Who gets to win power and how do they keep it – and lose it? These are the questions that Mary Beard and Rory Stewart addressed when they came to Intelligence Squared on in November 2023. Beard, Britain’s best known classicist, has won legions of fans through her enthusiasm for the ancient world and her exploration of our cultural assumptions about powerful women, as depicted in her bestseller Women & Power. In her new book Emperor of Rome, she shines her spotlight on the men who ruled the Roman Empire. Stewart has seen the workings of power up close – and he has yielded it. Over the course of a decade from 2010, he went from being a backbench MP, though several ministerial positions, to standing for prime minister – before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. In his new memoir Politics on the Edge he reveals how he bore witness to cronyism and incompetence, which he believes laid the foundations for our current political and economic chaos.

This is Part One of a three-episode discussion.

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