Mullins: Never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time. My poor papa's maxim. The miserable wretch you behold. Annual income twenty pounds, annuals expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Mr Macabre drank a glass of punch with an air of great enjoyment and satisfaction and whistled the college horn pipe. Our time is sadly almost up but perhaps you could hear in that wonderful passage that mixture of melancholy and buoyancy,. That enjoyment and relish when you are supposed to be serious or grim, that is so distinctive of Charles Dickens.
Dickens. Tolstoy. Their names and reputations shake the ground – and so do their books, if you drop one. But whose legacy is more enduring? Whose vision truer and more relevant today? Should you embark on War and Peace or Our Mutual Friend? To battle it out, in 2018 Intelligence Squared brought two celebrated writers, John Mullan for Dickens and Simon Schama for Tolstoy, to our stage. They called on a cast of star actors, including Tom Hiddleston, to bring their arguments to life with readings from the authors’ finest works. The debate was chaired by author, playwright and broadcaster Bonnie Greer. This is the first instalment of a three-part episode.
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