For some reason, I wrote about all the BBC Reith Lectures since 1948 last year (here and here; postscript here). The last two years have been
2008 Jonathan Spence, Chinese Vistas
2009 Michael Sandel, A New CitizenshipYou can hear them, and others in the series, here.
2008 marked, I thought, a low point of incoherence, because Spence, an excellent historian, had obviously been told, like Barenboim before him, that a lecture was not what people nowadays wanted. His virtually extempore delivery might have worked at a university; it failed in the medium of radio.
Sandel this year was good. Sue Lawley continues to make sure that she is heard more than any questioner in the audience.
Here is a playlist for one of Pevsner’s lectures in 1955 on The Englishness of English Art.
