The EI Podcast

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

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

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

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

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