Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young,

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

You can support our podcast by visiting... Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

You can support our podcast by visiting Patreon.com forward slash Quilett and becoming a monthly patron.

By becoming a monthly patron you'll also receive our weekly newsletter. Welcome to the Colette Podcast. I'm Jonathan Kaye coming to you from Toronto. Andrew Doyle is a man of contradictions. On one hand he's the brains behind the fictional Twitter character to Tanya McGrath, an

over-the-top social justice foe intersectionalist who routinely lights up social media with her

pitch-perfect satire of overprivileged

woksters. Yet Doyle himself is a mild-mannered intellectual. A former professor and BBC

personality, he has a doctorate in Renaissance literature from Oxford, which I'm pretty

sure Titania McGrath doesn't have. He's also the author of a serious new book called

Free Speech and Why It Matters, in which he makes the case for unfettered free expression.

Doyle isn't to say anything hothead, just the opposite, as you'll hear from this podcast.

In fact, in his book he makes a strong case for voluntary codes of

decorum based on consideration for others, just not legally imposed

censorship regimes based on coercion. And while he rails against cancel culture as we all do

Doyle is one of the success stories someone who not only hasn't been

canceled but who continually gets away with poking at the pieties of ultra-progressive culture while making us all laugh in the process.

Andrew Doyle spoke to me last week from London. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

One of the things I learned from this book is that you have a background teaching Renaissance history?

I did a doctorate in Renaissance poetry, so that might be where that's coming from and I also taught the Shakespeare module at at Oxford University to the undergraduates.

...