Alastair Benn

Deputy Editor at Reaction

Editor at The Reaction Podcast

Deputy Editor at Engelsberg Ideas

Deputy Editor @EngelsbergIdeas Send pitches to [email protected]

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Articles

The art of Siena: a question of perspective

3 weeks ago | engelsbergideas.com | Alastair Benn

Just a few miles from Siena, the Tuscan countryside’s contours of farm and vineyard are broken by a perfectly shaped conical mound, crowned with a grove of cypress trees. A stone pyramid on its summit, visible from every approach, bears simple white plaques on two of its sides. One reads ‘MCCLX’, for 1260, and on the other, ‘Montaperti’, or ‘the hill of death’.
The subtle art of English comedy

Mar 6, 2025 | engelsbergideas.com | Alastair Benn

A smart dinner party is under way. Six guests arranged around the table are all wearing open-necked shirts, some of them with garish vertical stripes. They are enjoying generous glasses of wine. The dining room is enormous and lined with bare brickwork and minimal fittings, a little abstract art in the corner.
EI Talks... the myth and magic of spy fiction

Feb 13, 2025 | audioboom.com | Alastair Benn |David Omand |Paul Lay

Are we living through a golden age of espionage drama? And what do spy stories tell us about the true nature of the secret world? EI's Alastair Benn is joined by David Omand, ex-head of GCHQ, the British government’s world-renowned cyber agency, and author of How Spies Think, Pauline Blistène, an expert on intelligence affairs and spy fiction, and Senior Editor Paul Lay to discuss the enduring popularity and legacy of the spy in fiction.
EI Talks... the dawn of the post-literate society

Jan 30, 2025 | audioboom.com | Alastair Benn |James Marriott |Paul Lay

Is the era of mass literacy over? And what might a post-literate society look like? EI's Alastair Benn is joined by Times columnist James Marriott and Senior Editor Paul Lay to discuss the promise and peril of a culture defined by the audiovisual. Engelsberg Ideas is funded by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. EI Talks... is hosted by Paul Lay and Alastair Benn, and produced by Caitlin Brown. The sound engineer is Gareth Jones.
Bob Dylan, the last of the best

Jan 22, 2025 | engelsbergideas.com | Alastair Benn

It’s a cold winter morning in New York, ‘every artery of the city… snow-packed’. A corduroyed, scraggy young man, guitar in hand, bobs through Greenwich Village. The street is peopled with ‘salesmen in rabbit fur earmuffs hawking gimmicks, chestnut vendors’.
Podcasts v the written word

Jan 14, 2025 | engelsbergideas.com | Alastair Benn

In 2017, podcasts were still niche. A podcast, Michelle Dean wrote in March of that year, ‘needs to be an accretion of minutiae that satisfies the listener in his or her own obsession. The host and listener are like children counting marbles, things that have little or no value to others but that seem priceless to those engaged in the counting’. She continues: ‘Podcasts have devised new and entertaining ways to keep us informed.
Literacy's declining empire

Jan 8, 2025 | engelsbergideas.com | Alastair Benn

Last night I fell asleep earlier than usual and woke up around one in the morning – I jolted awake after two hours or so of sleep in which I had, quite involuntarily, imagined myself to be the subject of the book I had been reading: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, a monumental epistolary novel from the mid-18th Century.
The Slow Horses are Britain's perfect spies

Oct 8, 2024 | engelsbergideas.com | Alastair Benn

The spy novel, writes Dame Stella Rimington, former chief of Britain’s Home Security Service, MI5, and since her retirement herself a novelist, is ‘in a special class of literature in which the real and the imaginary can be mixed in any proportion, so long as both are present’. The operative phrase is here ‘in any proportion’. Most successful literature grafts some measure of the real onto the imaginary. The spy genre is especially marked by its demotic appetites and expansive tastes.
EI Talks... the attention dilemma

Oct 3, 2024 | audioboom.com | Alastair Benn

EI's Paul Lay and Alastair Benn discuss an attention dilemma that has haunted western thought for centuries. READING LISTOur attention dilemma is age-old | Alastair BennEpistulae Morales ad Lucilium | SenecaThe Essays of Michel de MontaigneDon Quixote | Miguel de CervantesEngelsberg Ideas is funded by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. EI Talks... is hosted by Paul Lay and Alastair Benn. The sound engineer is Gareth Jones.
Our attention dilemma is age-old

Sep 12, 2024 | engelsbergideas.com | Alastair Benn

A man sits down in an empty train carriage, his gaze is drawn towards the window, his eyes flitting backwards and forwards, from pylon to pylon. Sometimes, he focuses on a tree. It turns on its axis with the motion of the train. Just as he registers how pleasant the sensation is, this ‘frail travelling coincidence’ held in mind – of tree, sky, technology, thought and matter – he turns away. His phone is buzzing, yes, that thing clutched in his hand.