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In a different day and age, I would mainly have been angry. Now I was mostly sad. Really sad.

Because here you have one of the big media networks of the world, you know,

one of the more powerful media networks of the world, you would hope. And the fact that they

would, there was no pretense even that this was about journalism. It was like, look, we're

just scared. It's the lawyers advising us. That is the voice of Rutger Bregman. I think it's fair

to say that he's not a household name in the UK,

but he is one of Europe's most eminent historians and philosophers, an unafraid voice for the

creed of liberalism. You might remember that just a few months ago, unwittingly, he found himself

at the centre of a very British national controversy.

He had been asked to deliver the highly prestigious BBC Reith Lecture,

an annual honour awarded to someone who has made a singular contribution to our public intellectual life.

The theme was the decadence of Western political elites. How they had allowed,

Bregman said, through their political sloth, a rot to set in, a rot which has led to the populist

backlashes we see all around us. In the first lecture, delivered in person, there was a throwaway,

innocuous, but critical line about Donald Trump.

When it was broadcast, that single line was removed by the BBC, censored, apparently, on legal advice.

This chilled, Bregman, as it chilled us at the time when we reported on it. He has much to say on that episode

and what that moment means, but he has much more to say than that. He's just written a book,

Moral Ambition, which is a sort of political self-help guide, a call to arms to people,

to you, to us, to give up our useless jobs and do something, to be the political

...