Welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Knowles. This month we will be reading

King Lear by William Shakespeare, one of the great plays ever written.

But before we get into King Lear, in our fast-paced world, it is tough to make reading a priority.

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You have to go to thinker.org. T-H-I-N-K-R-org. No ease, no time for that folks. Start a free trial. Put your mind in motion. In the meantime, we will delve into King Lear with my guest, Douglas Murray, the international best-selling author of The Madness of Crowds, of Strange

Death of Europe.

These are books, Douglas, that paint, I'm sorry to say, a bleak political political picture and I felt the only book that paints a bleaker political picture

Would be King Lear by William Shakespeare. So thank you very much for coming on

It's a great pleasure. It's true. King Lear makes my work look like comedy.

This play, we've already done Hamlet, we've done the other greatest play ever written, and so now we're doing Lear. You know at least in Hamlet, there are a few light moments.

There are a few moments of levity, some kind of fun.

King Lear, not so much.

It is all tragedy all the time.

Yes, there are tiny moments of comic alleviation, but they are all themselves bleak.

You know, the fool famously in Leah is one of the only characters that becomes the only

character who can tell the truth to the king.

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