Today’s Between the Covers podcast with with Mary Ann Glendon, author of The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. We discuss how intellectuals contribute to public life, what her experience as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican taught her about politics, and whether William F. Buckley Jr. was right to say he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.