For 15 years, the power of the spoken word has been at the heart of Intelligence Squared’s mission. Argument and debate, we believe, can move, persuade and create real change. Now, in these anxious and divided times, we held a special event that celebrated the positive, transformative force of an...

In this Intelligence Squared event award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore and bestselling novelist Kate Mosse discussed letters by Michelangelo, Catherine the Great, Sarah Bernhardt, Rosa Parks, Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing and Leonard Cohen. Some are inspiring, some unsettling, others exp...

They are the titans of the spy novel, who have elevated thrillers to the level of literary fiction. Much imitated, much adapted by the big and small screens, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré have painted our picture of post-war espionage: Fleming through the dashing figure of James Bond, with his lu...

‘I believe fiction has a strange power, a profound weirdness, that enables it to destabilise the collective imaginings we inherit and reproduce’ – Mohsin Hamid

Mohsin Hamid is the internationally bestselling author of the novels The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West. In September he came to...

Umberto Eco was in conversation with Paul Holdengräber, Director of LIVE at the New York Public Library.

Their wide-ranging conversation in part focused on Eco's latest work of fiction, The Prague Cemetery. The book is an historical pseudo-reconstruction set in a 19th-century Europe teeming with...

Novelists worship him. Critics fall over themselves to explain his genius. His celebrity fans say his books are like drugs. ‘I just read 200 pages and I need the next volume like crack. It’s completely blown my mind,’ Zadie Smith tweeted. What they’re all raving about is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s bes...

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...

Filmed at the Royal Geographical Society on 30th June 2008.

Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven are without doubt two of the most sublime musical geniuses who ever lived. But which of the two was the greater? To battle it out, Intelligence Squared is bringing to the stage two celebrated figures from the world of music: world-renowned cellist St...

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...

Hercules, Prometheus, Pandora. The compelling characters of Greek mythology continue to fascinate readers thousands of years after their stories were first told. In February 2023 leading classicist Sarah Iles Johnston came to Intelligence Squared to discuss their enduring popularity and also to p...

‘In my opinion this idea of Anaximander’s [that the Earth is suspended in space] is one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thinking.’ – Karl Popper

Carlo Rovelli is one of the world’s best known scientists. A theoretical physicist, his boo...