Escaping Reality

Sarah Montague and Michael Sandel look back at the inaugural Reith Lectures given in 1948 and 1949 by the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

In Reith Revisited, Radio 4 assesses the contributions of great minds of the past to public debate, in a dialogue across the decades with contemporary thinkers. In 1948, households across Britain gathered before the wireless as the pre-eminent public intellectual of the age, the philosopher Bertrand Russell delivered a set of lectures in honour of the BBC's founder, Lord Reith. Since then, the Reith Lectures on the Home Service and subsequently Radio 4 have become a major national occasion for intellectual debate. In this series Radio 4 revisits five of the speakers from the first ten years of the Reith Lectures.