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'I gave him a very good lunch — he had a glass of sherry,' Asa Briggs recalls of his crucial meeting fifty years ago with that towering egotist, visionary and sternest of Presbyterians, the BBC's Founding Father John Reith. Briggs, then a young history professor at Leeds, had just accepted a commission from the Director-General, Ian Jacob, to write a history of the Corporation. Reith, just short of his seventieth birthday, had long ago left the BBC. But his personal account of the pre-war years would be invaluable. 'I'm not in the least wanting to see him,' Reith wrote in his diary a few weeks before they eventually met in the Oxford and Cambridge Club. He was on especially bad terms with the BBC, firmly believing it had gone to the dogs since his unhappy departure in 1938. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]