Welcome to Sharp Talk, the regular podcast of E-Sharp Magazine. Go to e-sharp.E.sharp. EU for free access to all the podcasts to date. This is Paul Adamson, and I'm in conversation with Sir Kieran Devan. Kieran is the chief executive of the British Council. Kieran, maybe people think they know what the British Council is, but maybe they don't really know what it is.

They think of it maybe as a kind of offshoot of the British government, largely financed by the British Foreign Office,

and whose main job is to go ahead and teach English to the outside world, the British version of the Alliance Francaise or the Goetre Institute,

if you like. So what does the British Council really do in 2018?

Using culture in its widest sense, so it could be language or it could be art or it could be

science or it could be sport, to create relationships at individual level, at institutional level,

at national level between the people of the UK and people of other countries.

And the belief that is behind that is that when you promote, as we tend to talk about,

the interchange of knowledge, good things are more likely to happen than bad.

So it's the fundamental belief that when people know each other and like

each other and understand each other, those good things are much more likely. And in the world

that we're in at the moment in 2018, then the uncertainty which young people are facing in many

countries around the world, the geopolitics that we're seeing at the moment, I think this idea of cultural relationships

is as important as ever. Well, obviously, there will be element in the room for all of us

is Brexit and as you know the British government is determined to try to deliver some kind of

Brexit. On the basis of this kind of of philosophy they're promulgating of global Britain.

Does the British Council's work form part of the British government's global Britain philosophy?

I think we always have been and so a priority for us is working with the next generation of

young people in the Middle East and North Africa and priority for us is working

with emerging economies whether it's the big ones like Indian China or some smaller

ones relatively such as Turkey and Brazil and of course there is the additional one where many of the relationships and friendships

and partnerships and partnerships which have been brokered through the institutions of the European Union

...