This is LBC from Global, leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

Good morning, it's three minutes after ten, and you are listening to James O'Brien on LBC,

where with, I mean, it'd be wrong to describe it as a sense of relief,

because, of course, the conversational matter is so important and serious, but we won't be talking at 10 o'clock this morning about coronavirus-related issues,

except, of course, to make a quick nod to that forecast from the OECD that we will be

worse hit than any other country in Europe, possibly, I just check the headline on that.

Actually, it wouldn't be the world, would it? Any other country in the developed world?

Oh, my days. Thank God when we get to the end of the year in which we're likely to suffer the

most economic damage of any country in the developed world, thank God that we're not going to be imposing

economic sanctions on ourselves at the end of that period, eh?

Doughcat, tug-for-lock, vote Boris Johnson.

We're going to talk instead about culture and about art, and it seems to me to be a particularly

important time to plot the difference to

recognise the distinctions between meaningful conversations and invitations to just bite chunks

out of each other. I don't know, I'll leave it up to you, whether it's helpful for me to

sort of highlight areas where I've made what I would call progress in recent years.

And I was thinking first about, and I don't have full memory,

and we didn't clip the show in the way that we do now before the cameras arrived in the studio.

But I do remember having a conversation some time ago about the use of the N-word

in the works of Mark Twain. And I think, I could be wrong, I hope I'm wrong actually,

but I genuinely think that I certainly set out initially to defend it as a sort of cultural gatekeeper. I think that's how I would have seen

myself. And it would have involved saying, well, it's important to recognize how it was written

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