might call them today) lose their creative power, turn self-obsessed and focus all their energies on self-preservation. The majority loses their trust in them and rebels. This leads to a loss of social cohesion and the civilisation splits into three groups. A ‘dominant minority’, a pale shadow of the creative minority of the past, that’s clinging on to their power; an ‘inner proletariat’ that’s within the civilisation but has no interest anymore in following the lead of the dominant minority and rebels against it; and lastly, an ‘external proletariat’ that’s beyond the boundaries of civilisation which now no longer is in the thrall of the dominant civilisation and resists any attempt by it to dominate any more. A civilisation in decline isn’t a pretty sight. There’s a lack of clarity on which way to steer it or even who will steer it. There’s an aimless drift in its affairs. There’s a longing for the glorious past or some kind of revolution that will usher in a new future. It is a fertile ground for demagogues. Sometime during the Vietnam War, Toynbee wrote:“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.” I will leave you to draw your inferences as you read the above section and look at the course America has taken over the past two decades. History might not repeat. But it rhymes. I will close with what Toynbee thought was the only way for a civilisation to revive itself:“Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements [of civilization]. Only birth can conquer death―the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.” There’s a lesson there for the US. And if you read that closely, there’s a lesson in there for India of the present too. Global Policy Watch #2: 9/11 and the Myth of Mindless ViolenceBringing an Indian perspective to global issues— Guest Post by Ameya NaikEven if you’ve never read Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, you’ve probably come across her theories on grief and loss. She proposed that the human mind processes grief in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Modern research has built on this model, supporting what may seem intuitive - that the five stages are often not linear, and that grief can be prolonged, impacted, and circular.As a psychiatrist, Kubler-Ross developed her theories (and then applied them) in her work with terminally ill patients in Chicago and California. As anyone who has lost a family member to such a condition will know, these are intensely personal experiences, as the afflicted person and their family grapple with illness, pain, and impending loss.Such experiences can be qualitatively different from instances of societal rupture: events that become a shared experience of loss, pain, trauma, or disruption. Unlike illness, which is ultimately an anticipable part of any personal or family life story, these societal events are like the shock of a traffic accident, magnified many times over. They can be seen as ruptures precisely because those who experience them recall feeling that the world changed -- that life would never be as it was before.It was just such an experience with mass violence and disruption that sparked Kubler-Ross’ own interest in how the human mind processes death, both actual and impending. As a volunteer with the International Voluntary Service for Peace at the end of World War II, she visited the Majdanek concentration camp outside Lublin, Poland. Her biography describes a striking image she found there: on a wall in the camp, prisoners awaiting execution had somehow carved a picture of butterflies in flight. It was an illustration, she said, not only of transformation - the philosophical idea that death is not an end, but a transition - but also of dignity among the dying. That this could be found even amidst the cruelty of a concentration camp is poetic; it cannot change the fact of the deaths that followed, but it does change their meaning.There is a second sense in which violence has meaning: the perpetrators of violence often intend it to convey a specific message to a specific group, often the community to which their victims belong. That message is usually some version of “do not imagine you are safe”. Sometimes it comes with the expectation of surrender - I can hurt you, so you had best not resist my will. In other cases, as with terrorist attacks, fear is an end in itself.Much of the study of political violence is understanding when a group uses violence against another or others, and what message they aim to convey thereby. For instance, Dara Kay Cohen and her colleagues have done exceptional work on understanding the variations in use of sexual violence in conflict - who does it, under what circumstances, and with what motive or desired effect.This is the irony of studying terrorism: it is war, and hence politics, by other means - and politics is all about messaging and influence. The perpetrators of a terrorist attack are well aware of how their actions will be interpreted, and quite deliberate in choosing actions that send such a message. We know this is true, and yet, the survivors and family members of victims of a terrorist attack are probably the last people who want to hear such an analysis. Their loved ones have been snatched away from them, suddenly and painfully. Some are fortunate to find, even in that loss, a story of courage and dignity -- for instance among the passengers on United Flight 93. Others, especially when in the stages of denial and anger, will pronounce these events -- the violence and loss -- meaningless, senseless, mindless.I have spent the past week and more listening to many voices speaking about attacks of September 11th, 2001, and what the twenty years since have involved, what lessons can be learnt, and so on. There can be no dispute that this event was a rupture -- our world has not been the same as it was before. A more complete accounting of what exactly has changed, though, is likely to prove difficult.As you take in these many voices, please take it as a sign that “what 9/11 means” is far from settled; to the extent that it meant and means different things to different people, a final answer may never be possible. What is certain is that the attacks themselves, and the “Global War on Terror” that followed, was neither mindless nor meaningless; violence never is.Matsyanyaaya: The Taliban Government and What it Means for IndiaBig fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action— Pranay Kotasthane(This is a draft of my article which appeared first in Times of India’s Thursday, September 9th edition.)Taliban has again done what it does best: make vague promises, extract concessions, and return to their original plan. Meanwhile, the interlocutors continue to extract more promises from the Taliban — hoping that the group has changed — only to return disappointed. This cycle repeats. Afghans suffer.The newly announced Taliban government is a good illustration of this now-familiar playbook. Former President Hamid Karzai and the Head of the High Council for National Reconciliation Abdullah Abdullah's presence in Qatar gave an impression that an interim government with broader representation is in the works. The Taliban made the right noises all through the Doha agreement negotiations about creating an inclusive government. But when the government was finally announced, it was anything but inclusive.The exclusion of women in the ministry shouldn't surprise anyone. Instead, notice three other aspects. Many old-timers have found a place in the government as a reward for their role during the twenty-year war. For the Taliban, it didn't matter if the international community had put these leaders under travel and financial sanctions. For a long time, the US  believed that these sanctions could mould the Taliban's future behaviour. Not only did the Taliban ignore this carrot of removing sanctions, but it has also chosen to appoint Sirajuddin Haqqani — still on the FBI's wanted list — as the powerful Minister of Interior. When asked on a Pakistani news show about the sanctions curtailing the ministers' ability to govern, the Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen countered that the US had gone back on its Doha agreement promise of removing the sanctions three months after the intra-Afghan dialogue began.  Two, as Ibraheem Bahiss of the Crisis Group points out, there are no Hazaras, just two Tajiks, one Uzbek, and hardly any representation from the north in the 33-member government. Pashtuns from the southern part of Afghanistan — Taliban's strong base — have disproportionate representation. While the world is still hoping that this caretaker government would transition to a more inclusive government in the future, the Taliban continues to maintain that it is already an inclusive formation. Despite the steadfast opposition, the Taliban's narrative has always been that without broad-based support, they wouldn't have been able to sustain a war with a superpower for twenty years.And three, the Pakistan-backed factions have cornered all the positions. Not only is the Haqqani Network in, but all candidates known to take an independent line are out. The Doha political office has been sidelined, while Mullah Abdul Ghani 'Baradar' has been relegated to a deputy prime minister role.Given the lopsided composition of this government, protests from many sections of society are likely to continue. The latest rounds of protests in Kabul were in opposition to Pakistan's interference in Afghanistan's domestic affairs. Such a perception will only gain strength with the formation of a government that came into being after an ISI Chief visited Kabul. Twitter feeds of protests in Kabul will continue to pressure other governments to modulate their engagement with the new government. Expect the resistance forces in the north to regroup once the Taliban lowers its guard there. From a foreign policy angle, the US is unlikely to grant any economic relief to this government.From the Indian perspective, hopes that the Taliban will be aggressive towards Pakistan, once in power, should be shelved for now. This government is, without doubt, a Pakistan-installed and Pakistan-controlled administration. It also means that any resumption of Indian diplomatic presence in Afghanistan will remain severely diminished for quite some time. Beyond limited contact to enable humanitarian assistance, the risks of engaging with this administration far outweigh the benefits.Finally, we shouldn't forget that the Taliban wants to transform the Afghanistan State itself. It won't be content with installing a government alone. The Taliban believes that it has freed Afghanistan from foreign powers, and its next project is to create a new constitution. Many Afghans will continue to oppose this revisionist project.India Policy Watch #1: Pluralism and its DiscontentsInsights on burning policy issues in India— Pranay Kotasthane“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” RSJ’s invocation of Toynbee reminded me of an instance of majoritarianism from the past week that should scare us, once again. A Bengaluru-based ready-to-cook food manufacturer was accused of mixing cow bones in dosa batter, through a targeted disinformation campaign on popular social media. To sound even more compelling, the posts also said that the company employed ‘only Muslims', it Halal certified, and hence ‘every single’ Hindu should refrain from buying its products.At one level, none of this should surprise us. Like everything else in India, food is also not personal. It’s communal and hence communal. The Information Age version of food-based majoritarinism perhaps began in 2015 with the lynching of a Muslim man in Dadri following the circulation of three photos of meat and bones of a slaughtered animal via WhatsApp. Since then, such instances have become irregularly regular. And yet, this latest instance hurts. Perhaps because it is personal. I am an admiring customer of the brand facing baseless accusations. Their ready-to-cook food has popularised a whole new segment of breakfast eats, and inspired many a copycats in the process. On deeper reflection, I realised how this instance illustrates the instrumental significance of tolerance. Religious tolerance (or the lack of it) can even change the nature of acceptable competition in markets. In a communally-charged environment, instead of product quality and differentiation, targeting the religion of a seller becomes the shortest-path-to-ground for a hypothetical adversary. Why compete when you can communalise? What happens to an economy in which this hatred itself becomes the primary method for oneupmanship between employees and between firms? It is easy to blame social media apps that are used to propagate such messages. But its really the ‘social distancing’ between Hindus and Muslims that has allowed people to frame, disseminate, and want to believe, the most outlandish accusations against each other. And so, when I think of twenty years since 9/11, my heart sinks. While the terrorists have been defeated over the last decades, it seems to me that terrorism has won. It has deepened the divides between religious communities. Terrorism has even managed to set the terms for casual debates about politics, society, and culture. And most importantly, it has torn down the carefully constructed idea of Indian pluralism. Like with the language of terrorism, the ‘other’, the ‘enemy’ has become central to the existence of all our religious communities. If terrorism is theatre, the show’s been running for twenty years and still going strong.I’ll end this lament with a Puliyabaazi episode with Ghazala Wahab, whose book ‘Born a Muslim’ tries to bridge the knowledge gap between Hindus and Muslims. We need many more such stories if we truly want to vanquish majoritarianism.India Policy Watch #2: On-road behaviour and usInsights on burning policy issues in India— Pranay KotasthaneRoads are like big functions — you come across several annoying people whom you meet just once. But on roads, this fearsome interchange happens every single day. And so on-road behaviour tells a lot about our society, values, and priorities. Two thoughts regarding roads made me write this piece.One, the precipitous fall in observing traffic rules since COVID-19 began. In my city, driving on the left-side of the road divider was a rule largely followed before the pandemic hit. But that norm melted once the traffic thinned during the first-wave. Not surprising. But what’s interesting is the persistence of this norm-breaking. Observe how the norm, once broken, hasn’t been put together even as vehicle traffic has gone back to near normal on key roads. Is this your observation as well? What’s happened to rule-breaking on roads in your city? How can we return to the older equilibrium of more rule-following?Two, I read this tongue-in-cheek and yet not tongue-in-cheek story of the Union Roads Minister’s idea that vehicle horns should also play to their tunes, meaning that horns should sound like flutes, violins, and tabla (how sushil and sanskaari). So that the honourable minister doesn’t seem out of place, I have another wacko idea — a two-way horn that’s audible to drivers. I even wrote something on it seven years ago in CitizenMatters: A basic law of economics states that a rational person makes a choice by comparing the costs and benefits associated with it. If the marginal benefits of picking an alternative exceed the marginal costs, that alternative is picked. It is relevant in the current context because the marginal costs currently are too low for the offenders to force them to give up the benefit experienced by pressing the easily accessible horn button. Raising monetary costs alone will not be sufficient to change the predisposition of the average Indian driver, which is to use the horn as an object to reduce his/her on-road anxiety — much like an office desk stress ball.One way is to think beyond fines and instead increase the emotional costs for the offenders. This can be done, for example, by installation of horns that channel a portion of the sound they generate towards the vehicle users themselves.Currently, the users are practically shielded from the noise pollution because the design is such that the sound is amplified and expelled outwards. If, on the other hand, if a blaring horn also causes discomfort to the user’s ears, it will make him/her think twice before launching a noise assault on other road users, particularly the unarmed pedestrians.Though the design of such a system is simple and costs not high, it is natural that no vehicle maker will be interested in incorporating this for the fear of turning away possible customers. And this is where governments can step in. The Union government can create noise guidelines on the lines of the Bharat Stage emission standards. Such vehicular noise guidelines with broad specifications for horns that feed back to the user will help bring down noise levels.Along with the existing initiatives, this step of increasing emotional costs can make our urban public spaces sane and peaceful. Ideally, a society that is more empathetic towards others will not need such government interventions. But until we reach that enlightened state, we need our governments and our people to collectively tackle this social evil of urban noise pollution.HomeWorkReading and listening recommendations on public policy matters[Podcast] Dan Carlin on the retreat from Afghanistan: After 20 years in Afghanistan the U.S. exits the country thus ending the longest war in American history. Are there any lessons to be learned? [Article] Yuval Harari’s 2015 article on the theatre of terror[Podcast] Toynbee’s Reith Lectures from 1952. The BBC website has taken down the audio for five of the six parts. Thankfully, the transcripts are all available here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). Get on the email list at publicpolicy.substack.com

In our final episode of Mark Carney’s 2020 BBC Reith Lectures, the economist and former governor of the Banks of England and Canada, focuses on how the ultimate test of a more fair economy will be how it addresses the growing climate crisis.

2020 BBC Reith Lecturer Mark Carney continues his lecture series entitled, ‘How We Get What We Value.’ In this episode, the former bank governor focuses on the 2008 financial crisis and the ongoing impact of the pandemic.

Mark Carney is the 2020 Reith Lecturer, the BBC’s flagship lecture series. In his lectures entitled, 'How We Get What We Value,' he argues the worlds of finance, economics, and politics have too often prioritized financial values, over human ones. The future depends on reversing that shift. In lecture one, he addresses the changing nature of value — and how we've come to equate 'value' to what is profitable.

Today on the Take on Board podcast, Helga is speaking to Leesa Chesser about AICD chairs mentoring program and why advisory boards are a great way to build your portfolio career.Leesa is a Non-Executive Director, and mentor who builds and Chairs Advisory Boards for start ups, SME’s, not-for-profit organisations and social enterprises to create value in the health and human services, infrastructure, defence and space industries.She is on the boards of Community Options Australia Sydney, Hen House Co-operative Ltd Adelaide and chairs or sits on several advisory boards in Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide in the start up space, social enterprises and the GOGO Foundation.Contact Leesa or find out more about her:https://www.linkedin.com/in/leesa-chesser-ned/Resources mentioned in this episode:The Reith Lectures: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9What barrier? Getting more women in the boardroom with Jan Easton https://www.helgasvendsen.com.au/episode-64-jan-eastonCan I get some help over here? Tips for putting together an advisory board with Louise Broekman https://www.helgasvendsen.com.au/episode-63-louise-broekmanFOR MORE INFORMATION:TOB Breakfast: Event - 16 March 2021: https://www.trybooking.com/BOJER Board Accelerator 2021: https://www.trybooking.com/BLWWY)Join the Take on Board community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TakeOnBoard/Follow along on Twitter: @TakeOnBoardFor more information about Helga Svendsen: https://www.helgasvendsen.com.au/Interested in working with Helga? https://www.helgasvendsen.com.au/workwithmeContact Helga: helga@helgasvendsen.com.au

How can you extend life? Professor Tom Kirkwood is Emeritus Professor at Newcastle University where he headed the Institute for Ageing and Health. He delivered the famous Reith Lectures and was awarded a CBE in 2009. Perhaps most famously he put forward the ‘Disposable Soma Hypothesis' — which postulates that the body has a limited budget of resources and energy. It must therefore make a compromise between living longer (longevity) and activities which will help it reproduce. Interestingly, he also invented the INR in the 80s, which is a blood test used everyday by doctors to measure the clotting of a patient's blood. We talk about the disposable soma theory, how calorie restriction may extend lifespan, anti-ageing interventions which Prof Kirkwood finds interesting and how you would design a trial to show the efficacy of an anti ageing drug. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Published on 28 May 2019. Jonathan Sumption explains how democratic processes have the power to accommodate opposition opinions and interests. But he argues that in recent years that politics has shied away from legislating and now the courts have taken on more and more of the role of making law. Lord Sumption was until recently a justice of the UK’s Supreme Court and is a distinguished historian. This lecture is recorded in front of an audience at Birmingham University.The Reith Lectures are presented and chaired by Anita Anand and produced by Jim Frank. Editor: Hugh Levinson

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced nation states to confront how we value health, wealth, and opportunity, apparently forcing governments to choose between the life of its citizens, and the life blood of the economy. Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, argues this is a false dichotomy, and that we should be moving beyond a narrow and financially driven reaction, to COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced nation states to confront how we value health, wealth, and opportunity, apparently forcing governments to choose between the life of its citizens, and the life blood of the economy. Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, argues this is a false dichotomy, and that we should be moving beyond a narrow and financially driven reaction, to COVID-19.

In 2008, the world experienced the near total implosion of the banking system.  According to 2020 BBC Reith lecturer, and former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, it was a deeper crisis in our values that underpinned that lurch towards the abyss. 

In 2008, the world experienced the near total implosion of the banking system.  According to 2020 BBC Reith lecturer, and former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, it was a deeper crisis in our values that underpinned that lurch towards the abyss. 

Mark Carney’s Reith lectures chart how we have come to esteem financial value over human value and how we have gone from market economies to market societies. He argues this has contributed to a trio of crises: of credit, Covid and climate.

When a dying person asks their doctor if he or she can do anything to help, is it easier for the doctor to provide a false hope than have a difficult conversation about how best to manage their last days? Hardtalk speaks to Atul Gawande, who wants to change the way doctors think - and talk - about death. It is a subject he covers in the BBC's annual Reith Lectures this year. He says doctors are good at addressing specific individual problems or diseases, but argues that the ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life - all the way to the very end.(Photo: Atul Gawande. Credit: Tim Llewellyn/BBC)

On Start the Week Andrew Marr discusses how World War II still grips the public imagination. No other period in history has presented greater dilemmas for both leaders and ordinary people, and in two sweeping accounts Max Hastings and Antony Beevor discuss the power politics at play, ideological hypocrisy, egomania, betrayal and self-sacrifice. Juliet Gardiner discusses how military history has been largely replaced by social history, as the lives of those who lived through war and its aftermath take centre stage. And for this year's Reith Lectures, Niall Ferguson questions whether the Western world, in the aftermath of WW2 and the Cold War, has become so in thrall to its institutions of democracy and the rule of law that it can no longer find solutions to today's crises. Producer: Katy Hickman.