Leadership: lessons from US Presidents and campaigners.
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2018
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Doris Kearns Goodwin on POTUS, crisis management and ambition - from Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt through FDR and LBJ to Donald Trump. Novelist Georgina Harding and Philip Woods compare notes on the impact of the war in Burma and depictions in fiction, war reporting and memoirs. New Generation Thinker Louisa Egbunike looks at the campaigning of Obi Egbuna the Nigerian-born novelist (1938- 2014), playwright and political activist who led the United Coloured People's Association. Anne McElvoy presents.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is a Pulitzer prize winning historian whose latest book is called Leadership: Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times. Georgina Harding's latest novel is called Land of the Living. Philip Woods is the author of Reporting the Retreat: War Correspondents in Burma.
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 |
| 0:21.2 | it. It's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Anne McHelvoy. |
| 0:39.2 | Welcome to BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas discussion programme, |
| 0:43.4 | where we bring together the most stimulating artists, writers and thinkers in conversation and debate. |
| 0:50.2 | Leaders and trailblazers are on our minds tonight, |
| 0:53.2 | from American presidents to those at the sharp end of colonial adventures, and a prominent protester of 1960s Britain revisited. |
| 1:02.4 | I've been reading a novel exploring the impact of the Battle of Kohima in the Second World War on a survivor and his wife. |
| 1:09.5 | The writer Georgina Harding and historian Philip Woods |
| 1:12.2 | join me later to mull over the differences between fact, fiction and war reporting. |
| 1:18.1 | But we begin with leadership of different kinds. Here's Louisa Egbenike. |
| 1:23.0 | In terms of Obie Abouinna's role as a leader, in addition to his writing, he also organised public displays of protest. |
| 1:30.3 | And one of the most notable ones is after he's released from prison in the late 60s, he has a mock trial of Enoch Powell in Brixton. |
| 1:37.3 | And he says, I've never heard black youths from the ghettos make more revolutionary speeches and appeals for unity as I heard that day. |
| 1:45.4 | More from Louisa on her research a bit later on. |
| 1:48.9 | Before that, though, a doyen of presidential biography, Doris Kearns Goodwin. |
| 1:54.2 | She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian |
| 1:56.1 | whose latest book is called Leadership, |
| 1:59.0 | Lessons from the Presidents for Turbulent Times. |
| 2:02.8 | It interweaves stories of four presidents, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin |
| 2:07.9 | D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. |
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