The EI Podcast

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

Marie Kawthar Daouda, author of Not Your Victim: How our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, speaks to EI’s Alastair Benn about the historical illiteracy of attempts to ‘decolonise’ Western culture. Instead, she argues that the moral complexities of history must be accepted in order to develop a genuine appreciation of the Western tradition. 
Image: ‘Ruins with an Obelisk in the distance’ by Hubert Robert (1775). Credit: Alamy

From placard-waving crowds in Yazd to troll farms on social media, the Islamic Republic has long tried to wield Scottish nationalism as a weapon against the UK. This audio essay is read by Leighton Pugh.
Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/irans-strange-scottish-obsession/.
Image: Royal Scots Guards military pipers. Credit: Alamy

Following the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, President Donald Trump has warned that Cuba is ‘next’. What exactly does he mean by that? Joseph Ledford, Fellow at the Hoover Institution, speaks to EI’s Jack Dickens about a new age of US interventionism in Latin America. 
Image: Protesters outside the White House following the arrest of Nicolás Maduro, January 2026. Credit: Alamy