Fancy a nice juicy steak? Most of us do from time to time, and we don’t trouble our consciences too much with the rights and wrongs of eating meat. Others, while vaguely aware that we ought to go vegan, just can’t face the rest of our lives denying ourselves bacon, beef, butter etc. But once we s...

25 years ago, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the future looked rosy. Liberal democracy, freedom and individual rights were on the march, triumphing over tyranny and repression. The end of the Cold War had brought an end to history, declared Francis Fukuyama. A quarter of a century on, that sun...

According to Laura Bates a vast network of incels and other misogynists are able to operate, virtually undetected online. These extremists commit deliberate terrorist acts against women. Vulnerable teenage boys are groomed and radicalised.

In this episode Bates, the bestselling author and founde...

What should we be eating to live a long and healthy life?

How is it that some people can eat absolutely anything and stay slim, while others on a ‘healthy’ diet get fat?

Why is it that Cubans are much healthier than Americans, despite eating on average twice the amount of sugar?

To unpack the ...

Filmed at the Royal Geographical Society on 30th January 2007.

Speakers for the motion: Claire Fox, Anatole Kaletsky, Jenna Nicholas
Speakers against the motion: Baroness Onora O'Neill, Mary Ann Sieghart
Chair: Sir Clement Freud

Historian William Dalrymple discusses how British colonialism was rooted in capitalism and the East India Company with Kavita Puri. We talk about the British conquering India, but Dalrymple argues the phrase disguises a more sinister reality where a dangerously unregulated private company, run by...

There’s a new school of history that’s revolutionising the way we look at the past. For centuries, our history has been taught in separate chunks, with the classical, European world divided from China and the East. This traditional, somewhat lazy history of civilisation, zeroing in on the Western...

New York Times columnist David Brooks is one of the leading public intellectuals of our times. His book The Social Animal, a study of the unconscious mind and the triggers that drive human behaviour, was one of the most talked about publications of 2011. David Cameron instructed all the members o...

These are the words of Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bangladeshi economist world-famous for starting the microfinance movement. That movement is just part of Yunus’s mission to ‘put poverty in the museums’. A charismatic visionary, as much at ease with global leaders as he is with...

In May 2021 A.C. Grayling ,founder of New College of the Humanities, came to Intelligence Squared to take us on a journey through the history of science, psychology and history itself. In a special lecture drawing from his new book Frontiers of Knowledge he will describe how each field has advan...

Sarah Langford was a barrister, living and working in the city. But then she found herself moving to the countryside, back to an agricultural life she thought she had left behind. There she saw farmers dealing with problems very different from those faced by her grandfather, who had helped to fee...

Humans have been on the move for most of history. Even after the great urban advancement lured people into the cities of Uruk, Babylon, Rome and Chang’an, most of humanity continued to live lightly on the move and outside the pages of history. But recent discoveries have revealed the impact on ou...

Why do they do it? Again and again, after every attack, our media react by giving the terrorists exactly what they want – maximum publicity. Of course, the public should be told that an atrocity has taken place. But each attack dominates the news for days at a stretch. The TV networks go into ove...

‘America first!’ Donald Trump hammered out this message over and again in his inauguration speech a week ago today. He promised tariffs, a crackdown on immigration, and a restoration of American military might. He entered the White House as the least popular incoming president in 40 years.

Not e...

Do corporations lead or do they follow? Do they push government or do they work within whatever legal frameworks are of the day?

Of course, they do all of the above. They always have. And in the process they have been crucial cogs of progress – much of it good, but not all. That is now changing....

Powerful women have too often been overlooked by history. Of course we know about Boudica, Cleopatra, Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great. But there are many others whose stories are just as dramatic and deserve to be better known, such as Wu Zhao, who poisoned the crown prince and became the fir...

The lifeblood of any free society is healthy disagreement: people with different views trying to change each other’s minds through argument and persuasion. But many democracies across the world are suffering a crisis of faith in the values of debate and have instead turned to writing off those wh...

What is it about Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that has enchanted the public since its publication in 1843? Few people are as well placed to answer that question than John Mullan and Simon Callow. Mullan is a professor of English literature, whose recent book, The Artful Dickens, reveals the...

In the current cost of living crisis it has never been more important to understand the financial world and take control of your money. For over 40 years, Paul Lewis has been arming the public with everything they need to know about personal finances on his BBC Radio 4 programme Moneybox. And on ...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Western culture began to spread throughout Russia and the former Soviet states like never before. One of the ambassadors of so-called Western values at the time which sparked controversy in Russia was the popular American children’s programme Sesame ...

Mark Galeotti is one of the world’s leading experts on modern Russia and on February 26 he comes to Intelligence Squared to talk about the themes of his new book Putin's Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine. In conversation with the New Statesman’s Katie Stallard, Galeotti will detail how Vladimir Puti...

‘We rebuilt the same barracks, we rebuilt the new dictatorship, we rebuilt the same regime that we used to live in and now we have another regime, and the question is the same: How to preserve our human dignity, if everything is humiliating?’ – Mikhail Shishkin

Mikhail Shishkin is one of the mo...

When world-renowned economist Ha-Joon Chang first arrived in Britain in the 1980s he recoiled in horror at how dull and dreary British food was. But it was not just the food – which has much improved since then – that caused him to despair: it was mainstream economic thinking too. Neoclassical li...

Martin Wolf is widely admired as one of the most influential economic commentators in the world. While he sees the flaws in the capitalist system he believes it is worth saving. Yanis Varoufakis is a globally renowned economist and a bestselling author. He rejects economic orthodoxies and advocat...