"I never thought about it that way before." For forty years, CBC Radio's Ideas has challenged listeners with provocative contemporary thought. In IDEAS: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds, executive producer Bernie Lucht presents twenty selections from the program's rich archive.

IDEAS: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds is a symposium of prominent thinkers who have shaped the culture of our times. On topics including peace and conflict, ideology and the nation-state, and secularism and religion, voices from the past and present resonate together. Tariq Ali and Roméo Dallaire share dedication to personal responsibility, Northrop Frye's views on the Bible complement Bernard Lewis's assessment of Islam after 9/11, and Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt's opinions on violence foreshadow James Orbinski's exposure of false humanitarianism.

For four decades, Ideas has presented more than 400,000 CBC Radio listeners in Canada and the United States with the most challenging contemporary thought of the day. Now, to mark the program's 40th anniversary, executive producer Bernie Lucht has selected the most striking interviews and lectures for Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds. Featuring some the best thinkers from North America and around the world that have appeared on the program since its beginnings in 1965, Ideas: Brilliant Thinkers Speak Their Minds touches upon societal values, how we govern ourselves, and navigating in the international community. In this remarkable book, Bernie Lucht, winner of the John Drainie Award for broadcast journalism, introduces readers to the origins of the ground-breaking program and to "the best ideas you'll hear tonight."

Since the beginning, geopolitics has been one of the significant concerns of the program, and issues such as democracy, dictatorships, the nature of the nation-state, the public good, ideology, religion, peace and violence keep returning to the fore. Although many of the topics have been around for decades, the questions remain startlingly topical today, even in a radically changed world. Exploring geopolitics writ large, Ideas features interviews, lectures and radio documentaries with such influential contemporary thinkers as Tariq Ali, Michael Bliss, Noam Chomsky, Ursula Franklin, Northrop Frye, Bernard Lewis, Margaret MacMillan, James Orbinski, and many, many others. While each thinker speaks from his or her specific experience in time, the themes and concerns resonate as much today as they did last week or forty years ago.