Hello, this is Jeremy Bowen, the International Editor of BBC News, and I'm here because I want

to talk to you about an event I'm doing with Intelligent Squared on the 2nd of November in London,

and I'm going to be talking about the more than 30 years that I've spent reporting on major

events in the Middle East with my great friend and colleague over many, many years, Justin Webb.

And I'm sure we'll talk about a few other things as well, Justin and I started at the BBC on

the same day in 1984. So, if you'd like to join us either in person or online, then visit

IntelligentSquared.com to find out more. Welcome to Intelligent Squared. I'm producer Catherine

Hughes. In an age where the line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation

seems ever more blurred, it's worth asking if anyone can actually own a culture.

In this episode of the podcast, acclaimed author and public intellectual Martin Puckner,

shows that the history of mankind has always been a story of borrowing from one another,

and that this is something to be celebrated and not lamented. I host for this conversation is Edward

Wilson Lee, fellow and lecturer at Sydney Sussex College University of Cambridge. His

Edward with more. The Martin is the Byron and Anita Wien, a professor of English and comparative

literature at Harvard University, and the author of a large number of books on literature, cultural

history and philosophy, amongst which I will just mention a few such as 2017's The Written World,

The Power of Stories to Shape People, History and Civilizations, and 2020's The Language of

Feeves about a secret code language targeted by the Nazis for elimination. But we're here tonight

to discuss his most recent volume, which is Culture, a New World History, which is now out from

Norton in the US and from Ithaca here in the UK. Martin, thank you so much for joining us. I'm

going to start by just getting a sense of how you embarked on this absolutely immense undertaking,

and it is a book of enormous scope chronologically, geographically and thematically. So it moves

...