Pete Townsend said it best. “Hope I die before I get old” he wrote in The Who’s anthemic 1965 hit, “My Generation”. But what Townsend really meant in a lyric that best captured the rebellious Boomer spirit of the Sixties, he later acknowledged, was “hope I die before I get very rich”. Townsend, as it happens, is still

When we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes—war, famine, pandemic—we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion,

As a young historian at Cambridge and Oxford, he did not rest in the ivory tower but brought his erudition on the great stories and crises of the day, travelling widely and becoming one of our most celebrated broadcasters and influential public intellectuals. Later, he returned to his native Canada to become leader of

A special live edition recorded in front of an audience in Cambridge: David talks to writer, broadcaster, academic and politician Michael Ignatieff about his personal experiences of democratic politics. From his bruising time as Liberal party leader in Canada to his recent confrontations with the Orban government in Hu

Central European University's President Michael Ignatieff is a human rights scholar, an educator, a former politician, and, as he tells us, the son of a refugee. He discusses what he calls "the ordinary virtues," such as patience and tolerance; the status of human rights today and the dilemmas of migration; the essenti

Andrew Keen interviews Michael Ignatieff, the rector and president of the Central European University in Budapest, an institution that has come under attack by Viktor Orban’s government in Hungary.