Battle of the texts: which books changed the world?
Economist Podcasts
The Economist
4.4 • 5K Ratings
🗓️ 26 December 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
So many books are published each year; few stand the test of time. Today we devote our whole show to asking which works have shaped the way we behave and how we think. Picks include “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen, “A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth and “Lord of the Rings” by JRR Tolkien.
Full list of books mentioned in the show:
The Bible
The Koran
“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen
“The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
“On the Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin
“Il Saggiatore” by Galileo Galilei
“Two New Sciences” by Galileo Galilei
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty
“Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman
The novels of Philip Pullman
The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
“The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie
“Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley
“A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth
“Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien
“A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Economist. |
| 0:10.3 | Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. |
| 0:13.9 | I'm your host, Rosie Bloor, and today we're discussing my very favourite thing, books. |
| 0:28.3 | Thank you. my very favorite thing, books. Every Christmas, we ask our correspondence to talk about books that fit a particular theme. |
| 0:33.9 | Last year we talked about books that predict the future, and this year we thought we're going to go one bigger. |
| 0:39.7 | We want to talk about books that have changed the world. |
| 0:45.2 | To help me leave through the pages, I'm joined in the studio by Catherine Nixie, who wrote A Darkening Age and is our culture correspondent and also writes for the Britain section. |
| 0:54.7 | Hi, Catherine. Hi, Rosie. And I'm also joined by Oliver Morton, who wrote The Moon History for |
| 1:00.4 | the Future and is also a senior editor at The Economist. Nice to have you, Olly. Nice to be here, Rosie. |
| 1:09.4 | Catherine, Olly, my first question is, can a book change the world? |
| 1:14.0 | I think almost nothing other than books change the world. |
| 1:16.7 | I mean, the obvious one is the Bible, of course. |
| 1:18.6 | It's impossible to run a counterfactual on what the world would have been like, |
| 1:21.4 | had that book books. |
| 1:22.7 | It's really a library rather than a book, not happened. |
| 1:25.0 | But, I mean, you go through history. |
| 1:26.8 | And again and again, |
| 1:27.6 | the great turning points will come from books, from the rediscovery of Aristotle, from the rediscovery |
| 1:33.3 | of Lucretius in the Renaissance to more obvious modern books that have changed the world, like |
| 1:37.9 | on the origin of species. Do you think that the Bible would have changed the world without |
| 1:41.3 | the operation of divine grace? |
| 1:45.1 | A careful right at the beginning. |
... |
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