Alex Marklew

Lend me your ears

Philip Collins analyses 25 influential speeches from the past 2,500 years, and explains just why they’re so powerful

Complaints about the decline and fall of political oratory are nothing new. Back in 1865 a British reporter branded the Gettysburg Address ‘dull and commonplace’ and, as this joy of a book points out, even Cicero had to put up with the Neo-Attics sniggering from behind their togas at his overwrought and outdated speaking style. The poor Roman must have felt rather like Harry Kane when a bunch of pub footballers take to Twitter to bemoan his inability to find the target.

In rhetorical terms, Philip Collins is a long way from a Sunday League layabout. With three years as Tony Blair’s principal speechwriter/verb-remover, followed by a successful career as a leader writer and columnist for the Times, he is certainly no stranger to the art of persuasion. This experience regularly comes to the fore in his analyses of contemporary political speeches for the Times, and it’s a format that he uses here to run the rule over 25 great and influential speeches from the past 2,500 years.

There’s no shortage of ‘great speech’ anthologies on offer, most of which simply reproduce the same dozen or so transcripts alongside a brief commentary. Collins goes much further, drawing on an eclectic selection of speeches and drilling down on a technical level to explain how a speech is structured, what rhetorical techniques are used, and why it had such an impact.

We see how Lincoln channeled Pericles as he used the individual as a metaphor for the nation, and how Reagan repeated the trick in Berlin more than a century later. We get a crash course in the power of imagery thanks to a 1991 address by Aung San Suu Kyi, although recent events in Burma lend a grim poignancy to her talk of ‘the spark of courage that is an essential attribute of those who would free themselves from the grip of oppression’.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in