Word: reith
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Lord Reith, the autocratic founder of the British Broadcasting Corporation, died four years ago at the age of 81, he was covered with honors. During his 16-year reign (1922-38) at the BBC, he had built it into one of Britain's most revered institutions; in return, the towering (6 ft. 6 in.), beetle-browed son of a Presbyterian minister had been rewarded with knighthood, a barony, the Order of the Thistle and a public reputation as one of the great moral pillars of the realm...
Those who knew the private John Reith were less sure whether he was a pillar or a petty tyrant. BBC employees fairly quaked in his presence; he once told a chief engineer who was named as the innocent party in a divorce case: "My son, you have strayed from the paths of righteousness. Our ways must part forever. You are dismissed." Now the private man has been mercilessly unwreathed in his startlingly venomous diaries, whose publication he arranged out of what one critic described as an impulse toward "posthumous suicide." They reveal him as a splenetic, mean-spirited misanthrope...
...commitment to Israel. Some political experts stress that in a diplomatic situation as difficult as that in the Middle East now, a treaty might be useful. "The only effective and tested form of guarantee is an alliance," declared Oxford Professor Alastair Buchan in last year's Reith Lectures...
Died. Lord Reith, 81, architect of the British Broadcasting Corporation and first chairman of British Overseas Airways Corporation; of heart disease; in Edinburgh. The teetotaling son of a Scottish clergyman, John Reith left his job with an engineering firm to take charge of the BBC in 1922. He invested the BBC with his own strong sense of dignity by requiring unseen radio announcers to wear dinner jackets while reading the news. Reith resigned as BBC chief in 1938 to head Imperial Airways, which merged with another airline the following year to become BOAC. The dour Scot ran several ministries...
Britain was the cradle of both the industrial revolution and, with Adam Smith, the science of economics. With that in mind, Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, 58, went to London to deliver on BBC radio the famed Reith Lectures (a series of six) on "The New Industrial State." He entered a plea for a sort of diplomatic immunity...