Free Thinking - A Brexit reading list.
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2016
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Classicist Professor Edith Hall, New Generation Thinker Chris Kissane, novelist Elif Shafak, and Dr Alan Mendoza from the Henry Jackson Society join Matthew Sweet to consider what might be on a reading list to prepare for a post Brexit world.
Reading List: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Moniza Alvi, Europa Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart Voltaire, Candide Sun Tzu, The Art Of War Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians At The Gate Ali Smith, Autumn Hannah Arendt, Men In Dark Times
Producer: Luke Mulhall
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to evil genius on BBC sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Welcome to the Arts and Ideas podcast from the free thinking team at the BBC. |
| 0:37.0 | What are you reading about Brexit? |
| 0:39.8 | The article in Monday's Metro newspaper, perhaps, reporting that Moore's murderer Ian Brady |
| 0:44.9 | thinks judges must not block the people's vote. |
| 0:48.0 | Or the report in Bilt magazine in which the President of the European Council called Brexit |
| 0:52.9 | the beginning of the destruction of Western political civilisation in its entirety. |
| 0:58.5 | Or all those millions of tweets, hashtag Brexit shambles, hashtag take control. |
| 1:04.7 | It's enough to give anyone a headache. |
| 1:06.7 | Imagine being involved in the process of negotiating Britain's departure from the European Union |
| 1:11.9 | in the middle of this cacophonous and ephemeral discourse. |
| 1:15.6 | On tonight's programme, we're going to offer those people and ourselves something more substantial to chew on. |
| 1:21.4 | No hot takes, no Facebook posts, no memes, no 140 character rants. |
| 1:30.1 | Books, proper books, written by really good writers whose ideas and experiences might help us towards a satisfactory conclusion, whether |
| 1:35.8 | the prospect of Brexit has us gazing optimistically into a headwind or screaming into the |
| 1:40.9 | camera like McCauley Culkin in Home Alone. Tonight, we've gathered a caucus of writers and academics to draw up a Brexit reading list, |
| 1:49.1 | the books that David Davis and Theresa May should be reading in order to get this right, |
| 1:54.3 | and the ones that we should read to understand how to live in a post-Brexit world. |
| 1:59.4 | And among them might be Ali Smith's new book, Autumn, identified by many as the first post-Brexit world. And among them might be Ali Smith's new book, Autumn, |
| 2:02.6 | identified by many as the first post-Brexit novel. All across the country, people felt it was |
... |
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