War And Our World

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 1998

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Reith lecturer for the 50th anniversary series, is British military historian and journalist John Keegan. He has been a senior lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and also held a visiting professorship at Princeton University. Leaving the academy in 1986 John Keegan joined the Daily Telegraph as a Defence Correspondent and remains with the publication as Defence Editor, also writing for the American conservative website, National Review Online. His published work examines warfare throughout history, including human prehistory and the classical era; with the majority of his writing focussing on the 14th century onwards to modern conflict.

In his first Reith Lecture, recorded at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London, John Keegan explores the great impact warfare has had on modern times. War has been the scourge of this century, but John Keegan argues that until very recently war was not among life's great enemies. War previously had occasionally had epidemic effects, but it always stood lower in peoples' fears than the arrival of famine and disease. The fear of war as a widespread killer, he says, only began in the 19th century, and only in the 20th century did the fear of war overtake the more primordial anxieties associated with sickness and deprivation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.
0:04.4	This lecture in the series War in Our World, given by John Keegan, was originally broadcast in 1998.
0:12.4	Welcome to the 50th anniversary series of Reith Lectures on Radio 4.
0:16.3	You join an invited audience at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London.
0:20.7	Gathered here and in future weeks at other venues are, among others,
0:24.3	serving officers, elected politicians,
0:27.0	some with current or former responsibility for defence and foreign policy,
0:31.1	writers and academics with specialist knowledge or experience,
0:34.5	peace campaigners, former re- lecturers, and other public figures.
0:38.5	It's here the Michael Faraday lecture theatre that Faraday famously gave his public lectures
0:43.7	on the emerging principles of science, intended to bring greater general understanding of the
0:49.1	new ideas which would eventually shape our world.
0:52.1	After one lecture, a member of the audience,
0:54.3	Charles Dickens, was so impressed that he leapt up
0:56.4	and offered him a column in his popular newspaper.
0:58.9	Excellence, public interest, opportunity and accessibility,
1:02.5	all combined, which makes it an appropriate setting for the wreath lectures.
1:06.9	They were inaugurated 50 years ago by Burton Drussell
1:09.6	to mark the enormous contribution made to public life by the BBC's first directed general, Sir John, later Lord Reith.
1:17.6	John Reith, who served in France in the First World War, believed fiercely that broadcasting should be a public service designed to inform, educate and entertain all those who paid for it.
1:28.3	It's in that spirit that the BBC invites a leading figure this year John Keegan
1:32.5	to deliver a series of lectures using the medium of radio to advance greater public understanding of their field.
	...

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