Reith Lectures

thumb|right|The Reith Lectures are named in honour of [[John Reith, 1st Baron Reith, the BBC's first director-general]]

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.

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 J. 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 V. 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

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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"
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 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, "Freedom of Speech"; Rowan Williams, "Freedom of Worship"; Darren McGarvey, "Freedom from Want"; Fiona Hill, "Freedom from Fear" (theme: "The Four Freedoms")
2023 Ben Ansell, "Our Democratic Future"
2024 Gwen Adshead, "Four Questions About Violence"
2025 Rutger Bregman, "Moral Revolution"

Censorship

Rutger Bregman's intended statement in his 2025 lecture that Donald Trump was the "most openly corrupt president in American history" was censored by the BBC upon advice of its lawyers prior to the broadcast. The BBC forbid its staff from quoting the censored line in communication with the media.

Reith Lectures

The Reith Lectures archive

2000s

2010s

2020s

Censorship

See also

Notes

References

External links