Influencing History
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Do individuals or broader forces shape history? In the 2025 Reith lectures on BBC Radio 4, Rutger Bregman argues that small groups of individuals can have an outsize influence and he looks to examples in history from suffragism to the ending of slavery. In the Free Thinking studio for Radio 4's round-table discussion about the history of ideas, Matthew Sweet is joined by:
Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer prize winning historian and author of Autocracy Inc, which looks at the networks linking powerful people in our world Jake Subryan Richards, New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and AHRC which puts research on radio. His new book is The Bonds of Freedom: Liberated Africans and the End of the Slave Trade Selina Todd, historian and author of The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class Clare Jackson, historian of seventeenth century Britain, whose latest book is Mirror of Great Britain: A Life of James VI & I Rupert Read, philosopher, climate advocate and co author of Transformative Adaptation and The Climate Majority Project
Producer: Eliane Glaser
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.4 | This is the story of a book. |
| 0:09.8 | It's a wonderful book. |
| 0:10.9 | She's an immensely valuable writer. |
| 0:13.1 | Award winning, commercially and critically successful. |
| 0:16.6 | Then, cancelled. |
| 0:18.3 | It just infuriates me. |
| 0:19.9 | You're reinforcing stereotypes. |
| 0:22.0 | I remember feeling sick by page 8. |
| 0:24.5 | A culture war about race, class, and who has the right to say what? |
| 0:28.9 | I do not think that I wrote in any way a racist book. |
| 0:32.7 | Shadow World, anatomy of a cancellation. |
| 0:35.5 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:37.3 | Hello, my name's Matthew Sweet and you're listening to the Arts and Ideas podcast. |
| 0:41.7 | Who Makes History? A couple of weeks ago on Freethinking, |
| 0:45.9 | we asked you to consider that its turns might be shaped less by human decisions |
| 0:50.4 | and more by climate and geology. |
| 0:53.4 | Well, tonight, inspired by this year's Wreath Lecturer, |
| 0:56.5 | the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, were going to twist the dial the other way. Back, you might |
| 1:02.0 | think, to a rather 19th century view of history as something determined by the actions of human |
| 1:08.3 | individuals, people we might actually name. |
| 1:11.8 | The first lecture described how electorates across the world are turning to populists and authoritarians, |
... |
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