Profile Books

In a world where there is increasing sensitivity, confusion and unease over how we should talk about race, religion and culture, Intelligence Squared brings together two of the most respected thinkers to shed new light on this most thorny of topics. Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of America's leading philosophers and gave the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures in 2016. Born in London to a Ghanaian father and British mother and brought up in Ghana, he has a cosmopolitan outlook which infuses his thinking. Appiah will challenge our assumptions about different kinds of identity and argue that most of our notions about them were formed in the nineteenth century and need to be updated for the twenty-first. Take race, for example. Much of our understanding of it, he will argue, is still based on outdated, Victorian-era pseudoscience. Or take the nation state. We may all agree that we have the right to rule ourselves, but how do we define who 'we' are? And the very idea that there is such a thing as Western culture, he will say, is mistaken. In conversation with Appiah will be John Gray, one of Britain's most provocative and original thinkers, who has never been afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day. Gray takes issue with the idea popular amongst liberals that there is a hierarchy of identities, which gives greater value to those of historically oppressed ethnic and sexual minorities, while downplaying identities that are based on nation or religion. Identities divide us, but they also unite us and fulfil our need for a sense of collective belonging. Join us on October 18th as these two great thinkers explore one of the most complex and controversial issues of our times.

Mary Shelley's life story is well known. But who was the woman who lived it? She's left plenty of evidence, and in this fascinating dialogue with the past, Fiona Sampson sifts through letters, diaries and records to find the real woman behind the story. She uncovers a complex, generous character trying to fulfil her own passionate commitment to writing at a time when to be a woman writer was an extraordinary and costly anomaly.

For a hundred and fifty years, between the plod of packhorse trains and the arrival of the railways, canals were the high-tech water machine driving the industrial revolution. Amazing feats of engineering, they carried the rural into the city and the urban into the countryside, and changed the lives of everyone. And then, just when their purpose was extinguished by modern transport, they were saved from extinction and repurposed as a 'slow highways' network, a peaceful and countrywide haven from our too-busy age. Today, there are more boats on the canals than in their Victorian heyday. Writer and slow adventurer Jasper Winn spent a year exploring Britain's waterways on foot and by bike, in a kayak and on narrowboats. Along a thousand miles of 'wet roads and water streets' he discovered a world of wildlife corridors, underground adventures, the hardware of heritage and history, new boating communities, endurance kayak races and remote towpaths. He shared journeys with some of the last working boat people and met the anglers, walkers, boaters, activists, volunteers and eccentrics who have made the waterways their home. In Britain most of us live within five miles of a canal, and reading this book we will see them in an entirely new light.