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. This episode is the second in a two-part series of literary talks produced in

partnership with Sotheby's. In this conversation, a claimed actor and Charles Dickens' enthusiast,

Simon Callow, joins David Goldthought, Sotheby's head of books and manuscripts for Europe.

In a live event chaired by award-winning novelist Kate Moss, to discuss a fascinating handwritten

text of David Copperfield, which Dickens used to perform dramatic live readings and is included

in the London auction on Thursday 20th of July. This event took place in Sotheby's galleries

to mark Sotheby's book week, which encompassed three books and manuscripts auctions in London,

Paris and New York. If you head to Sotheby's.com, you can discover numerous fascinating works

featured in London auction. And now I'll hand over to our chair, Kate Moss, to kick off the conversation.

The thing that I love, I suppose, and particularly listening to you talk about Dickens and obviously

the books that you've written about him, is this sense of an enormous appetite for life

and for the messiness of humanity, all the people, not just one type of person. He's very

even with the baddies, as it were, he's generous. It's absolutely right. There's a huge

generosity, of course, but also he can be very, very savage about things. But you have to remember

that the absolutely pivotal moment in Dickens' life was this time he spent in the blacking warehouse.

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