Great Speeches Of The 20th Century

The Guardian has started a series on great speeches of the 20th century It is being issued in booklets. They have chosen not only on grounds of rhetorical skill, but also of historical significance (so Thatcher gets in but her opponent Kinnock, the better orator, doesn’t) and moral content, so Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech is excluded. On the same grounds I would of course vote certain speeches higher than they do: Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ trumps Churchill, JFK, even Mandela and certainly Kruschchev for me. How about you?

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