Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Souty and today I'm going to be talking to

Sarah Bakewell, a writer who specialises in writing about writers, adventurers and philosophers.

Her latest book, Humanly Possible, explores 700 years of writers, thinkers, scientists and artists,

all trying to understand what it means to be truly human.

I'm so thrilled to be able to talk to her about it today. Sarah, welcome to the Penguin podcast.

Thank you very much. You're so welcome. Now, so I'm working on something at the moment and yesterday I

had this book and my colleague said, what's that? What's that? And I said, it's about

humanism. He said, I haven't got a clue what that is. Explain it to me, but we had to be really

quick because we were about to start work. So I said, well, it's about valuing connections with

humans over anything else, expanding your appreciation of what it is to be alive, possibly not believing in a God,

but you can be a humanist and believe in God, and appreciating art as much as possible.

And he said, oh, I think I'm a humanist then. And I said, well, yeah, actually, I think lots of

people are. Now, was that a good explanation? I'm sure I missed bits out, but I was under

pressure. I thought, well, I'll just say what comes into my head. I think that was a great

explanation, especially under pressure. It is one of the absolutely classic things about humanism

is that it's very hard to define, and it's, everybody has their own humanism. Sometimes you

come across people saying, well, only my version of humanism is the real

one and everybody else is not. But it is a incredibly far-reaching concept. And the version that is

well known in the English-speaking world today is the roughly non-religious one, or the one that

I would say rather, it's not that it's non-religious,

...