PAST LECTURES
2007 A C Grayling
2006 John Julius Norwich
2005 Jonathan Keates
2004 Marina Warner
2003 Claire Tomalin
2002 Andrew Roberts
2001 David Cannadine
2000 Matt Ridley
1999 John Keegan
1998 Roy Jenkins
1997 Tom Stoppard
1996 Robin Hanbury-
Tenison
1995 Victoria Glendinning
1994 Colin Matthew
1993 John Grigg
1992 Anthony Thwaite
Unrepresentative Radicals: William Hazlitt and Bertrand Russell
The Duff Cooper Diary
The Portable Paradise: Baedeker, Murray
and the Victorian Guidebook
Charm’d magic casements: The Arabian
Nights and its influence on magic plots,
spellbound character and political fabulism
The Secret Companion: Samuel Pepys’s
Diary
What If?: accident versus design in history
In the Shadow of the Victorians?
How the twentieth century saw them, and how
we should see them
Manufacturing Mystery: science writing’s
new golden age
Old Men Remember: recent memoirs of
the Second World War
The Reading Habits of Politicians: with
special reference to W E Gladstone
‘The invention of love and not only love’:
reflections on biographical fiction
The Literature of Travel and Exploration
Who is Jonathan Swift?
The DNB and the New DNB: Leslie Stephen
and Sidney Lee a hundred years on
The Curious Eclipse of H A L Fisher
Tennyson in His Time and Ours
THE FOUNDERS AND FOLLOWERS - THE ORIGINAL LECTURE SERIES
In 1991, to mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of the London Library, a series of seven literary lectures were delivered by distinguished members:
Noel Annan
Anthony Quinton
A S Byatt
John Julius Norwich
Kenneth Rose
A N Wilson
John Wells
Thomas Carlyle
Richard Monckton Milnes
George Eliot and George Henry Lewes
Rudyard Kipling
Harold Nicolson
Rose Macaulay
Some Previous Librarians
Apart from the last lecture the subjects were all prominent literary figures who, with one exception, had held office in the Library, ranging from the founder and president, Thomas Carlyle, to a chairman and members of the governing committee. While George Eliot was not an office-holder, her close association with G H Lewes, a long-serving member of the committee, almost gives her honorary status.
The full texts of the lectures were published in a single volume, with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin:
Founders and Followers: literary lectures given on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the London Library (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1992)
