Podcast
Ideas, influence and international politics
The academic origins of geopolitics explained
What is geopolitics?
The origins of a contested concept
Glastonburied (w/ David Butterfield)
Can we keep live music alive?
The end of the line?
Arriving at our destination
Hitting the buffers — when rail fails
Bold projections and frustrating results
Rail riddles — the complex practicalities of rail travel
The realities of rail, from the US to China
Tracking modernity — trains in the modern world
On the complex realities of rail
The wisdom of gamekeepers (w/ Patrick Galbraith)
Deer, eels and Philip Larkin’s lawnmower
Beeching reconsidered
We must assess history before we judge it
Uni tunes (w/ Charlie Bentley-Astor)
Ideas that deserve discussion, not cancellation
Wearing shades
We plebs aren’t supposed to buy designer-influenced fast fashion anymore
The dangerous excesses of breaking boundaries
There is a double standard on trans people and violence
Healers who harm
Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up by Abigail Shrier
Why the Intellectual Dark Web has failed
Internet ideologues have yet to formulate a coherent vision to turn their ideas into action
Tragedy of the common spaces
It is sadly in keeping with the modern British mindset to prefer something good not to be done
William Wilberforce and England’s forgotten saints
The Clapham Saints and their efforts to reform British manners have been unjustly and unwisely forgotten
Alcohol and Islam
An English novelist travels the Muslim world in search of a drink
The king and the boss
Turkish President Erdoğan is no fan of Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu — and vice versa
WW3 and the end of history
The age of world wars is past, the age of global civil war has come
Britain has an industrial strategy, but it’s bad
British politicians have made a fatal commitment to human quantitative easing
It’s not rocket science
It all goes wrong when arts departments start imitating research universities
