Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

And this week we're going to be talking about Ayn Rand, a writer who's been dead for 40 years,

yet who continues to trend on social media,

most recently because our new health secretary, Savid Javid, claims to reread RAND every single year.

Now, I'm joined by two people who know a bit about Ayn Rand.

One of them is Lisa Dugan, who's a professor at New York University

and the author of a fine short study of Rand called Mean Girl, Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed,

and Adam Roberts, who's a professor at Royal Holloway in the University of London,

and who is also a science fiction novelist, and has recently read and blogged not entirely favourably

about the reissued edition of Atlas Shrugged. Welcome both. Now both of you are, let's say,

to some extent, round sceptics and it's quite easy to find Rand Skeptics and quite hard to find people who adore her, at least

certainly in the sort of literary world. But I want to start by asking, therefore, not what's bad

about her, but what's good about her? What is it that causes this writer of enormously long books

who hasn't been around for quite some time to continue to seem to have such a vital part in our public life?

Well, you know, what I argue for in Mean Girl and what I'll argue for now is her importance, right?

So whatever one wants to say about the literary quality, and there are a lot of complicated

things to say about the quality of her writing, but her importance is indisputable.

So it's like if we want to understand our current political economic moment, she's as

important as reading Milton Friedman or knowing the history of the International Monetary Fund.

Right. If we want to understand how this political economy came to be, a writer like Ein Rann

provides the kind of emotional architecture, the affective energy. She motivates and converts

people into advocates of this very cruel, unequal political

...