Britain feels stuck. The NHS creaks, the housing crisis deepens, social care remains unresolved, and a growing fatalism has settled over public life — the sense that nothing can really change. John Kampfner has spent three years travelling the world to challenge that assumption, and the result is a book the Financial Times calls "rattlingly readable... inspiring" and the New Statesman praises as "a rare example of a Broken Britain book with answers."
At a time when democracies seem paralysed by fear and populations are turning inward, Kampfner visited ten countries confronting our shared challenges with bravery and imagination. Taiwan's health system achieves 90% patient satisfaction at a fraction of the cost of the NHS. Vienna has pursued affordable social housing for a century, with 60% of residents living in subsidised accommodation without stigma. Costa Rica has tripled its economy while doubling its forest cover. Finland's schools prepare children for an uncertain world that Britain's teaching-to-the-test system cannot match.
These are not distant utopias. They are practical, working models chosen precisely because they demonstrate that difficult problems are not unsolvable. As the Observer puts it, Braver New World is "engaging and informative, imploring us not to lose hope" — a top ten bestseller that Radio 4's Start the Week simply called "a ray of sunshine."
In this session, John Kampfner will bring these stories to life and ask the question at the heart of his book: solutions exist — do we have the courage to learn from them? For an audience in Brighton and Hove, a city that has long been willing to think differently about politics and public life, it is a talk that could hardly feel more timely.
John Kampfner is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and foreign affairs commentator who began his career reporting from East Berlin during the fall of the Wall and from Moscow during the collapse of communism. He went on to cover British politics for the Financial Times and the BBC before editing the New Statesman. His previous book, Why the Germans Do It Better, was a top ten bestseller and Book of the Year in the Guardian, the Economist, and the New Statesman. Braver New World is his eighth book, published by Atlantic Books in 2026.
A Q&A session will follow.
