In 2007, David Edmunds, a documentary filmmaker for BBC World Service, and Nigel Warburton, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, began a free podcast featuring bite-sized interviews with philosophers on a variety of topics. In their first two years, they generated five million downloads and fanfare from around the world. In this small volume, Edmunds and Warburton have chosen what they consider to be the 25 best interviews. They are to be commended for taking an old and often musty academic subject and infusing it with contemporary flare.

This volume in the third in a series of books based on the podcasts. Unlike its predecessors, this one has interviews grouped around various themes. The first asks: "Who is the most impressive philosopher you've met?" and contains a variety of answers. The thematic modules have a definite philosophical sobriety about them:

• Joy and Pain
• Morality
• Mind, Self, and Imagination
• Free Will, Responsibility, and Punishment
• Politics
• Metaphysics, Meaning, and Reason

Agree with him/her or not, it is always stimulating to listen to a philosopher probe the meaning of free will, imagination, morality, reason and consciousness. This excellent series of books give philosophy a good name.