Richard Ovenden, OBE

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227 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 6 Feb

Richard Ovenden, OBE’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Secret Life of Books · Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

I've posited that there are kind of five functions of libraries in the age in which we live.

And the first and most obvious of those is about education.

And that ranges from the education of young people who think of public libraries, taking out books when you're a small child, going to picture books and beginning to kind of engage with ideas and reading and story, particularly story, right through to the information that's needed by brain surgeons or neuroscientists.

and that kind of range in between.

It's that broad educational process.

And I put in there the meaning part of,

And what Philip Larkin was saying was the value of literary manuscripts.

You know, discovering meaning is educating society, educating individuals, helping to write books, establish knowledge.

There's a second aspect, which is about different opinions, different ideas, a diversity of knowledge.

And so where you might have ideas from different cultures.

So I'll give one example, which was the Bodleian Acquired

Chinese books in 1604.

We were the first library in Britain, in Europe, to acquire Chinese books.

And there was nobody who could read them in Oxford for 80-odd years.

But then a Chinese man was employed by my predecessor, the fifth librarian, to come and catalogue them.

And the first thing he did was turn them up the right way round on the shelf.

And then there began people who could read them.

And that sort of idea of Chinese culture being brought into the

realm of ideas in a university it starts to educate other people to see the world differently you see that particularly with the acquisition in the body and of arabic texts particularly arabic science which comes in to directly influence scientists working in oxford like edmund halley

And so those diverse ideas are important in order to challenge the status quo.

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