4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2018
⏱️ 37 minutes
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0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
0:03.0 | Hello, I'm Kristi Young. |
0:05.0 | Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item |
0:12.0 | that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island. |
0:16.0 | For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. |
0:22.0 | You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website. |
0:30.0 | My cast away this week is the philosopher John Gray. |
0:53.0 | If you can't yourself as curious, then listen up. |
0:56.0 | His forte is using a glintingly sharp intellect to prod the pulp cavity of Western liberal presumptions, penetrating comfy certainties with deft intellectual precision, |
1:07.0 | painfully exposing a plethora of widely held preconceptions. |
1:11.0 | These days, he writes full-time and broadcast too. |
1:14.0 | But for almost 10 years, he was professor of European thought at the LSE, having also spent a stretch as professor of politics at Oxford, |
1:22.0 | and time too, as visiting professor at both Harvard and Yale. |
1:26.0 | The eldest son of a time-side docker, he started out on the political left, but his self-confessed recurrent habit of inquiry seems to have resulted in a refreshingly supple approach to political allegiance. |
1:39.0 | He's had stints identifying with both the right and left. |
1:43.0 | He says, my aim is not to convert anyone. I don't care what you believe. |
1:47.0 | I write for those that are curious who want to question, who want to look at their thinking and reflect on it, and see whether they want to carry on with it. |
1:56.0 | So John Gray, welcome. |
1:58.0 | The notion that you don't care is a very interesting thing to me. |
2:03.0 | So your purpose in writing and broadcasting, then, is to encourage your readers, encourage listeners to really think about what they think. |
2:10.0 | How do you know if you're being effective? Because it's a sort of one-way conversation. |
2:15.0 | Oh, it's not one-way at all, really. My writings do tend to provoke strong responses, and I can see when I've touched a nerve in the strong, sometimes virulent reactions of many of my critics. |
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