Thinking Class

Dr Lola Salem is a musicologist, cultural critic, and Catholic convert. She is the author of the forthcoming Artless (Polity Press) and writes for The Critic and the Catholic Herald.

In this conversation we think out loud about:
• The boycott crisis in the arts and how it works in the shadows 
• Why the right keeps winning elections and losing the civilisation 
• The left as high-functioning alcoholics of culture 
• The post-cultural state — institutions remain, the spirit has left 
• The collapse of the managerial elite 
• The education pipeline that reproduces institutional capture 
• Whether the recovery o...

Oliver Bennett and Morgan Watkins are the co-founders of The Base and RADA-trained actors with nearly twenty years of experience in British film, television, and theatre.

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

What The Base is and why it exists The campification of British theatre and the shame around the Western canonThe Edinburgh Fringe as a monument to progressive capture and why the RSC is rehearsing a lesbian Othello set against the climate crisisMeeting Shakespeare on his own terms (the third position beyond progressive deconstruction and conservative nostalgia)The working men’s club with a l...

Dr Ben Jones is the Director of Case Management at the Free Speech Union and author of Island of Strangers: Diversity, Decline & Free Speech In Crisis

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

When saying “it’s a free country” died in Britain and what replaced it6,000 people punished for speaking in five years, and what the Free Speech Union’s caseload reveals about modern BritainHow hyperdiversity and the decline of Christianity have destroyed the shared moral universeWhy the ethno-nationalist vs civic-nationalist debate is irrelevant — both will be swept away by eventsBritain’s pre-revolutionary state: the last tim...

Auron MacIntyre is the host of The Auron MacIntyre Show on Blaze TV and the author of The Total State. Auron previously taught high school before leaving education to build his media platform, writes the Substack The Total State, and appears across conservative and heterodox media.

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

Why every Western state is becoming total and why the HR department is the new political commissarHow bureaucracies automatically recognise one another as authoritative and create a self-reinforcing systemWhy it’s not a state-run media but a media-run state and that distinction ch...

Nathan Pinkoski is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, the translator of Eric Zemmour’s The Suicide of France, and author of the forthcoming Silent Revolution: The End of the Liberal West. He writes for First Things and Compact and publishes the Substack Lament for the Nations.

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

— Why Zemmour’s Suicide of France sold half a million copies and what it tells the English-speaking world 
— How the 1968 revolution conquered society rather than the state — and nobody noticed the difference 
— The 10% threshold: when the foreign-born population rea...

R.R. Reno is the editor of First Things, the most important journal of religion and public life in America. He is the author of Return of the Strong Gods, In the Ruins of the Church, and a forthcoming rock climbing memoir. He has taught theology at Creighton University and has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Commentary.

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

— What the strong gods look like when they return to a country that no longer has any gods at all — and whether there is a floo...

Stephen Blackwood is President and Founder of Ralston College in Savannah, Georgia. The Chancellor is Dr Iain McGilchrist. He is on the advisory board for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). 

This episode is supported by Aquinas Tuition, which provides bespoke academic tutoring for children who deserve to be stretched, not managed.

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

— What Blackwood saw inside the Western university system at its highest level that made him believe the existing institutions could not be saved
— How Boethius took the seeds of civilisation and cast them...

Tom Ough is Senior Editor at UnHerd and author of The Anti-Catastrophe League. Calum Drysdale is an engineer and writer. Together they host Anglofuturism — a podcast exploring ambitious, outlandish, and remarkably achievable ideas to revitalise Britain from their thatched space station. Robert Jenrick declared himself an Anglofuturist at a 2025 conference. Curtis Yarvin has appeared on their show.

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

— What Anglofuturism actually is — and whether the Britain it imagines is one that also knows who built it and why it matters
— Whether you can be an Anglofuturist without being a...

Ricardo Duchesne is a Puerto Rican-born Canadian historical sociologist. He studied history at McGill University, received his PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University (awarded the Doctoral Prize for best dissertation of the year), and served as professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick until his retirement in 2019. His major works include The Uniqueness of Western Civilisation, and Greatness and Ruin. 

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

— What made the West so continuously innovative across thousands of years — from the Indo-Europeans through Greece and Rome to the modern era
—...

Clement Knox is a writer and historian. He is the author of The Scramble for America: How the United States Conquered a Continent (William Collins, 2026), and writes at Past Notes on Substack.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was thirteen coastal colonies clinging to the Atlantic seaboard. Within a single lifetime, it became a continental empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific — and the founding generation openly called it exactly that: an empire. This conversation asks how it happened, and who actually did it, because the people who crossed the Appalachians, fought the wa...

Katharine Birbalsingh is the headmistress and founder of Michaela Community School in Wembley, and a former UK Social Mobility Commissioner.

She built the most successful school in Britain from nothing — in one of London's poorest boroughs — by insisting on the things the educational establishment now treats as radical: discipline, gratitude, knowledge, and the belief that every child is capable of excellence. Her results are extraordinary. Almost nobody in the profession will copy her.

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

Why Katharine believes children are born naughty rather than good — and why saying so out...

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a writer, curator, and researcher working with the multiple politics of the arts. He is the resident art critic for the English magazine The Critic, and his writing has appeared in outlets such as ArtReview, The Spectator, and Compact. 

*NOTE: If you downloaded this before 11th July, there are sync issues on the audio, therefore please re-download for a better listening experience*.

In 2024, he co-founded Verdurin, a space for experimentation in aesthetics, learning, and the difficult conversations which drive today’s culture.

Pierre previously directed waterside contemporary, a gallery that...

Frank is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and the author of twenty-eight books on the cultural forces shaping Western societies, including his most recent, In Defence of Populism. Frank is also a Senior Fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Brussels.

In this conversation Frank and I think out loud about: 

the spirit of populism, why the credentialized class fears ithow anti-populists restrict democracy while claiming to defend itwhy fascism and populism are not just different but oppositewhy nostalgia underpins cultural continuitywhy 60% of the crisis starts in the schoolswhether assimilation is possible i...

Max Klinger is a lawyer and political analyst. He writes at Max Klinger's Newsletter on Substack and his work has appeared in The Spectator.

Britain's progressive establishment spent a decade re-racialising public life. It racialised Brexit, policing, and every institution in the name of anti-racism. Now the wider British public has adopted the same lens and applied it in the opposite direction, and the establishment is horrified. 

In this conversation we think out loud about:

In what specific ways the British establishment has gone off at the deep endThe real-life impact of anti-racist and D...

Professor Andrew Hussey OBE is Dean of the University of London Institute in Paris and Director of the Centre for Post-Colonial Studies at the University of London's School of Advanced Study. Born in Liverpool, educated at the University of Manchester and Jean Moulin University Lyon 3, he is the author of The French Intifada (Faber, 2014), Paris: The Secret History (Penguin, 2006), The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (Jonathan Cape, 2001), and Fractured France. He was awarded an OBE for services to cultural relations between the United Kingdom and France. He writes for the Observer, the Guardian, and...

Professor Gregory Clark is a British-born economic historian at the University of California, Davis and holds a DNRF Chair at the Danish National Research Foundation and a professor at the Historical Economics and Development Group (HEDG) at the Department of Economics, SDU. Furthermore, he is a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics (LSE) and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Davis. He is the author of A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World and The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility.

In this conversation Greg and I think...

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and since September 2025 the Chancellor of Ralston College. He lives on the Isle of Skye. He is the author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the...

William Clouston is the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the United Kingdom and a member of the advisory board for Restore Britain. 

Firas Modad is an analyst and political economist focused on the Middle East and global geopolitics. He runs his own consultancy, Modad Geopolitics, helping companies and investors understand the commercial impact of political, economic, and security risks they face. Firas Modad is a host on Podcast of the LotusEaters.

Britain built its economy on the assumption that global stability was permanent. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for n...

Lord Tony Sewell CBE is a British educational consultant, author, and life peer. Born in Brixton to Jamaican parents, he trained as a teacher and worked in some of London's most challenging schools, during which time he completed his PhD on black masculinities and schooling at the University of Nottingham. He helped transform education in Hackney as part of the team that established the Learning Trust and the iconic Mossbourne Academy, a flagship of the Academy movement. He is the founder and chair of Generating Genius, a charity that has helped hundreds of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into...

Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in New Jersey. He edits the journal Book History and was founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. He is the author of several books including The Literary Churchill and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.

For the better part of two centuries, the British working class sustained one of the most remarkable intellectual traditions in any civilisation. Miners read Shakespeare. Engine-men debated Darwin. Workmen's institutes built libraries of tens of thousands of volumes. Literacy was not...

Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order — one of the most clarifying accounts written of how a set of economic assumptions came to dominate Western politics, and how they are now collapsing. He is currently Kluge Chair of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress, working on his next book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century, forthcoming from Penguin Press.

The neoliberal order is over — the set of idea...

Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Dr. Anthony Daniels — physician, psychiatrist, and social diagnostician. He spent years working in the hospitals and prisons of Birmingham before his essays for City Journal established him as the foremost chronicler of what he called the culture of the British underclass. His writing has also appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, New Statesman, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, The New English Review, and The Wall Street Journal. Theodore has authored numerous books, his book Life at the Bottom is twenty-five years old this ye...

Michael Lind is a political theorist, historian, and one of America's most rigorous independent analysts of class, democracy, and political economy. He is a Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, a co-founder of the New America think tank, and a visiting professor at the University of Austin. He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and previously served as an assistant to the Director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the US Department of State.

His books include The New Class War...

Dr. Carl R. Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania and currently a visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His most recent books are The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural Amnesia, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, (with Bruce Gordon) The Oxford Handbook to Calvin and, and To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse (B and H). His writing has appeared in Deseret Journal, Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, American Mind, Claremont Review of Books and Public Discourse. 

Richard IV is a writer, cultural commentator and men's mentor whose work has helped thousands of men in Britain and across the West understand what has gone wrong and what can still be recovered.

In this episode of Thinking Class, John Gillam speaks with Richard about the invisible order that once gave men a path through life — the initiatory traditions, the moral codes, the religious inheritance — and what has happened to the men who grew up without it. They discuss why so many young men in Britain are adopting a roadman identity that has nothing to do with...

Kathleen Stock is a Contributing Editor to UnHerd, a philosopher, author of Material Girls and Do Not Go Gentle, and one of the most forensically precise thinkers in British public life.

A bill is moving through the British Parliament right now that would allow doctors to help their patients die. Its proponents call it assisted dying. Its opponents call it assisted suicide. In Canada, five percent of all deaths now occur through the state-sanctioned equivalent. In Belgium, they have extended it to newborn babies. Canada will allow it for those with mental illness alone from 2027.

...

For decades, the British Empire in India has been reduced to a simple moral claim: that it was an extractive, exploitative system which left only damage behind.

But is that really the full story?

In this episode of Thinking Class, John Gillam is joined by Lord Nigel Biggar and Professor Tirthankar Roy to examine what the British Empire — and the East India Company before it — actually did in India, and how that history continues to shape the present.

One of India's leading economic historians, Professor Tirthankar Roy challenges the dominant narrative from within — and hi...

Will Tanner is a writer and commentator on history, politics, and the late imperial world, whose work explores the realities of decolonisation and what followed in its wake. Will is the Co-Founder of the American Tribune and he is the host of the podcast The Old World with Will Tanner.

What happens after empire ends and what should the West learn from it?

In this episode of Thinking Class, Will Tanner discusses decolonisation not as an abstract academic slogan, but as a historical process with real political, social, and civilisational consequences.

We explore...

John Waters is an Irish journalist, author, and columnist known for his work with Hot Press, The Irish Times, and The Irish Independent. He has written on social and political issues, specialising in father's rights and cultural critiques. 

Ireland changed faster than almost any country in the West. The question now is whether the Irish still recognise the nation they live in. In this episode of Thinking Class, we discuss the moral, cultural and demographic transformation of Ireland over the course of John Waters' lifetime.

We explore the Ireland of his youth — ethnically and culturally hom...

Michael Reiners is a writer, lawyer, and architectural historian. Michael is the founder of the Reiners Project, which publishes essays, draft legislation and commentary on English constitutional law and the art and architectural landscape. 

Britain’s constitutional settlement has changed more in the last few decades than most people realise — and the consequences now reach into identity, speech, governance, and the question of who the country is for.

This episode forms part of Thinking Class’ ongoing inquiry: The Question of the West — examining the political, cultural, and civilisational foundations of our common life.

We d...

Lord Nigel Biggar is an Anglican priest, theologian, and moral philosopher, a member of the House of Lords, and Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford.  His most recent books are The New Dark Age: Why Liberals Must Win The Culture War, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023), What’s Wrong with Rights?, In Defence of War, and Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation. In the press he has written articles for the Financial Times, the (London) Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator, the (Glasgow} Herald, the Irish Times, Standpoint, The Critic, The Article, UnHerd and...

Lionel Shriver is a novelist and columnist at The Spectator, and the author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Mania, and A Better Life among many other books.

Lionel Shriver returns to Thinking Class to discuss mass immigration in the West—not as an abstract moral debate, but as a lived experience reshaping belonging, institutions, and politics.

We start with Lionel’s new novel A Better Life, which tackles immigration through fiction from the host-country’s point of view. We explore why the “native-born” perspective is rarely told, what happens when immigration becomes mass-scale, and why vo...

Lord Jonathan Sumption is a British judge and historian, who served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012 – 2018. He is the author of The Challenges of Democracy And The Rule Of Law, the Sunday Times bestseller Trials of the State, Law in a Time of Crisis, and Divided Houses, which won the 2009 Wolfson History Prize.

Across Britain and the wider West democratic decision-making is increasingly being hollowed out by courts, by bureaucracies, by delayed elections, by restrictions on speech, and by a political class that often appears unwilling to govern according to the public will.

In th...

Dr Carrie Gress has a doctorate in philosophy from the Catholic University of America and is the editor at the online women’s magazine Theology of Home. Carrie’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including National Review, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, First Things, Newsweek, The American Spectator, The Catholic Thing, The Federalist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Examiner. She is a frequent radio and podcast guest and has appeared on Fox, BBC, CBC, EWTN, OAN, and Russia Times television. She is the best-selling author of eleven books including The Marian Option, and The Anti-Mary Exposed, The End...

Dr. Bijan Omrani is a classicist, historian, and Oxford-educated barrister. His research explores questions of religious history and cultural identity, spanning from ancient Roman Greece to Afghanistan and the Silk Road. He has taught Classics at Eton College and Westminster School, is a former editor of Asian Affairs, and currently serves as a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is also a churchwarden.

Dr. Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert is the director of the organisation Don't Divide Us. She is an educator, academic, author, and campaigner who believes passionately in the essential importance of impartiality. 

What d...

Firas Modad is an analyst and political economist focused on the Middle East and global geopolitics. He runs his own consultancy, Modad Geopolitics, helping companies and investors understand the commercial impact of political, economic, and security risks they face. Firas Modad is a host on Podcast of the LotusEaters.

Firas examines how Britain’s security is being quietly undermined at home and abroad, and why so few in the political class are willing to confront the scale of the problem.

In this conversation, we think out loud about:

Britain’s internal security and the risk...

Professor Azar Gat, one of the world’s leading scholars of nationalism, war, and political identity.

Professor Gat is Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University and the author of several major works on conflict and political order, including War in Human Civilization and, most notably for this conversation, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism.

In that book — and in our discussion today — Gat challenges one of the most dominant assumptions of modern political thought: that nations are merely recent inventions, artificial constructs, or the superficial products of elite...

Renaud Camus, writer, painter, photographer, was born in 1946. He is now the author of more than one hundred and sixty works. His works are marked by the question of meaning and the fight against the industrialisation of man and the massacre of landscapes. 

In this episode of Thinking Class, John Gillam and essayist Renaud Camus engage in a wide-ranging conversation about what Camus has long described as “the disaster” — the civilisational, cultural, and demographic transformations reshaping France, Britain, and much of the Western world.

Camus is widely known in public debate for his writings on demogra...

William Clouston is the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the United Kingdom and a member of the advisory board for Restore Britain. 

In this conversation, William Clouston and I think out loud about the current state of British politics, focusing on the disconnect between government promises and actual governance. We explore:

The need for a cultural and civilisational vision beyond economicsThe challenges posed by mass immigration for social democracy and defining remigrationThe importance of governing in the national interest and what the national interest isWhether Western European nations will be forced into ending m...