Big ideas for Christmas at the Academy of Ideas bookshop
Great books make great presents - and our Letters on Liberty make stimulating stocking fillers, too!
It’s that time of year when we are all scurrying around buying presents for family, loved ones and colleagues. We at the Academy of Ideas are unsurprisingly keen on the value of ideas – so what better a gift than books brimming with stimulating, priceless ideas? Take a look at our Academy of Ideas bookshop picks below. There’s plenty there to ensure that recipients will be buzzing with stimulating thoughts over the festive period, all ready for the political and cultural battles ahead in 2025.
I’d like to especially recommend our Letters of Liberty, designed as an antidote to today’s suffocating censorious climate. Drawing on the tradition of radical pamphlets from the seventeenth century onwards – designed to be argued over in the pub as much as parliament – Letters on Liberty promise to make readers think twice. While we stand on the shoulders of giants, we shouldn’t be complacent and can’t simply rely on the thinkers of the past to work out what liberty means today, and how to argue for it. So with these short but substantive reads, each Letter aims to be the basis for rowdy, but good-natured disagreement, with authors asked to experiment with what freedom might mean today on a wide variety of contemporary issues and stake a claim for how to forge a freer society in the here and now.
These pamphlets, each beautifully designed by artist Jan Bowman, and skillfully edited by our own Ella Whelan, are brilliant – and cheap – stocking fillers. We now have 42 to choose from. Every bundle of three will be packaged up in lovely Battle of Ideas ribbon, all ready for you to pop into Santa’s sack or as a lovely addition to your Xmas cards. Each bundle of three costs £5. Or you could buy someone a gift subscription with the most recent three pamphlets packaged up and the subscription for future issues starting in the new year. This costs £25, including postage.
Happy Christmas shopping. Enjoy the December build up to the holiday. Click on the image below to go to the bookshop page and let’s get buying…
