The EI Podcast

Lawrence Freedman profiles the Fortune journalist and best-selling author who played a key role in shaping mid-20th century perceptions of strategy and the role of the corporation. Read by Sebastian Brown. Image: From left to right: Dorothy McDonald (wife of John, née Eisner), Leon Trotsky and John McDonald in Coyoacan, Mexico, in the 1930s. McDonald was recruited to help defend Trotsky from charg...

The historian and broadcaster Alice Loxton joins the EI team to discuss her forthcoming book, Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives , and her fight to bring serious history to a wider public. Image: A jigsaw puzzle from the early nineteenth century, bearing representations of the Kings and Queens of England from William I to George IV. Credit: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo 

East Germany’s quest to catch up with the technological innovations of the West prompted some remarkable successes, but also expanded the oppression of its mass surveillance apparatus. Read by Helen Lloyd. Image: The Trabant car being manufactured at the East German Sachsenring car plant. Credit: Classic Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo 

EI's Alastair Benn sits down with Ian Leslie , author of Conflicted: Why Arguments Are Tearing Us Apart and How They Can Bring Us Together , to discuss how the counterculture went mainstream. Image: An advert on the Nike store at Oxford Circus. Credit: Matthew Chattle / Alamy Stock Photo 

An often-overlooked fact about the current Russo-Ukrainian War is that over the centuries Russia has waged several wars to try to conquer Crimea and the Donbas area. Read by Helen Lloyd. Image: Ukrania quae et Terra Cosaccorum cum vicinis Walachiae, Moldoviae, by Johann Baptiste Homann (1664–1724), 1720. Credit: history_docu_photo / Alamy Stock Photo 

Catherine Ostler profiles Maria Antonia , Electress of Saxony, an artistic polymath who helped re-shape elite culture in the Enlightenment age. Read by Sebastian Brown. Image: An 18th-century portrait of Maria Antonia of Bavaria, Electress of Saxony, by Peter Jacob Horemans. Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo 

EI's Angus Reilly discusses how Ronald Reagan put economic openness at the heart of the battle for ideas against Soviet Communism with William Inboden, author of The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. Image: Ronald Reagan at the Durenberger Republican convention Rally, 1982. Credit: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo 

The sense of being overwhelmed and constantly distracted is nothing new. Historians and policymakers should look to the 17th century for guidance on how to grapple with information overload. Read by Helen Lloyd. Image: Rembrandt's 'Portrait of a Scholar', 1631. Credit: PRISMA ARCHIVO / Alamy Stock Photo

EI's Alastair Benn discusses the condition of Classical music today with Richard Bratby , chief Classical music critic of The Spectator. Image: Music scores. Credit: Tim Gainey / Alamy Stock Photo 

Part statesman, part prophet, Charles de Gaulle knew instinctively that political success and failure are inevitably interlinked, and that history would be the ultimate judge of both. Read by Helen Lloyd. Image: The President of France Charles de Gaulle marches through the streets under the Arc de Triomphe in 1944. Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo 

EI's Iain Martin is joined by Kwasi Kwarteng, historian and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, to discuss the turbulent life of the 18th-century financial speculator John Law, whose innovative ideas were credited with bringing Ancien Régime France to the brink of ruin. There are echoes of what happened when the Truss government tried its own financial experiment, he acknowledges. Image: A cartoon...

Laura Freeman profiles Helen Sutherland , an isolated, austere, and fastidious heiress who dedicated herself to art. Read by Sebastian Brown. Image: Woman Playing a Piano, by Winifred Nicholson. Her work was championed by Helen Sutherland. Credit: Paul Quezada-Neiman / Alamy Stock Photo 

Celebrated as predestined shepherd in the glory days of Angela Merkel, Germany in the 2020s is an uncertain giant who has defied expectations, good or bad. Read by Leighton Pugh. Image: The top of the Reichstag Building. Credit: Artur Bogacki / Alamy Stock Photo 

The leading classicist Daisy Dunn joins EI's Paul Lay to discuss her new book, The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It . Image: Nikolaos Gyzis, a 19th Century painter, depicts Sappho playing the lyre. Credit: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo 

We cannot afford not to rediscover the fine art, nowadays almost forgotten, of learning from history. Read by Leighton Pugh. Image: 16th Century engraving by Theodoor Galle, titled The Printing of Books. Credit: The Granger Collection / Alamy Stock Photo 

James Barr profiles the debonair and open-faced diplomat, George McGhee , whose shuttle diplomacy helped accelerate Britain's decline as a player in the Middle East. Read by Sebastian Brown. Image: President John F. Kennedy (left, in rocking chair) meets the newly-appointed US Ambassador to West Germany, George McGhee. Credit: Gibson Moss / Alamy Stock Photo

A new constitutional order is coming. Read by Leighton Pugh. Image: The Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Credit: Lane Erickson / Alamy Stock Photo 

Erica Benner applies ancient wisdom to modern problems in her new book Adventures in Democracy: The Turbulent World of People Power . She shares her insights with EI's Deputy Editor, Alastair Benn . Image: Gathering of the Areopagus, a deliberative court that met in the open air in ancient Athens. Credit: North Wind Picture Archives / Alamy Stock Photo 

‘Democracy’ is in Sweden built on a basis fundamentally different from the one associated with the development of liberal democracy in the West. Read by Leighton Pugh. Image: Midsummer Dance by Swedish artist Anders Zorn (1860-1920) painted in 1897. A classic of Swedish art history showing traditional folk dancing in the Dalarna countryside in the extended summer evening light. Credit: Universal A...

Dominic Sandbrook profiles Jesse Ventura , the former Navy SEAL and WWE champion who won Minnesota’s governorship in 1999 on an anti-elite ticket. His transition from showbiz to politics was a precursor of the age of Trump – but ’the Body’ was no ordinary populist. Read by Sebastian Brown. Image: Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura yells to the crowd at his People's Inauguration in Minneapolis. Credi...

What is the future of the European Union? The EU is sui generis . It certainly cannot be a nation state. Nor is it destined to turn into a Staatsnation or willed nation. Then what? Read by Leighton Pugh. Image: European Union flags. Credit: Brian Lawrence / Alamy Stock Photo 

EI's Paul Lay and Alastair Benn ask: do we really live in an age of upheaval? Image: Turner's Vesuvius in Eruption. Credit: Artefact / Alamy Stock Photo 

The current violence and turmoil in the Middle East is expressive of a conflict between rival ideas, between the modern nation state and an old, historical concept of an Islamic caliphate. Read by Leighton Pugh. Image: Abdel Nasser at a rally after the rupture of relations with Syria. Credit: colaimages / Alamy Stock Photo 

James Hardie on the violinist-composer who mixed the sacred and profane in his fantastical music, a lost genius of the 17th century. Read by Sebastian Brown. Image: A print of Heinrich Biber. Credit: The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo 

Jingoism was a natural offshoot of late Victorian imperialism. Read by Leighton Pugh. Image: Poster for a British imperial railway company. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo