Master-Mind Lectures

A bequest from Miss Henriette Hertz (d. 1913) established a fund that was intended both to support three lecture series, and more generally to enable the Academy to support scholarly research and publication. The Master-Mind Lectures were one of the lecture series. Each lecture was intended to be an appreciation of an individual of ‘genius’, connected with any of the disciplines of the Academy. The lecture was first delivered in 1916. The series was discontinued after the Academy developed a series of events on ‘Thinkers for our time’.

List of Master-Mind Lectures delivered since 1960.

2017 Karl Marx’s changing picture of the end of capitalism by Gareth Stedman Jones (text)

2014 Thomas Hobbes: Liberal illiberal, by Noel Malcolm (text | audio)

2014 Simone de Beauvoir, by Toril Moi (video)

2006 Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment, by Lorraine Daston (text)

2005 Einstein, by John Stachel (text)

2004 Montaigne, by Terence Cave (text | audio)

2002 Freud? by Adam Phillips (text)

2000 Plato, by M F Burnyeat (text)

1998 Max Weber, by Geoffrey Hawthorne (text)

1996 George Eliot: Immanent Victorian, by Catherine Gallagher (text)

1994 Voltaire [in French], by Marc Fumaroli (text)

1992 Rabelais, by M A Screech

1990 Michelet, by F Furet (text)

1988 Socrates, by Gregory Vlastos (text)

1986 Wyclif, by Anthony Kenny (text)

1984 Jacob Burckhardt, by Hugh Trevor-Roper (text)

1982 Pindar, by Hugh Lloyd-Jones (text)

1980 F. W. Maitland, by S F C Milsom (text)

1978 The Mind of Nietzsche, by J P Stern

1976 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Jean Starobinski (text)

1974 Walter Bagehot, by K C Wheare (text)

1972 Bertrand Russell as a Philosopher, by A J Ayer (text)

1970 Eratosthenes of Cyrene, by P M Fraser (text)

1968 Jonathan Swift, by Irvin Ehrenpreis (text)

1966 Dr. Bernard Mandeville, by F A Hayek (text)

1964 Inigo Jones, by John Summerson (text)

1962 Bentham, by H L A Hart (text)

1960 Thucydides, by Ronald Syme (text)

. . .

1916 Cervantes and Shakespeare, by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly (text)

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