Simon Evans on JS Mill
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 14 August 2018
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Towards the end of his comic rant about the descent of man, Simon Evans does something very dangerous.
He starts to read out to his audience an extract of John Stuart Mill. Potential comedy death?
He tells Matthew Parris why the famous Victorian philosopher with the squirly hair is his idea of genius.
As well as On Liberty, Mill wrote The Subjection of Women and was the first member of Parliament to call for women's right to vote.
The expert witness is Professor Anne Phillips of the London School of Economics.
Producer: Miles Warde
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2018.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Doleepa, and I'm at your service. |
| 0:04.7 | Join me as I serve up personal conversations with my sensational guests. |
| 0:08.8 | Do a leap interviews, Tim Cook. |
| 0:11.2 | Technology doesn't want to be good or bad. |
| 0:15.0 | It's in the hands of the creator. |
| 0:16.7 | It's not every day that I have the CEO of the world's biggest company in my living room. |
| 0:20.7 | If you're looking at your phone more than you're looking in someone's eyes, you're doing the wrong thing. |
| 0:26.0 | Julie, at your service. |
| 0:28.0 | Listen to all episodes on BBC sales. |
| 0:31.5 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:33.0 | Our story begins rather shockingly |
| 0:37.0 | with a bundle found lying beneath a tree |
| 0:40.0 | and a man on his way to work. |
| 0:42.0 | It was in St James's Park, and when the man, a man, a boy really, just 17, unwrapped the bundle, he found inside a baby, |
| 0:50.4 | newborn but dead. Let's hold that scene there for a moment. |
| 0:55.0 | John Stuart Mill was a philosopher, a writer, a pioneering thinker of the Victorian age. |
| 1:01.0 | He's best known as the writer of On Liberty, but before that he lived an extraordinary life. |
| 1:06.4 | In his time, many thought he was a little abnormal. |
| 1:09.6 | When he found that dead baby in the park, his response was to walk the streets handing out advice on contraception. |
| 1:17.0 | This baby had probably been unwanted and the mother had faced a terrible choice. |
| 1:22.0 | Mill was the first MP to call the mother had faced a terrible choice. |
| 1:23.0 | Mill was the first MP to call for women's suffrage and frequently laughed at in cartoons |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

