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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud.

Each week we choose some of our favourite pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

I'm Patrick Gibbons and on this week's podcast,

with the philosopher Descartes as

inspiration, Matthew Paris ponderes if he is alone in thinking. Joanna Bell discusses her

impromptu interview with Ireland's Michael Collins, not their revolutionary hero, but his namesake,

the current leader of the Independent Island Party. Professor of Global History

at Oxford University, Peter Frankapan, argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas.

Reviewing Living in Wonder, Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age by Rod Dreher, Mary Wakefield

contemplates angels and demons in a world of smartphones.

And finally, Flora Watkins provides her notes on the Christmas comeback of Baby Sham.

Up first, Matthew Parris.

And remarking that this verity, I think, don't I am,

it is so firm and so assured that all the more extravagant supposition

of skeptic not were capable of embranelay, I judged that I could be

receiving without scrupule for the first principle of the philosophy that I cherche.

Pardon my French, and I translate below, but so elemental was what René Descartes wrote,

afterwards rendered in Latin, cogito, ergo sum, that his phrasing should confront us first

...