Pascal Bruckner is not afraid of controversy. Original and unconventional, the author of The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism has garnered praise from Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens and, of course, the brilliant polymath Clive James. He came to fame as one of the “nouveaux philosophes” together with Bernard-Henri Lévy, had a novel made into a film by Roman Polanski (Bitter Moon) and writes lucid prose. This was a conversation which ranged from geopolitics t...