Reith Lectures

Reith Lectures
The Reith Lectures is a series of annual BBC radio lectures given by leading figures of the day. They are commissioned by the BBC and broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service. The lectures were inaugurated in 1948 to mark the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Lord Reith, the corporation's first director-general.
Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service that aimed to enrich the intellectual and cultural life of the nation. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver the lectures. The aim is to advance public understanding and debate about issues of contemporary interest.
The first Reith lecturer was the philosopher and later Nobel laureate, Bertrand Russell. The first female lecturer was Dame Margery Perham in 1961. The youngest Reith lecturer was Colin Blakemore, who was 32 in 1976 when he broadcast over six episodes on the brain and consciousness.
The Reith Lectures archive
In June 2011 BBC Radio 4 published its Reith Lectures archive. This included two podcasts featuring over 240 lectures from 1948 to the present day as well as streamed online audio, and the complete written transcripts of the entire Reith Lectures archive:
Podcast 1: Archive 1948–1975
Podcast 2: Archive 1976–2012
Transcripts 1948–2010
In pictures
The BBC found that some of the audio archive of the Reith Lectures was missing from its library and appealed to the public for copies of the missing lectures.
The Reith Lectures 1948–2020
1940s
1948 Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual
1949 Robert Birley, Britain in Europe
1950s
1950 John Zachary Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science
1951 Lord Radcliffe, Power and the State
1952 Arnold J. Toynbee, The World and the West
1953 Robert Oppenheimer, Science and the Common Understanding
1954 Oliver Franks, Britain and the Tide of World Affairs
1955 Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art
1956 Edward Victor Appleton, Science and the Nation
1957 George F. Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West
1958 Bernard Lovell, The Individual and the Universe
1959 Peter Medawar, The Future of Man
1960s
1960 Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy
1961 Margery Perham, The Colonial Reckoning
1962 George Carstairs, This Island Now
1963 Albert Sloman, A University in the Making
1964 Leon Bagrit, The Age of Automation
1965 Robert Gardiner, World of Peoples
1966 John K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State
1967 Edmund Leach, A Runaway World
1968 Lester Pearson, In the Family of Man
1969 Frank Fraser Darling, Wilderness and Plenty
1970s
1970 Donald Schon, Change and Industrial Society
1971 Richard Hoggart, Only Connect
1972 Andrew Shonfield, Europe: Journey to an Unknown Destination
1973 Alastair Buchan, Change Without War
1974 Ralf Dahrendorf, The New Liberty
1975 Daniel Boorstin, America and the World Experience
1976 Colin Blakemore, Mechanics of the Mind
1977 A. H. Halsey, Change in British Society
1978 Edward Norman, Christianity and the World
1979 Ali Mazrui, The African Condition
1980s
1980 Professor Sir Ian Kennedy, Unmasking Medicine
1981 Laurence Martin, The Two Edged Sword
1982 Denis Donoghue, The Arts Without Mystery
1983 Douglas Wass, Government and the Governed
1984 John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science
1985 David Henderson, Innocence and Design
1986 Lord McCluskey, Law, Justice and Democracy
1987 Alexander Goehr, The Survival of the Symphony
1988 Geoffrey Hosking, The Rediscovery of Politics
1989 , Beyond the Tunnel of History
1990s
1990 Jonathan Sacks, The Persistence of Faith
1991 Steve Jones, The Language of Genes
There was no lecture in 1992 because "the BBC simply couldn't find anyone to do them"
1993 Edward Said, Representation of the Intellectual
1994 Marina Warner, Managing Monsters
1995 Richard Rogers, Sustainable City
1996 Jean Aitchison, The Language Web
1997 Patricia Williams, The Genealogy of Race
1998 John Keegan, War in Our World
1999 Anthony Giddens, The Runaway World
2000s
2000 Chris Patten, Sir John Browne, Thomas Lovejoy, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Vandana Shiva, Charles, Prince of Wales, Respect for the Earth
2001 Tom Kirkwood, The End of Age
2002 Onora O'Neill, A Question of Trust?
2003 Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, The Emerging Mind
2004 Wole Soyinka, Climate of Fear
2005 Lord Broers, The Triumph of Technology
2006 Daniel Barenboim, In the Beginning was Sound
2007 Jeffrey Sachs, Bursting at the Seams
2008 Professor Jonathan Spence, Chinese Vistas
2009 Michael Sandel, A New Citizenship
2010s
2010 Martin Rees, Scientific Horizons
2011 Aung San Suu Kyi and Baroness Manningham-Buller, Securing Freedom
2012 Niall Ferguson, The Rule of Law and Its Enemies
2013 Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery
2014 Atul Gawande, The Future of Medicine
2015 Stephen Hawking's lecture was postponed because of illness
2016 (March) Stephen Hawking, Do Black Holes Have No Hair?
2016 (October) Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mistaken Identities
2017 Hilary Mantel, Resurrection: The Art And Craft
2018 Margaret MacMillan, The Mark of Cain
2019 Jonathan Sumption, Law and the Decline of Politics
2020s
2020 Mark Carney, How We Get What We Value - From Moral to Market Sentiments
2021 Stuart J. Russell, Living with Artificial Intelligence
2022 The Four Freedoms: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "Freedom of speech"; Rowan Williams, "Freedom of worship"; Darren McGarvey, "Freedom from want"; Fiona Hill, "Freedom from fear"
See also
Boyer Lectures
References
External links
History
Listen to archived lectures
1948 establishments in the United Kingdom
1948 radio programme debuts
Annual events in the United Kingdom
BBC Radio 4 programmes
BBC World Service programmes
British lecture series
Radio-related lists
Recurring events established in 1948