The EI Podcast

Latest Episodes:

The life and legacy of Steve Schapiro May 21, 2026

Show notes

Filmmaker Maura Smith discusses Steve Schapiro: Being Everywhere, her documentary on the photographer who captured modern America.

Image: Steve Schapiro in the 1960s. Credit: Steve Schapiro

Agent Zo, the spy who saved Poland May 18, 2026

Show notes

Elżbieta Zawacka, who played a key role in the Home Army’s resistance efforts, was one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history. Clare Mulley assesses her legacy. Read by Leighton Pugh.

Read the essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/agent-zo-the-spy-who-saved-poland/.

Image: Monument to Agent Zo. Credit: Alamy

Lewis and Clark’s American Odyssey May 14, 2026

Show notes

Craig Fehrman speaks to EI’s Max Mitchell about his new book ‘This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark’, shedding light on one of America’s founding myths.

Image: ‘America in the Making: Lewis and Clark’ by Newell Convers Wyeth (1938). Credit: Alamy

Why powerful individuals are dominating politics May 11, 2026

Show notes

From Xi Jinping in China to Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the US, Nicholas Wright explores how powerful leaders are reshaping the rules of the global great game. Read by Leighton Pugh.

Read the original essay here: https://engelsbergideas.com/essays/why-powerful-individuals-are-dominating-politics/.

Image: Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’. Credit: incamerastock

Weimar’s descent into darkness May 07, 2026

Show notes

How did Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller, become the crucible of Germany's moral collapse? Katja Hoyer, author of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, speaks to EI's Alastair Benn about the town's role in the rise of the Third Reich.

Image: Adolf Hitler at the ‘Haus Elephant’ in Weimar, 1936. Credit: Alamy

The civilising wonders of wine May 05, 2026

Show notes

Amid the rise of individualistic technologies and weight-loss drugs, there has been a steady decline in alcohol consumption in Western societies. Yet, Henry Jeffreys argues that this is no good thing. Instead, it suggests a gradual weakening of a shared civilisational inheritance. This audio essay is read by Leighton Pugh.

Read it here: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-civilising-wonders-of-wine/.

Image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’. Credit: Maidun Collection

Can Europe thrive in a multipolar world? Apr 30, 2026

Show notes

Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, speaks to EI’s Jack Dickens about Europe’s place in a changing world order.

Image: The EU flag in Siracusa, Sicily. Credit: Alamy

The long shadow of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials Apr 27, 2026

Show notes

In the courtrooms of Nuremberg and Tokyo, the victorious Allies declared that civilisation must not merely win wars but also judge them, leaving a legal and moral legacy that persists to this day. Read by Leighton Pugh.

Image: The defendants at the Nuremberg Trial in 1946. Credit: PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive.

Universities are at crisis point Apr 23, 2026

Show notes

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

The anatomy of the spy novel Apr 20, 2026

Show notes

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

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