Thinking Class

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a writer, curator, and researcher working with the multiple politics of the arts. He is the resident art critic for the English magazine The Critic , and his writing has appeared in outlets such as ArtReview , The Spectator , and Compact .  *NOTE: If you downloaded this before 11th July, there are sync issues on the audio, therefore please re-download for a better listening...

Frank is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and the author of twenty-eight books on the cultural forces shaping Western societies, including his most recent, In Defence of Populism. Frank is also a Senior Fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Brussels. In this conversation Frank and I think out loud about:  the spirit of populism, why the credentialized class fears it...

Max Klinger is a lawyer and political analyst. He writes at Max Klinger's Newsletter on Substack and his work has appeared in The Spectator . Britain's progressive establishment spent a decade re-racialising public life. It racialised Brexit, policing, and every institution in the name of anti-racism. Now the wider British public has adopted the same lens and applied it in the opposite d...

Professor Andrew Hussey OBE is Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris and Director of the Centre for Post-Colonial Studies at the University of London's School of Advanced Study . Born in Liverpool, educated at the University of Manchester and Jean Moulin University Lyon 3 , he is the author of The French Intifada (Faber, 2014), Paris: The Secret History (Penguin, 2006), The Game...

Professor Gregory Clark is a British-born economic historian at the University of California, Davis and holds a DNRF Chair at the Danish National Research Foundation and a professor at the Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG) at the Department of Economics, SDU. Furthermore, he is a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics (LSE) and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Dav...

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford , an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford , a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists , a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital , London, a former research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and since September 2025 the Chancellor of Ralston College . He lives...

William Clouston is the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the United Kingdom and a member of the advisory board for Restore Britain .  Firas Modad is an analyst and political economist focused on the Middle East and global geopolitics. He runs his own consultancy, Modad Geopolitics , helping companies and investors understand the commercial impact of political, economic, and security...

Lord Tony Sewell CBE is a British educational consultant, author, and life peer. Born in Brixton to Jamaican parents, he trained as a teacher and worked in some of London's most challenging schools, during which time he completed his PhD on black masculinities and schooling at the University of Nottingham . He helped transform education in Hackney as part of the team that established the Lear...

Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in New Jersey. He edits the journal Book History and was founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing . He is the author of several books including The Literary Churchill and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes . For the better part of two centuries, the British wo...

Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order — one of the most clarifying accounts written of how a set of economic assumptions came to dominate Western politics, and how they are now collapsing. He is currently Kluge Chair of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress , wor...

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Dr. Anthony Daniels — physician, psychiatrist, and social diagnostician. He spent years working in the hospitals and prisons of Birmingham before his essays for City Journal established him as the foremost chronicler of what he called the culture of the British underclass. His writing has also appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, New Statesman,...

Michael Lind is a political theorist, historian, and one of America's most rigorous independent analysts of class, democracy, and political economy. He is a Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, a co-founder of the New America think tank, and a visiting professor at the University of Austin . He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkin...

Dr. Carl R. Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania and currently a visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His most recent books are The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural Amnesia, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, (with Bruce Gordon) The Oxford Handbook to Calvin and, and T...

Richard IV is a writer, cultural commentator and men's mentor whose work has helped thousands of men in Britain and across the West understand what has gone wrong and what can still be recovered. In this episode of Thinking Class, John Gillam speaks with Richard about the invisible order that once gave men a path through life — the initiatory traditions, the moral codes, the religious inherit...

Kathleen Stock is a Contributing Editor to UnHerd , a philosopher, author of Material Girls and Do Not Go Gentle , and one of the most forensically precise thinkers in British public life. A bill is moving through the British Parliament right now that would allow doctors to help their patients die. Its proponents call it assisted dying. Its opponents call it assisted suicide. In Canada, five perce...

For decades, the British Empire in India has been reduced to a simple moral claim: that it was an extractive, exploitative system which left only damage behind. But is that really the full story? In this episode of Thinking Class , John Gillam is joined by Lord Nigel Biggar and Professor Tirthankar Roy to examine what the British Empire — and the East India Company before it — actually did in Indi...

John Waters is an Irish journalist, author, and columnist known for his work with Hot Press , The Irish Times , and The Irish Independent . He has written on social and political issues, specialising in father's rights and cultural critiques.  Ireland changed faster than almost any country in the West. The question now is whether the Irish still recognise the nation they live in. In this epis...

Michael Reiners is a writer, lawyer, and architectural historian. Michael is the founder of the Reiners Project , which publishes essays, draft legislation and commentary on English constitutional law and the art and architectural landscape.  Britain’s constitutional settlement has changed more in the last few decades than most people realise — and the consequences now reach into identity, speech,...

Lord Nigel Biggar is an Anglican priest, theologian, and moral philosopher, a member of the House of Lords, and Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford.  His most recent books are The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win The Culture War, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), What’s Wrong with Rights? , In Defence of War , and Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nat...

Lionel Shriver is a novelist and columnist at The Spectator, and the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Mania, and A Better Life among many other books. Lionel Shriver returns to Thinking Class to discuss mass immigration in the West—not as an abstract moral debate, but as a lived experience reshaping belonging, institutions, and politics. We start with Lionel’s new novel A Better Life, which...

Lord Jonathan Sumption is a British judge and historian, who served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012 – 2018. He is the author of The Challenges of Democracy And The Rule Of Law , the Sunday Times bestseller Trials of the State , Law in a Time of Crisis , and Divided Houses , which won the 2009 Wolfson History Prize. Across Britain and the wider West democratic decision-making is increasingly b...

Dr Carrie Gress has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and is the editor at the online women’s magazine Theology of Home . Carrie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including National Review, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, First Things, Newsweek, The American Spectator, The Catholic Thing, The Federalist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Examiner. Sh...

Dr. Bijan Omrani is a classicist, historian, and Oxford-educated barrister. His research explores questions of religious history and cultural identity, spanning from ancient Roman Greece to Afghanistan and the Silk Road. He has taught Classics at Eton College and Westminster School, is a former editor of Asian Affairs, and currently serves as a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is al...

Firas Modad is an analyst and political economist focused on the Middle East and global geopolitics. He runs his own consultancy, Modad Geopolitics , helping companies and investors understand the commercial impact of political, economic, and security risks they face. Firas Modad is a host on Podcast of the LotusEaters. Firas examines how Britain’s security is being quietly undermined at home and...

Professor Azar Gat, one of the world’s leading scholars of nationalism, war, and political identity. Professor Gat is Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the author of several major works on conflict and political order, including War in Human Civilization and, most notably for this conversation, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism . In that bo...