Hello, I'm Rory Stewart, and I'd like to tell you about an intelligent squared event

I'm doing with the classicist author and broadcaster Mary Beard. Together we'll be discussing

politics and power from the Caesars to Sunack, who gets to Winpar, who is excluded. Does power

always corrupt, or are there examples of leaders who've maintained their integrity while an

authority? And how does the nature of power vary across different times and cultures? These are

just some of the questions that Mary and I will be trying to answer. In person tickets are now

sold out, but you can still watch online on the 13th of November at 7pm BST. Put your questions

to us live as we discuss power and politics down the ages. Hello podcast listeners, Connor here

from Intelligent Squared. Welcome to this week's episode of The Sunday Debate. Today we're

featuring one of our most popular literary debates. It was Brave New World versus 1984. Our speakers

look back at Aldous Huxley and George Orwell's most famous works and questioned which one was the

most prescient in predicting the path societies were going down. We hope you enjoyed and now let's go

to the episode. Thanks to all of you for coming. My name is Jonathan Friedland. I'm going to be

guiding the proceedings this evening. And often you know you have these cultural combat evenings

where the debate is of course enlightening and fascinating, but rarely can it claim to be urgently

topical. And yet somehow with two novels, one written in 1931 and one written in between 1948

and 1949, you nevertheless have two works that speak to us in our own time with great urgency

and topicality. We of course are going to leave proceedings tonight knowing which one does that

more than the other one, but that is the subject before us. So two dominant novels of the 20th century

discussed and debated and advocated by two of the leading public intellectuals of our 21st century.

So it's going to be a hugely stimulating evening. The other thing about cultural combat

events is that they often have a different quality from the debates that Intelligent Squared

...