Reith Revisited: Grayson Perry on Nikolaus Pevsner

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science, Government, Technology

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2017

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

'The Englishness of English Art' was the theme of the 1955 BBC Reith lectures by art historian Nikolaus Pevsner. Sarah Montague discusses them with Grayson Perry, the artist who himself was a Reith Lecturer in 2013.

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.

Producer: Neil Koenig Researcher: Josephine Casserley

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Nicola Cocklin.
0:02.8	Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them.
0:06.6	My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right.
0:10.6	In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people
0:16.0	who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world.
0:19.8	Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela,
0:22.5	Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:30.4	Thanks for downloading this edition of Reith Revisited, part of the special programming
0:34.9	celebrating BBC Radio 4's 50th birthday.
0:38.5	In this episode, Sarah Montague and the artist Grayson Perry
0:42.4	look back at the 1955 wreath lectures by Nicholas Pevzner
0:46.8	on The Englishness of English Art.
0:51.4	Russia, the Atom and the West by George F. Kenney.
0:55.9	This series is given by Dr. Nicholas Pilsner.
0:58.5	Authority and the individual, and the speaker is the eminent philosopher Bertrand Russell.
1:04.8	We present the Reef Lectures, an annual series of broadcasts named in honour of the BBC's first director general.
1:15.4	It's in Pevsner. That's a line of argument you'll still hear used in planning applications today.
1:22.5	Nicholas Pevzner, who gave the wreath lectures in 1955, was a historian of art and architecture.
1:29.3	He'd come to Britain from Germany in the 30s after the Nazis stopped him from working
1:33.3	because of his Jewish background.
1:35.9	Despite that, he was briefly interned in the Second World War for being an enemy alien.
1:41.8	Pevsner went on to have a successful career. Among his many works was his monumental
	...

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