Hello, I'm Catherine Carve, producer of Talking Politics. Many thanks for the questions

we've had about this series of history of ideas and for all the feedback. I'm going

to put some of these questions to David and I'm sorry in advance if we don't have time

to get to yours that we've picked, what we hope is a representative sample.

So here are a couple of general questions about this series to start with. So first of all,

how do you select which thinkers to talk about and for each thinker, how do you

choose one work to focus on? A lot of these thinkers are people I've known for a while,

not known personally, but I've taught, I'm familiar with these books, but not all of them.

So for this series, I wanted to do a few that I'd never read before either because they were

recommended or because I felt they were books I ought to have read and was a bit of shame never

to have read them. So this time there were three that I'd never read before, Frederick Douglass,

my bondage and my freedom, Samuel Butler Erowon and I'm ashamed to say I'd never read

Simon de Beauvoir the second sex and I think those were probably the three I most enjoyed

doing because they're great books and I was delighted to have read them.

But I also tried to pick authors that there's not a single story in this series,

it doesn't track a single narrative arc, but where there are connections where it's possible

at least to join some of the thoughts together and in each case for each individual

or in each book, the way I try and do it is to think whether it's possible to tell a story

about the book. So one way to answer this question is to say I do try to pick books

where either the book has a story in it with Russo, I picked the discourse on inequality

rather than the social contract because the discourse on inequality is a story.

It's not just a history, it's a kind of narrative of the human experience.

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