| Lecturer | Year | Topic | 
| John Kenneth Galbraith | 1968 | - | 
| Steven Runciman | 1970 | The eastern churches and the secular state | 
| Wilfred David Borrie | 1972 | Population, environment and society | 
| Macfarlane Burnet | 1973 | The biology of aging | 
| William Henry Pickering | 1974 | Exploring our solar system | 
| W. J. M. Mackenzie | 1975 | Political adaptivity | 
| John Russell Brown | 1976 | Theatre for today | 
| Ivan Illich | 1978 | The art of suffering | 
| Richard Feynman | 1979 | The behaviour of light and electrons[2] | 
| Harry Hinsley | 1980 | The rise and fall of the modern international system | 
| Richard Leakey | 1981 | Human Origins | 
| Bernard Lewis | 1982 | Historical roots of the Islamic revolution | 
| Carleton Gajdusek | 1983 | Man in isolation | 
| Ngugi Wa Thiong’o | 1984 | The politics of language in African literature | 
| Hermann Bondi | 1985 | The world of physics | 
| Stephen Jay Gould | 1986 | Charles Darwin and the science of history | 
| Laura Nader | 1987 | Controlling processes | 
| E. P. Thompson | 1988 | Customs in common | 
| William John Francis Jenner | 1989 | The power of China's pasts | 
| Ian Brownlie | 1990 | Treaties and indigenous peoples | 
| Colin Blakemore | 1991 | Images in the brain | 
| Marshall Sahlins | 1992 | The anthropology of history in Polynesia | 
| Carole Pateman | 1993 | Women and democracy | 
| Lewis Wolpert | 1994 | The unnatural nature of science | 
| Bernice Johnson Reagon | 1996 | The place of song in African American history | 
| Immanuel Wallerstein | 1997 | Utopistics, or historical choices of the 21st century | 
| Paul Krugman | 1998 | What happened to Asia? | 
| Judy Chicago | 1999 | Women and art | 
| Steven Weinberg | 2000 | [cancelled for illness] | 
| Steven Pinker | 2001 | Language, mind, and evolution | 
| David_Barker | 2002 | Mothers, babies and health in later life | 
| Bryan Sykes | 2003 | The interpretation of genes | 
| Marina Warner | 2004 | Magic and transformation in contemporary literature and culture[3] | 
| Carl Wieman | 2005 | Two breakthroughs in physics research | 
| Jared Diamond | 2006 | Science, history and human societies | 
| Yash Ghai | 2007 | Organisation of the state in multi-ethnic societies | 
| Sheldon Rothblatt | 2008 | "The uses of the university" revisited | 
| Frans de Waal | 2009 | Our inner ape | 
| Nicholas Stern | 2010 | The challenges for global collaboration and rationality[4] | 
| Tariq Ali | 2011 | Empire and its futures | 
| Alison Gopnik | 2012 | The philosophical baby: What children’s minds can teach us about the big questions | 
| Kwame Anthony Appiah | 2013 | Identity, Honour, Politics[5] | 
| Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson | 2014 | The Human Cost of Inequality[6][7] | 
| Stuart Firestein | 2016 | Science and uncertainty[8][9] |