The Battle of Ideas 2008 was a two-day festival of high-level, thought-provoking debate organised by the Academy of Ideas and hosted by the Royal College of Art.
Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick; chair, Neuroscience Research Partnership, Singapore; chair, general advisory committee on science, Food Standards Agency
John Cooper, leading criminal and human rights barrister; regular columnist,
The Times and
Observer; editor,
Criminal Bar Quarterly
Frank Field, MP, Labour MP for Birkenhead; co-chair, Cross Party Group on Balanced Migration; author,
Neighbours from Hell: The Politics of Behaviour
Frank Furedi, sociologist and social commentator; author,
What's Happened to the University?,
Power of Reading: from Socrates to Twitter, On Tolerance and
Authority: a sociological history
Leela Gandhi, professor of English, University of Chicago; author
Affective Communities: anticolonial thought, fin-de-siècle radicalism, and the politics of friendship; founding co-editor,
Postcolonial Studies journal.
Clare Gerada, GP; past chair, Royal College of General Practitioners
Susan Jacoby, author,
The Age of American Unreason; programme director, Centre for Inquiry - NYC; fellow, Centre for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library.
Bronwen Maddox, chief foreign commentator,
The Times; author
In Defence of America
Kenan Malik, writer and broadcaster; author,
The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics and
From Fatwa to Jihad