Afleveringen
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The old media has failed to rise to the challenge of tech, but we'll miss it when it's gone.
Read the original essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/testament-to-doomed-media/.
Image: Woman reading a newspaper. Credit: Alamy
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Thomas de Waal joins EI’s Jack Dickens to discuss how the recent elections in Armenia could reshape geopolitics in the Caucasus and beyond.
Image: Armenian flag with Mount Ararat in background. Credit: Alamy
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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The late Len Deighton produced novels that were packed with excitement and suspense but also infused with moral complexity and psychological insight. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/len-deightons-spycraft/.
Image: Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. Credit: Allstar Picture Library Ltd
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George Magnus speaks to EI’s Jack Dickens about the geopolitical logic behind China’s economic strategy.
Image: A container ship from China. Credit: Rudmer Zwerver
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The largest Jewish community in the world is defined by its deep integration into America's national story, its liberal traditions and scepticism towards Israeli governments. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/a-jewish-american-dream/
Image: A member of the American Jewish Congress participating in the 1965 Montgomery March, advocating for civil rights. Credit: Image Bank
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Marc David Baer speaks to EI’s Paul Lay about his new book 'Children of Abraham: The Story of Jewish-Muslim Relations', and the deep historical connection between two faiths, bound by common roots.
Image: Tiles at Ali Ben Youssef Medersa in Marrakech, Morocco. Credit: Stelios Michael.
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Re-reading CS Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, Hannah Lucinda Smith discovers glimmers of the culture and history of the Turkic peoples in the author's work. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/finding-turkey-in-narnia/
Image: Puffin paperback editions of the Narnia tales by author CS Lewis. Credit: NearTheCoast.com / Alamy Stock Photo
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Filmmaker Maura Smith discusses Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere, her documentary on the photographer who captured modern America.
Image: Steve Schapiro in the 1960s. Credit: Steve Schapiro
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Elżbieta Zawacka, who played a key role in the Home Army’s resistance efforts, was one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Clare Mulley assesses her legacy. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/agent-zo-the-spy-who-saved-poland/.
Image: Monument to Agent Zo. Credit: Alamy
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Craig Fehrman speaks to EI’s Max Mitchell about his new book ‘This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark’, shedding light on one of America’s founding myths.
Image: ‘America in the Making: Lewis and Clark’ by Newell Convers Wyeth (1938). Credit: Alamy
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From Xi Jinping in China to Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the US, Nicholas Wright explores how powerful leaders are reshaping the rules of the global great game. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Read the original essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/why-powerful-individuals-are-dominating-politics/.
Image: Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’. Credit: incamerastock
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How did Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller, become the crucible of Germany's moral collapse? Katja Hoyer, author of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, speaks to EI's Alastair Benn about the town's role in the rise of the Third Reich.
Image: Adolf Hitler at the ‘Haus Elephant’ in Weimar, 1936. Credit: Alamy
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Amid the rise of individualistic technologies and weight-loss drugs, there has been a steady decline in alcohol consumption in Western societies. Yet, Henry Jeffreys argues that this is no good thing. Instead, it suggests a gradual weakening of a shared civilisational inheritance. This audio essay is read by Leighton Pugh.
Read it here: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-civilising-wonders-of-wine/.
Image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’. Credit: Maidun Collection
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Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, speaks to EI’s Jack Dickens about Europe’s place in a changing world order.
Image: The EU flag in Siracusa, Sicily. Credit: Alamy
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In the courtrooms of Nuremberg and Tokyo, the victorious Allies declared that civilisation must not merely win wars but also judge them, leaving a legal and moral legacy that persists to this day. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Image: The defendants at the Nuremberg Trial in 1946. Credit: PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive.
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Daisy Christodoulou and Nicholas Wright join EI’s Paul Lay to discuss the crisis in British universities and how to fix it.
Image: Sightseers outside the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Credit: Alamy
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From the gung-ho glamour of Ian Fleming’s James Bond to the decline and disorder of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, postwar spy novels have captured the shifting myths, legends and caricatures surrounding the secret world. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-anatomy-of-the-spy-novel/.
Image: Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr No (1962). Credit: Alamy
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Marie Kawthar Daouda, author of Not Your Victim: How our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, speaks to EI’s Alastair Benn about the historical illiteracy of attempts to ‘decolonise’ Western culture. Instead, she argues that the moral complexities of history must be accepted in order to develop a genuine appreciation of the Western tradition.
Image: ‘Ruins with an Obelisk in the distance’ by Hubert Robert (1775). Credit: Alamy
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From placard-waving crowds in Yazd to troll farms on social media, the Islamic Republic has long tried to wield Scottish nationalism as a weapon against the UK. This audio essay is read by Leighton Pugh.
Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/irans-strange-scottish-obsession/.
Image: Royal Scots Guards military pipers. Credit: Alamy
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Following the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, President Donald Trump has warned that Cuba is ‘next’. What exactly does he mean by that? Joseph Ledford, Fellow at the Hoover Institution, speaks to EI’s Jack Dickens about a new age of US interventionism in Latin America.
Image: Protesters outside the White House following the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, January 2026. Credit: Alamy
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