Angus Kennedy is head of external relations for the Institute of Ideas, working principally to programme the annual Battle of Ideas festival in London and its international satellite events. He chairs the Institute’s Economy Forum and helps organise its discussions. He writes for spiked and Culture Wars, among other publications, with particular interests in the Holocaust, classics, culture and the arts, economics and moral philosophy. He is a Member of the European Cultural Parliament, ECP.

His main concern is the sense of a loss of historical meaning, values and authority that permeates contemporary culture and society: as increasingly evidenced by the growth of instrumentalist thinking - the inability to define and defend things (education, the arts, economic growth) in their own terms – and also by the rise of a ‘magical’ thinking that ascribes agency to almost anything but man.

He has produced several strands and individual debates at the Battle of Ideas: on themes as various as history, opera, the Holocaust and memory, the ancient Greeks, social justice, the arts and the economy. He both speaks at and chairs similar events across the UK and beyond. He is currently researching a book on courage and fate.

Angus has a degree in Classics from Oxford, in Linguistics from the University of London and an M. Phil. in Artificial Intelligence from Dundee University. He is Canadian by birth, grew up in Edinburgh, and is now settled in London with his daughter.