The EI Podcast

Amid the rise of individualistic technologies and weight-loss drugs, there has been a steady decline in alcohol consumption in Western societies. Yet, Henry Jeffreys argues that this is no good thing. Instead, it suggests a gradual weakening of a shared civilisational inheritance. This audio essay is read by Leighton Pugh.
Read it here: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-civilising-wonders-of-wine/.
Image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’. Credit: Maidun Collection

Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, speaks to EI’s Jack Dickens about Europe’s place in a changing world order.
Image: The EU flag in Siracusa, Sicily. Credit: Alamy

In the courtrooms of Nuremberg and Tokyo, the victorious Allies declared that civilisation must not merely win wars but also judge them, leaving a legal and moral legacy that persists to this day. Read by Leighton Pugh.
Image: The defendants at the Nuremberg Trial in 1946. Credit: PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive.

Daisy Christodoulou and Nicholas Wright join EI’s Paul Lay to discuss the crisis in British universities and how to fix it.
Image: Sightseers outside the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Credit: Alamy

From the gung-ho glamour of Ian Fleming’s James Bond to the decline and disorder of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, postwar spy novels have captured the shifting myths, legends and caricatures surrounding the secret world. Read by Leighton Pugh. 
Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/the-anatomy-of-the-spy-novel/.
Image: Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr No (1962). Credit: Alamy