Geoffrey Stern


Geoffrey Howard Stern was an English academic in the field of international relations, a radio personality on the BBC World Service, and a composer.

Biography

Stern's father Malcolm was an accountant and his mother Rose a piano teacher; his paternal grandfather had immigrated to Britain from Dąbrowa Tarnowska in Austrian Poland in the late 19th century and settled in Essex.
Born in Liverpool and raised in London, Stern was educated at St Marylebone Grammar School, with a wartime spell in Bournemouth. He then took his undergraduate degree and a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science. From 1960, he taught for LSE's Department of International Relations and external programme until retiring in 2001 as a senior lecturer.
Stern was a radio personality for over forty years since applying to work for the BBC as a postgraduate student. He presented the programmes 24 Hours and Newshour on the BBC World Service, and interviewed a number of world leaders. In the early 1980s, he organised a week-long covert trip for a group of British journalists to the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. An expert in International Communism, he was much in demand on radio and television shows at the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko and at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
He was also a composer, who had maintained contact with Ralph Vaughan Williams as a teenager. A concert of his works was performed at LSE's Shaw Library in 2001.
His son is the former Big Brother contestant Jonty Stern and his daughter is the theatre historian Tiffany Stern.

Select publications