Bridget Kendall MBE
The Roller Coaster Ride of Modern Day Anglo-Russian Relations
The Trustees of the Lord Caradon Lectures Trust are delighted to announce that their 2019 lecture will take place at 7.30 pm on 9 December at University of Plymouth and will be given by Bridget Kendall MBE.
A long-standing and distinguished BBC Correspondent, Bridget was appointed the first female Master of Peterhouse, the University of Cambridge’s oldest College, in 2016.
Educated at Oxford, Harvard and two Russian universities, she joined the BBC World Service as a trainee in 1983 and became the BBC’s Moscow correspondent between 1989 and 1994, covering the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as Boris Yeltsin’s rise to power. She was then appointed Washington Correspondent before moving to the senior role of BBC Diplomatic Correspondent, reporting on major conflicts such as those in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Georgia and Ukraine.
Since she became Master of a Cambridge College she has stepped back from her role as a staff BBC correspondent, but she remains a regular broadcaster and commentator on Russia and is the main host of BBC radio’s weekly flagship discussion programme, The Forum.
She is a recognised authority on Russia and East West relations and has given many lectures on the subject. Her interviews with global leaders include Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin.
Her book, The Cold War; a New Oral History explores the decades long conflict between East and West through the eyes of those who, like her, experienced it at first-hand, from pilots making food drops during the Berlin Blockade and families fleeing the Korean War, to young Soviet soldiers sent to fight in Afghanistan.
Her awards include the James Cameron Award for distinguished journalism, as well as an MBE. She is an Honorary Fellow of two Oxford Colleges, Lady Margaret Hall and St Antony’s College, and has Honorary degrees from St Andrew’s University in Scotland, the University of York, the University of Exeter and the University of Birmingham in Central England.