Intelligence Squared

China’s relationship with Africa is often presented as a recent contest for minerals and influence. However, journalist Paul Kenyon argues that the relationship rests on centuries of history, with alliances forged in the struggle against Western colonialism. He charts how China has managed, since the 1950s, to control much of Africa's natural resources, consumers, workforce and political institutions.

In this episode, Margherita Volpato speaks to Paul Kenyon. In his latest book, China’s African Empire: The Country That Captured a Continent, he explores the new economic and political hierarchies that shape our modern world.

Paul Kenyon is a BAFTA award-winning journalist who has worked for almost twenty years across BBC News and Current Affairs. He is the author of numerous books including Dictatorland and China’s African Empire: The Country that Captured a Continent.

Margherita Volpato is Senior Producer at Intelligence Squared.
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What would a world without American leadership look like? Shadi Hamid joins Intelligence Squared co-host Conor Boyle to discuss his book The Case for American Power and why he changed his mind about America’s role in the world. They explore the legacy of the Iraq War, the contradictions of American foreign policy and whether the United States remains essential to a more peaceful and democratic world. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nearly four centuries after his death, no writer has come close to matching Shakespeare’s understanding of the world – or his gift for dramatic poetry. It’s not just kings and queens that he captured so uniquely in his transcendent verse. Shakespeare analysed the human condition, not just for Elizabethan England, but throughout the world and for eternity. Britain may not have matched the Continent for music or art but when it comes to literature, Shakespeare sees off all international rivals, whether it’s in the spheres of comedy, tragedy or the sonnet. Even today you and I quote Shakespeare without knowing it: if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if you vanish into thin air or have ever been tongue-tied, hoodwinked or slept not one wink, you’re speaking the Bard’s English.

Milton, say his fans, works on an altogether different, higher plane. In Paradise Lost – the best poem ever written in English – Milton moved beyond the literary to address political, philosophical and religious questions in a way that still resounds strongly today. In his complex, intellectual poetry he drilled down deep into the eternal truths and sought to embody new scientific discovery in his work.

His engagement with the issues of the day – with the nature of knowledge, slavery, free will, love and creation – was unparalleled. Despite complete blindness in middle age, he was the English republic’s best known, most fervent apologist, and a key civil servant for Oliver Cromwell. In his other works, notably in Areopagitica, his attack on censorship, he showed himself as much a master of prose as poetry. He defines not only his age, but our own.

To help you decide who should be crowned king of English letters we brought together advocates to make the case for each writer, and they called on a cast of leading actors to illustrate their arguments with readings from the works.
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Who stands to benefit from Donald Trump’s Venezuela oil deal? Anne Applebaum joins Intelligence Squared co-host Conor Boyle to discuss her investigation for The Atlantic into Trump’s dealings in Venezuela since the removal of Nicolás Maduro in January 2026. They explore the opaque agreements reshaping the country’s oil industry, Washington’s ties to the surviving regime and whether promises of democratic change are giving way to the pursuit of profit. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The dead internet theory began as an obscure online conspiracy. Its proponents claimed the internet had been overrun by bots and automated content. In 2021, much of it sounded paranoid. Today, parts of the theory are beginning to look uncomfortably plausible.

According to Cloudflare, machines now generate more web traffic than people, while AI-generated music, images and writing are flooding online platforms. Some material is even designed not for human readers, but for other bots and AI systems that retrieve and cite it.

In this episode, Mia Sorenti speaks with researcher Carl Miller about an internet increasingly shaped by machines talking to machines. Drawing on new research from Demos, Carl sheds light on findings that suggest Russian propagandists are already manipulating the information served up by LLMs - and how we can fight back in a new age of information warfare.

Carl Miller is a Demos Fellow and co-founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media. He is co-author of the Demos report GEO for Geopolitics.

Mia Sorenti is Senior Producer at Intelligence Squared.
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