Battle of the texts: which books changed the world?

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• 00:03

  The Economist Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.

• 00:13

  I'm your host, Rosie Bloor, and today we're discussing my very favourite thing, books.

• 00:28

  Every Christmas we ask our correspondents to talk about books that fit a particular theme.

• 00:34

  Last year we talked about books that predict the future and this year we thought we're going to go one bigger.

• 00:39

  We want to talk about books that have changed the world.

• 00:45

  To help me leaf through the pages,

• 00:47

  I'm joined in the studio by Catherine Nixie who wrote A Darkening Age and is our culture correspondent and also writes for the Britain section.

• 00:54

  Hi Catherine.

• 00:55

  Hi Rosie.

• 00:56

  And I'm also joined by Oliver Morton, who wrote The Moon,

• 00:59

  A History for the Future, and is also a senior editor at The Economist.

• 01:03

  Nice to have you, Ollie.

• 01:04

  Nice to be here, Rosie.

• 01:09

  Catherine Ollie.

• 01:10

  My first question is, can a book change the world?

• 01:13

  I think almost nothing other than books changes the world.

• 01:16

  I mean, the obvious one is the Bible, of course.

• 01:18

  It's impossible to run a counterfactual on what the world would have been like had that book books.

• 01:22

  It's really a library rather than a book, not happened.

• 01:25

  But I mean, you go through history and again and again,

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