Plato

Plato the Athenian was the philosopher who founded the Academy and whose brilliant writings are the foundation texts of the entire western philosophical tradition. A student of Socrates, his dialogues use the Socratic method of question-an...

The Changing Geography of Ill Health

Ill health has always been concentrated in particular places; tackling these pockets of ill health is an essential role for public health. These may be driven by environmental factors, demography, deprivation and healthcare provision. In t...

Data: The Past, the Present and the Future

Digital technology from the early 1990s onwards produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question ...

Understanding the Universe with AI

Digital technology from the early 1990s onwards produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question ...

Snow White: Evil Witches

The Brothers Grimm's tale of Snow White has been retold dozens of times in print and the cinema over the past two centuries. A central character is the Evil Queen, Snow White's malevolent stepmother, who tries to kill her with the help of the occu...

Fatal Months: Auschwitz and the End of the Second World War

The 2020 Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the most lethal of all Nazi camps. This lecture looks back at its final months, from the time the camp reached ...

Cosmic Vision: Witnessing Fireworks

Accounts of occasional celestial spectacular events in past centuries have provided crucial information for modern-day astrophysicists. One such example is the so-called Great Eruption of Eta Carinae which was for a time in the mid 19th century th...

The Sound of Mathematics

It has been known since antiquity that there are simple "harmonic" relationships between notes that sound appealing together. This lecture introduces the mathematics of pitch, scales, and just temperament. The pitch of a sound is not its o...

How Are Drones Changing Warfare?

THE 2020 PETER NAILOR MEMORIAL LECTUREDrones, or unmanned air systems, are changing the face of war in the 21st century, for combatants and civilians. We are used to a history of the RAF based on a narrative of the 'bravery of the few' wit...

What Do We Owe Society?

How has Covid-19 re-shaped our ideas about what we owe society? The lockdown has had a terrible impact on the economic prospects of young people - and the elderly have suffered from high mortality in care homes. Choices have to be made between the...

Loving Animals: Historical Reflections on Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love

What is meant by 'love' between human and nonhuman animals? Why is sex with animals such a taboo? It is only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality. Are their arguments danger...

Ruling Passions: The Architecture of the Cecils

Father and son, William and Robert Cecil, not only dominated politics for much of Elizabeth I and James I reign but dominated architectural fashion. Building a series of spectacular houses, they, and not the monarchy, were the great palace builder...

Connected Nature

The story of the deep, biogeophysical planetary connections and how these are intensifying the effects of climate change and economic development, is told through personal research and expeditions to remote locations across the world (including so...

Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites

Charles Edward Stuart ('Bonnie Prince Charlie') is one of the most recognisable and romanticised figures of British history. Born in Rome as a Catholic prince on 31 December 1720, he led the Jacobite Rising of 1745, which came closer than anyone e...

John Evelyn: Britain's First Environmentalist

Air pollution, the usefulness of trees, ideas for a green belt are not concerns we associate with the 1600s. But John Evelyn, writer, diarist and gardener, was unusual. His thinking in Fumifugium (1661) about air quality, and Sylva (1664) about tr...

Convincing Fiction

How does fiction make itself seem like fact? Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a 'strange surprising' story seem entirely 'probable' (the word ...

Cosmic Vision: Attentive Eyes

Well-trained eyes can be remarkably useful for capturing light curves of evolving objects in the cosmos, even contributing to modern research programmes. This lecture will consider how stargazing with imperfect, non-linear human eyes can a...

Hidden Investment Opportunities

Psychological studies show that humans overweight tangible factors and underweight intangible ones when making decisions. This talk shows how these biases affect the stock market - it focuses excessively on short-term profit, but ignores e...

The Windrush Thinkers and Artists

Caribbean migrants not only came to work in the buses and hospitals. Many - such as the novelists George Lamming and Sam Selvon - came to Britain in search of opportunities to be paid to think and write. Others such as Stuart Hall, Vidia Naipaul a...

The African Diaspora in Britain

This lecture examines the centuries long presence of the African diaspora as an integral part of Britain's history since Roman times. Unfortunately, this history is still too often ignored, its promotion limited only to October. Attempts t...

Reserve Currencies in the Era of Fiat Money

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by D'Maris Coffman 21 OctoberTh...

Cryptocurrencies: Protocols for Consensus

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by Andrew Lewis-Pye 21 OctoberT...

Thomas Harriot on the Coins of England

This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by Norman Biggs 21 OctoberThe t...

An Introduction to Algorithms

Algorithms, loosely translated, are systems for doing things. Algorithms are thus the link from pre-history to the modern world - without algorithms we would have an inanimate universe without all the mess and complexity of real life. It turns out...

The Political Lawyer

Traditionally a lawyer's own views and political affiliation are irrelevant to the pursuit of the legal process. This lecture will examine - and celebrate - the work of lawyers who have crossed the usual lines and worked for political chan...

The Role of the State in Public Health, and its Limits

The relative role of the State and the individual is a recurring theme of political theory. It is also a practical question in public health - what are the respective responsibilities of government, individuals and healthcare professionals to prot...

Silence, and the Dynamising of African Creative Resistance

In the face of enslavement, colonialism and cultural suppression, peoples of African descent have fought to maintain cherished cultural practices. Dr Gus Casely-Hayford, the new Director of V&A East, tells the story of how that resistance ...

Connected Humans

Was Covid-19 the ultimate wake-up call about how we live on planet earth? Looking at the effect on the environment of a near-stoppage of the world's economies, the first lecture explores emerging perspectives and some of the guiding princi...

The Mathematics of Musical Composition

Pattern and structure are essential to music, from the permutations in a Bach fugue, to the structure of a round. This lecture will explore the mathematics of musical symmetries, such as the "translational symmetry" of the transposition of...

Eve's Evil Legacies

Eve was the original Evil Woman. She was tempted by Satan, introducing sin into the world. In turn, she seduced Adam, bringing the wrath of the Creator upon humanity for all eternity. From the 2nd century, Eve has been blamed for evil. The...

What Medicine Can Learn from Savile Row

Clinical practice is often seen as the acquisition and application of scientific knowledge to diagnose and treat diseases. Yet every patient is different. This lecture draws on a ten-year collaboration with a Savile Row tailor to explore '...

Cosmic Vision: Watching the Radio

At longer wavelengths than the normal optical wavelengths to which human eyes are normally sensitive, is the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio astronomy can tell us about the distribution of magnetic fields in the Universe,...

Engels and Marx: Revolutionaries in London

On the 200th anniversary of the birth of Friedrich Engels, his biographer Tristram Hunt looks at how both Engels and Karl Marx were deeply affected by their time in London in the second half of the 19th century. London, then the heart of t...

Darwin, Breeding and Barnacles

Following the Beagle voyage, Darwin settled down to a quiet married life, relying on correspondence to gather facts. He wrote thousands of letters as he gathered facts to support his still-secret theory. Long before anyone had hear...

Does The State Really Care When It Kills You?

This lecture will focus on human rights and the wrongs of unexpected and/or sudden deaths in which the state is implicated.It will cover the importance of a proper death investigation, the impact on the family and state, how Magna Carta in...

Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery

We all need experts for things we can't do ourselves. And we are all on a path to becoming expert ourselves, whatever our areas of interest. But what does it mean to be expert? In his new book Expert: Understanding the Path to Mastery (Vik...

Srebrenica: the New Evidence

2020 marks the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre and the Dayton Accords resolution of the first two (Croatia and Bosnia) of the three Balkan wars of the 1990s. In examining the legacy of this conflict, Professor Nice will conside...

The World of Isaac Newton

This illustrated lecture will cover Newton's life and his mathematical and scientific labours in the context of 17th-century England, and feature his childhood in Lincolnshire, his university career in Cambridge and his later life in London as Mas...

Number Theory: Queen of Mathematics

In which years does February have five Sundays? How many right-angled triangles with whole-number sides have a side of length 29? How many shuffles are needed to restore the order of the cards in a pack with two Jokers? Are any of the numbers 11, ...

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Musorgsky

Musorgsky was a proficient, but not virtuosic pianist: in his youth, he entertained society ladies with popular marches and quadrilles, and in his last years, he toured as an accompanist in song recitals. On the basis of these modest exploits, no ...

England's Catholic Reformation

England's Catholic Reformation is the reformation that sixteenth-century England nearly had: a reformed and renewed English Catholic Church, its new schools and revived parishes matched with a firm smack of discipline. It almost happened; ...

Looking for Life On Mars

Mars has changed since it formed 4.6 billion years ago. When life started on Earth ~4 billion years ago, Mars was habitable too, with volcanism, a magnetic field, surface water and a thick atmosphere. Today, Mars is cold and dry, with a thin atmos...

The Psychology of the Stock Market

The Efficient Market Hypothesis argues that stock markets are rational - they take into account all relevant information, and incorporate it in an unbiased way. This talk will present evidence that stock prices are instead driven by human ...

Offensive Shakespeare

From The Merchant of Venice to The Taming of the Shrew, it's easy to see how Shakespeare's plays can cause offence to contemporary audiences. Is it harder to teach Shakespeare today than in the past? Have ideas about what is offensive in Shakespea...

BBC Radio in the 78 Era (1920-1948)

In 1920, Nellie Melba's singing was transmitted to Europe and Newfoundland via the wireless. In 1922 the BBC began broadcasting, and from the outset sponsored new music and relayed outside broadcasts to the nation (and from 1932, to the world).

Tudor Ambition: Houses of the Boleyn Family

A family best known for producing one of England's most famous queen consorts started out owning substantial estates in Norfolk before buying, and inheriting, a series of major houses close to London. These mansions became the stage for the traged...

The Mayflower: A London - Leiden Adventure

The story of the Mayflower is usually presented as a tale of persecuted Pilgrims crossing the Atlantic in circumstances of grave adversity to inhabit a desolate wilderness. There is another perspective. This lecture asks not where ...

The Family Court in Lockdown

How has lockdown affected the Family Court? Gresham Law Professor Jo Delahunty QC chairs a panel of senior lawyers and journalists discussing the issues faced by family courts and by families during lockdown.How has COVID-19 affected child...

Leadership Lessons From Lockdown

The COVID-19 pandemic has been devastating. But one silver lining has been the tremendous responses from businesses and individual citizens, as we've realised how even small actions can have a substantial effect on society. A second is tha...

De-radicalisation - Illusion or Reality?

Lord Carlile will discuss the effect of Covid-19 on counter terrorism policy, including suggestions that terrorist organisations have taken advantage of the pandemic to increase their influence. He will discuss whether UK counter-extremism...

Is Populism a Threat to Democracy?

THE 2020 ANNUAL PROVOST'S LECTUREWhat is the history of populism? Has it ever been a force for good? In this lecture, Sir Richard Evans, Provost of Gresham College, discusses the different varieties of populism, asks why it has be...

William And Mary: The Court Divided

Like James I, King William III was fundamentally unhappy with the stuffy formality of England's vast crumbling royal estate. But unlike James, who virtually abandoned Edinburgh, William maintained a second court, and a parallel suite of royal hous...

Digital Healthcare: Will the Robot See You Now?

It is commonplace for governments to complain that the cost of healthcare is rising. Various reasons are put forward: some claim that modern medicine is inevitably more expensive; some claim that the ageing population is the cause of the problem; ...

The Growth Mindset and the Abundance Mentality

This talk will explore the "growth mindset", the evidence-based view that talents are developed rather than genetic. It provides practical tips on how to develop new skills with limited time, and highlights the importance of pushing yourself outsi...

Hippocrates and Ancient Greek Medicine

The birth of rational medicine contributed to the scientific revolution which occurred amongst eastern Greek communities in the 7th-to-5th centuries BCE. Medical professionals still take the oath of the ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates of ...

The Cashless Society

Money may well make world go round but cash is surely an encumbrance we can do without. What does a cashless society look like? What is the technology behind the digital economy and the new forms of currency and money? Your bank doubtless ...

Perceptions, Expectations, and Discoveries

The Greeks famously identified many patterns and rhythms in the sky, deducing detailed information about eclipses and orbits that still have relevance today. The Chinese, on the other hand, made landmark discoveries of supernovae and comets - even...

The Last Mile: Ensuring Access to Affordable Energy to Poor, Rural Communities

How can we deliver clean and affordable energy to even the poor, especially in rural settlements, as set out in UN Sustainable Development Goal 7? Environment Professor Jacqueline McGlade will examine how renewable energy systems, ranging ...

A History of the Foot

The science of feet and footprints has a long, yet often forgotten, history. In this lecture, I look at what people from the late eighteenth century to the present thought they knew about toes, arches, heels, and ankles. What makes a beaut...

What Medicine Can Learn from Restaurants about Care

Medical care often frames patients as the passive 'recipients' of expert professional knowledge and skill. This lecture explores what comes into view if we reframe clinical treatment as hospitality, and patients as guests. Drawing on colla...

Diaghilev and Prokofiev: Return to Emotion

Diaghilev would often look at past art and then do the opposite. He playfully abandoned plot, elaborate costumes, emotional expression, and even meaning, but reinstating them whenever he felt like it - this was his undogmatic approach to modernism...

Artificial Intelligence and Religion

This lecture addresses the potential links between AI and religious belief, which include the question of whether an artificial "superintelligence", were one to arise, would be well-disposed towards us. Religious traditions historically assume tha...

War Games at the Field of the Cloth of Gold

2020 marks the 500th anniversary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, one of the most extraordinary diplomatic events of the late medieval period. Although commonly regarded as a 'peace festival', the meeting might more usefully be described as a tw...

Forgotten Victims from the Age of Atrocity

Some of the atrocities of the age of Europe's religious wars immediately became notorious. The execution of tens of thousands of women and men for witchcraft, by contrast, passed largely unremarked - until modern times, when this history was reviv...

Is Robocop Now A Reality?

Robocop (1987) embodied a particular vision of an electronic crime fighter but what is the reality of electronic crime fighting? How are the police and security services using technology to trap villains? In this lecture we will examine n...

COVID-19

At the time of writing, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has killed many thousands worldwide, infected many more - and changed lives around the world in ways that were unimaginable just weeks ago. What is COVID-19, how has it been managed and w...

The Future of Our Oceans

Recent evidence about the extent of plastics and litter in our oceans has led to grassroots rejection of single-use plastics. This lecture will draw on McGlade's own research (published in 2020) on plastics in our seas. She will show that ...

Equations That Have Changed The World

This final lecture will celebrate some of the great mathematical equations, and related algorithms, which have both changed the world as we know it and which are likely to change it in the future. The lecture will focus on a number of equa...

Mysteries of the Dark Cosmos

Dark matter and dark energy together make up 95% of our Universe. Yet, very little is known about them. This lecture will present the endeavours of cosmologists and particle physicists, as they attempt to explain the fundamental nature of ...

Critical Thinking

One of the most dangerous phrases is "evidence shows that …", because you can almost always find evidence to support any viewpoint. Experts are similarly distrusted, because they may have motives other than the truth. These problems are particular...

The Ballets Russes: Turning French

Modernity kept seeping into ballet, a genre that had traditionally looked to a distant, mythical or magical past. First, the tutu gave way to an everyday tennis costume in Jeux by Debussy/Nijinsky, then ragtime rang out in Parade by Satie/Picasso,...

Musical Endings

Should a composer leave the listener wanting more, or must a musical ending be definitive? Is a 'fade out' actually a cop-out, and is a decisive ending preferable to an abrupt one? In short, is the object of a musical ending to bring an audience t...

Choosing Religious Atrocities in Ireland

Nowhere in Europe have the wars of religion lasted longer than in Ireland. At the heart of this are two rival sets of memories of atrocities: above all, Protestants recall the massacres of the 1641 rebellion, and Catholics recall the massacres per...

How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit

BOOK LAUNCHBusiness has lost the public's trust. Concerns that capitalism only serves the elites has led to major unrest throughout the world and the election of populist leaders. Many people claim we need to overhaul capitalism - but that...

Good Gardeners of Planet Earth? The Vision of Silent Running (1972)

Are humans fit to be gardeners of this planet? Today's biotechnology companies promote themselves in distinctly utopian ways, but increasing numbers of people find their claims difficult to reconcile with the daily evidence of the damage that tech...

A History of the Stomach

Vertical banded gastroplasty surgery (or stomach stapling) has drawn attention in recent decades to the hidden, but unruly, stomach. This organ has been the focus of weight-control regimes for centuries, however.This lecture looks at ninet...

Charles II: The Court in Exile

For a decade after the execution of Charles I the Stuart courts were based in the Low Countries and France. Always short of money, but determined to maintain splendour and dignity, Charles II rented a series of mansions and used them as the headqu...

Corpse Roads: Digital Landscape Archaeology

This lecture explores how digital landscape modelling can help unlock the secrets of Britain's ancient pathways. Focusing on "corpse roads", pathways taken by coffin bearers over the countryside before the Enclosures, it discusses the significance...

The Japanese Martyrs

In the age of exploration, Catholic missionaries fanned out across the world, meeting with extraordinary success but also extraordinary opposition: nowhere more so than in Japan, where the fast-growing Catholic community was brutally suppressed in...

The Art of Maths

Mathematics and art are more similar than is commonly thought. Each is concerned with the process of being highly creative with abstract objects and of producing everlasting work of great aesthetic beauty. Early art inspired by geometry, s...

The Insider's Guide to Becoming a Barrister

This lecture provides an insider's brutally honest guide to what it's like to be a self-employed barrister - the highs and lows of the career, the work behind the scenes that makes a difference to outcomes in court, and the art of persuasion in it...

Engineering: Archimedes of Syracuse

In the 3rd century BCE, the Sicilian polymath Archimedes significantly advanced human understanding of mathematics, geometry and astronomy. By applying his discoveries to practical problems and physical phenomena, he became the founder of ...

Mental and Physical Wellness

Exercise, diet, rest, and sleep are sometimes seen as optional extras that are desirable if you have the time. They are also topics about which many myths and half-truths abound. This talk will provide rigorous evidence on the importance o...

Simple Laws, Spectacular Astrophysics

The laws of physics may be stated in simple and elegant ways that can be made easy to demonstrate and understand on their own. What is immensely hard to predict from first principles are the consequences of the combinations of these laws acting in...

Can Gender Equality Help Solve Climate Change?

Is gender equality a key factor in tackling climate change? Many think so, and in this lecture Environment Professor Jacqueline McGlade will explain why in relation to UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 is to 'achieve gender equality and empower al...

Arise, Sir Isaac! Newton's London career

During the last thirty years of his life, Isaac Newton lived in London, where as head of the Royal Mint he moved in wealthy aristocratic circles, exerted substantial political influence, and profited financially from imperial trade and exploitatio...

Thomas Becket and London

'St Thomas has adorned…London by his rising and Canterbury by his setting'. This lecture will explore how the influence of Thomas Becket permeated city life in medieval London until Henry VIII ordered the destruction of his shrine and the ...

The Cato Street Conspiracy, 1820: A Study in Terrorism

Two hundred years ago a group of conspirators assembled in a Cato Street stable in order to plan the massacre of the whole British cabinet at dinner and bring about revolution. Had they succeeded they would have achieved modern Britain's first ter...

The Ethics of Surgical Innovation

Scientific knowledge is advancing at dizzying speed and each day brings new breakthroughs in medical understanding. Unprecedented advances are opening possibilities that only a decade ago would have seemed like science fiction. Yet a deep anxiety ...

The Ballets Russes: Playing with the Past

Diaghilev seemed to be the nemesis of traditional ballet, but he was ready to draw on the rigorous classical schooling of his dancers whenever it suited him. Once ugliness had been established as a legitimate option, he was happy to bring back bea...

A History of the Penis and the Clitoris

Is the clitoris simply a female version of the male penis? Many scientists and biologists in the past thought so. It is only in recent decades that the physiology of the clitoris has become understood. What can debates about these two orga...

Lung Cancer and Mesothelioma

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in both men and women, but kills the most people through a combination of being common and currently having much less effective treatment. Both treatment and prevention are currently improving, slowly. ...

The Digital University and Other Mythical Creatures

In 2013 Sir Michael Barber declared that "An Avalanche is Coming" and that universities would be swept away by new digital technologies. Six years later nothing seems to have happened, yet there has been change. In this lecture we will rev...

Great Mathematical Myths

Mathematics is often thought of as being a dry and logical subject, and its conclusions free from the vagaries of fashion and misconception. However this is far from the truth. Mathematical misunderstandings, or perhaps a misunderstanding of mathe...

Making New Plants: A History

This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order. It also looks at the early twentieth-century 'Station for Experimental...

Unfinished Music

Bach's Art of Fugue, Mozart's Requiem, Schubert's Symphony No. 8, Alban Berg's opera Lulu, and Elgar's 3rd Symphony are all pieces that are famously incomplete. This lecture examines the fascination surrounding works that are left unfinish...

How to Survive a Massacre in Europe's Wars of Religion

Europe's Wars of Religion were fought against entire populations, and were punctuated by events remembered as atrocities: such as the siege of Leiden in 1573-4 or, most notoriously, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacres in France in 1572. Thi...

Webb Vs. Hubble: Battle of the Space Giants

The Hubble Space Telescope is rapidly approaching its 30th birthday, and we will explore some of the amazing insights it has provided on the beauty of our universe and our place in it. But as it approaches retirement, its replacement, the James We...

Homes Fit for Heroes: 100 Years of Council Housing

More council houses were built in Britain than any other country in the 20th century. By the 1970s, one in three households were council tenants. Yet after 1980 £100bn worth of council housing was sold off. How did this expansion come about, what ...

What Has Einstein Ever Done For You?

Albert Einstein's mind-boggling ideas revolutionized our view of the universe. From relativity to curved spacetime, from the Big Bang to black holes and gravitational waves, nothing could be further from our everyday experience than such esoteric ...

Can the Law Keep Up With Changes In Society?

Advances in medicine allow us to sustain life for longer, but at what cost and at whose choice? Why might the court intervene when a devout Jehovah Witness parent refuses a life-saving blood transfer to their child? Where does religious de...

Shapes of Free Fall

The shapes of the orbits of many planets and comets orbiting their mother-ship stars are well known to be circles or ellipses (an idea that was explained by Isaac Newton). But we now understand that, depending on the history and the energy of the ...

Prohibition: A Battle in America's Last Culture War

The extraordinary effort to ban drink must be understood as part of an American culture war, one framed between the country and the city, between the native-born (white Protestants) and foreign-born (Catholics and Jews), between religion and scien...

Powell and Pressburger's Island Stories

Stories about islands punctuate the careers of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, from Powell's breakthrough with Edge of the World (1936) to the Hebridean journey of I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), and the final act of their Tales of Hoffmann...

Clara Schumann (1819-1896): The Unsung Heroine of Romanticism

This lecture-recital will explore the life of Clara Schumann (1819-1896) through her music and surroundings, her achievements and influencers. Deservedly revered by all who knew her, she was a pioneer of female composition, who overcame so...

Public Speaking Without Fear

Surveys about people's fears commonly feature public speaking at the very top of the list. Many people believe that public speaking is either something you are born with or without. This talk will provide practical tips that everyone can e...

The Rite of Spring: A Failure and A Triumph

The Rite of Spring was the startling result of a collaboration between Stravinsky, Nijinsky (choreography) and Roerich (sets and costumes). In the immediate aftermath, it seemed to be a fiasco because of its riotous reception, but it proved to be ...

Can Machines Be Conscious, and Would It Matter If They Were?

The question "Will AI artefacts ever be conscious?" was raised by Turing seventy years ago, and will not go away even though no one quite knows what it means, nor how we would know they were conscious if they were. This lecture explores wh...

George IV: Radical or Reactionary?

On the 200th anniversary of George IV's accession to the throne, this lecture considers whether or not he had any real impact on the fast-industrialising world around him, and the turbulent political times he lived through. When George was...

A History of the Breast

There has been a great deal of research on breast cancer, surgery, and implants. This lecture looks at changing ideas about the healthy breast. It explores notions of beauty, sexual pleasure, and age. Early maturation of girls, coupled with a grea...

Prostate and Testicular Cancer

The most common cancer in men in the UK is prostate cancer, around a quarter of all male cancer diagnoses. Testicular cancer, the other male-specific cancer, is rare, but occurs early in life. Neither are preventable. There has been a stea...

Ending Our Consumer Addiction

How can we end our intense consumer addiction and change our habits and values to be more sustainable? In this lecture Environment Professor Jacqueline McGlade will look at patterns of consumption and the concepts of sufficiency in communi...

The City of London - Culture, Creativity and the Culture Mile

The 2020 Annual Lord Mayor's Gresham event will explore the value of culture for The City of London.The City of London is not only a great place to do business but also has a rich and vibrant cultural offer making it a great place to live,...

Improvising Medicine

Few patients like to think of their physicians or surgeons as improvisers. Yet clinical care is a human art where there will always be uncertainty. Though doctors spend years learning facts and gaining skills, each patient is unique and every situ...

Can Maths Save The Whales and Cure Cancer?

Saving the whales and curing cancer are two of the great challenges of the present day, and mathematics has a part to play in addressing them. This talk will use these two examples to illustrate the process of mathematical modelling to gai...

1928 - Annus Mirabilis of the Christmas Carol

1928 witnessed the BBC's first broadcast of the Christmas Eve carol service from King's College, Cambridge. 1928 also saw the publication of The Oxford Book of Carols. By paying tribute to conductors Arthur Mann and Boris Ord, and composer...

The Business of Santa Claus in Lapland

The myth of Santa Claus has been translated into an extraordinary market on a global scale. We see Santa everywhere in adverts and products, and people also travel quite long distances to meet the 'real Santa' in his faraway home. The firs...

The Man Who Invented Christmas: Film Adaptations of Dickens' A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol (1843) is the most filmed and televised of Dickens' works. Many will warmly remember the 1951 Alastair Sim version, but how many are aware of A Carol for Another Christmas (1964), a propaganda film produced in support of the UN, ...

Finding Purpose in Your Career

Many influential leaders stress the importance of pursuing a purpose rather than choosing a career based on salary. While inspiring, such talks can sometimes seem impractical because many people find it difficult to know what their purpose is, and...

Gardens of Empire: The Role of Kew and Colonial Botanic Gardens

Sydney's botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new c...

100 Years of Women in Law

A Gresham lecture that Delahunty gave in November 2017 was one of the first public identifications of the exodus of experienced women from the self-employed Bar - and gave a call for action. That loss affects the number of women who take Silk and ...

Physics: Its Birth in Greek Ionia

The study of the natural and physical world from a scientific viewpoint began in Greek cities on the western coast of Turkey around Miletus in about 600 BCE. The first scientists were known as physiologoi, or men who discoursed about nature (physi...

Breast, Uterine and Ovarian Cancers

This lecture will consider the treatment and prevention of common cancers in women. The outlook for those with breast cancer and uterine cancer have substantially improved in the last three decades, and the great majority with the diagnosis will b...

Taming the Trolls of Social Media

Barely a day goes by without some lunatic assertion on social media. Thinking-people shake their heads, but what can be done about this? It turns out that there are a variety of scientific and engineering approaches which might be adapted...

George Eliot and Relationships

Mary Ann Evans experienced difficult relationships with her family while growing up in Warwickshire, and with nineteenth-century London society more generally after she moved to the city and lived with a married man, George Henry Lewes. He...

A History of the Eye

From ancient times to popular self-help books today, eyes have been viewed as 'windows to the soul'. The interpretation of eye shape and colour have been used to distinguish between different degrees of 'civilization' (scientific racism), to ident...

How the English Learned to Hate Catholics

Medieval England was proudly Catholic and ostentatiously loyal to Rome. But from the late sixteenth century until recent times - and even now - anti-Catholic prejudice has been a cornerstone of English and British identity. This lecture wi...

The End of Matter?

Black holes give rise to some of the most spectacular phenomena we see in the cosmos. They significantly distort space-time and they grow by stealing material from other stars.This talk will separate science fiction from science fact and e...

Sir Thomas Gresham and the Tudor Court

This lecture will explore Gresham's service to the crown during the turbulent politics of mid-Tudor England. Gresham served three Tudor monarchs, and his career exemplifies the reliance of the Tudors on the intellectual gifts and financial...

Keyhole Surgery Pioneers

This lecture examines how minimal access ('keyhole') surgery has revolutionised medicine in just a few decades. By re-assembling teams of long-retired surgical pioneers from the 1980s and inviting them to re-enact early procedures using realistic ...

Unlocking the Health Benefits of Nature

Nature's benefits to human health are so well-attested, that the medical profession is now actively engaged in fighting for a clean, healthy environment as a human right and prescribing it as treatment across the world from Shetland to Japan. ...

Maths and Voting

We live in a democracy in which we all have a chance to vote. But does voting mean that the views of the majority are truly represented when it can be shown (mathematically) that all voting systems have flaws? In this talk we use mathemati...

Powell and Pressburger: The Matter of Britain

World War Two set British filmmakers a challenge: to be relevant and entertaining and to inspire without patronising. Powell and Pressburger brought wit and imagination to their task, questioning what Britain stood for, warts and all. Notoriously,...

The Origins of the Elements

In this talk, coinciding with the UNESCO International Year of the Periodic Table, Dr Wilkins will discuss the astrophysical origins of the chemical elements, almost all of which have an origin ranging from the big bang, to exploding white dwarfs,...

Charles I: The Court at War

During the Civil War Charles I's court, denied access to its usual country residences, was forced to set itself up in a series of makeshift locations. The most important of these was Oxford which Charles converted into a large and well-organised c...

Dams, Radiators and The Shard: The Legacy of English Gardening

BOOK LAUNCHThis lecture describes three ways in which technology developed for gardens changed the shape of England and its built environment. Gardening innovations in water engineering (17th and 18th century artificial lakes), central hea...

AI Weapons, War and Ethics

This lecture will explore fully autonomous weapons, the products of AI technology, and the arguments for and against their use. It will then look at the more complex issues of the ethical role of the state in the protection of its population, and ...

Weighing the Universe

The cosmic microwave background is the luminous echo of the primordial explosion, the Big Bang — literally the oldest light in the Universe. Exquisitely precise measurements of this light have allowed astronomers to achieve what might seem impossi...

A History of Hair

The 2014 scandal over Rachel Dolezal's lying about being of African-American heritage reignited debates about the politics of hair. It has been followed by numerous books with titles such as Don't Touch My Hair. This lecture explores how h...

Infection, Immunity and Cancer

Examples of cancers caused largely by infections include cervical cancer, some liver cancers, and gastric cancer. If the infection can be prevented, or treated, the cancer can also be prevented. When the immune system is damaged, including by infe...

The Ballets Russes: Courting the Exotic

Diaghilev found that the Oriental style that had been cultivated by Russian composers was a perfect match for the Parisians' love of exoticism, and he started to commission new ballets for this market niche. These were so successful that even Pari...

Slavery and the City of London

PART OF OUR BLACK HISTORY MONTH SERIESFreedom has been central to the identity of the City of London for centuries. But from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth centuries, the African Slave Trade and Plantation Slavery in the Americas were k...

Freedom Song: The Fisk Jubilee Singers' Story

PART OF OUR BLACK HISTORY MONTH SERIESA choir of ex-slaves, raising funds to build their University, toured America from 1871, suffering discrimination and hardship. They came to England, were treated with respect and sang to Queen Victori...

A Global History of the Eclipse of 29 May 1919

THE 2019 BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS / GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTUREThe event will focus upon mathematical expeditions, outlining how the use of mathematics has been instrumental to the success of historical voyages of ...

Mathematical Practice and the 18th-Century British Voyages of Scientific Exploration

THE 2019 BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS / GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTUREThe event will focus upon mathematical expeditions, outlining how the use of mathematics has been instrumental to the success of historical voyages of ...

Privateer and Mathematician: The Voyages of Edward Wright

THE 2019 BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS / GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTUREThe event will focus upon mathematical expeditions, outlining how the use of mathematics has been instrumental to the success of historical voyages of ...

Frozen in Time?

Most information from outer space reaches us at the speed of light and this governs our understanding of time and evolution in the cosmos. When we observe the Universe, we are 'looking back in time': we see the Universe as it was, not how it is. T...

Biometrics: How Unique are You?

If people cannot identity themselves digitally then the digital society does not work. How do biometrics help reduce crime and is it possible to have a biometric system yet not broadcast even more personal information than we do now? There...

The Mathematical World of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

BOOK LAUNCHCharles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) is best known for his Alice books. But his day job was as a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church in Oxford. What mathematics was he interested in? - and how good a mathematician was he? T...

Black Tudors: Three Untold Stories

PART OF OUR BLACK HISTORY MONTH SERIESDr Kaufmann tells the intriguing tales of three Africans living in Tudor England - Jacques Francis, a diver employed by Henry VIII to recover guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose; Mary Fillis, a Morocc...

Building Sustainable Communities: A New Era for Twinning

In contrast to their stark socio-economic and environmental differences, the communities of Harbury, UK and Sekenani, Kenya are building 'collaborative ecosystems' that are helping people and their environment to flourish. With similar ide...

Slavery, Memory and Reparations

PART OF OUR BLACK HISTORY MONTH SERIESUsing memory scholarship, this talk will examine how the history and memory of enslavement shaped questions of identity and citizenship in Europe. In Africa, debates about the origins of exclus...

Organ Transplants and Human Rights Abuses in China

This lecture reports on the findings of The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China (June 2019), which examined reports of state-sponsored murder for the harvesting and sale of organs. The ve...

Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891) And the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis

2019 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, and will see the building of the first major addition to the system he created to prevent sewage entering the Thames. The Thames Tideway Tunnel is now finally making its way 1...

1667 and The Royal Society: A Manifesto for the Future

When Thomas Sprat's The History of the Royal-Society of London appeared in 1667, it was less a history than a manifesto for the future, designed to convince Charles II that experimental research was a worthwhile investment. Focusing on exp...

The Maths of Future Computing

This lecture examines the mathematics behind computing, starting with the history of the explosive growth of computer technology, from code breaking through to all aspects of modern communication and security, as well as the simulation of physical...

Experimental Gardens from Francis Bacon to Today

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627) imagined a utopian island including an experimental garden, where plants could be made "greater much than their nature". These new plants were central to Bacon's dream of a better world, where hunger - and even ...

Have Women Achieved Professional Equality? 100 years since the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act

2019 marks 100 years since the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 when a woman was recognised as a 'person' in law. This groundbreaking Act enabled women to be awarded university degrees and to enter professions such as law and medicine from ...

Time Management in the Digital Age

Classic time management frameworks advise us to focus on the important rather than the urgent. But these frameworks seem not to be applicable to the 21st century, where technology means that we are constantly bombarded with deadlines. This...

Faster than Light?

The speed of light has fundamental significance. This talk will explain how the speed of light was first measured, and how an obscure but brilliant patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland by the name of Albert Einstein deduced that the speed of ...

Human Traffic: Race and Post-War Migration Policy

THE 2019 ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLIN MATTHEW MEMORIAL LECTUREPART OF OUR BLACK HISTORY MONTH SERIESIn the years after 1945 successive British governments set out to weaponise the nation's immigration policy. To maintain historic...

How to Avert a Climate Catastrophe

After the UN Climate Action Summit in September, our Environment Professor will be talking to three experts about whether we still have a meaningful chance of averting a climate catastrophe, and how we can get there. The Extinction Rebellion prote...

Everyone Expects the Spanish Inquisition: The Making of Spain's 'Black Legend'

Spain became a byword for cruelty in much of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whether it was the brutality of American colonisation, the tyranny of the Spanish Inquisition or the horrors of the Eighty Years' War in the Netherland...

Exporting Russia: Diaghilev's Beginnings

The great Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev didn't have the talents to become an artist or the money to become a patron. His gift was to inspire, facilitate and market artistic projects that were highly colourful and distinctive. In this lecture ...

Archers Assemble: Creating The Powell-Pressburger Partnership

When Alexander Korda teamed Michael Powell with Emeric Pressburger in 1939, a lasting partnership between this Englishman and refugee Hungarian must have seemed unlikely. Yet they soon discovered a remarkable bond, pushing each other far beyond wh...

Musical Openings

The hammerblow introduction to Beethoven's 'Eroica' Symphony and the iconic four-note opening motif of the 5th Symphony, the unresolved start of Wagner's Tristan & Isolde, the sensuously meandering melody that begins Debussy's Prelude to the After...

James I: The Court at Play

Before he became King of England in 1603 James I had never set foot in an English royal palace. What he found when he did was a mixed blessing: he may have liked the grandeur and riches, but he hated the stuffy formality. His answer was to create ...

Striking the Balance Between Common Sense and Legal Reasoning

THE 2019 GRAY'S INN READINGLord Kerr intends to address the recent decision in Stocker v Stocker and the challenges which confront judges when required to take on the role of a jury in applying a common-sense approach to the meaning of wor...

The Weimar Republic: Germany's First Democracy

THE 2019 PROVOST'S LECTUREA century has passed since the establishment of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, founded in August 1919 and superseded 14 years later by the Nazi dictatorship. Sir Richard Evans, one of the world's foremost ...

Sir Thomas Gresham 1519-2019

THE 2019 SIR THOMAS GRESHAM ANNUAL LECTUREA special illustrated lecture will be presented by Dr John Guy to commemorate the 500th Anniversary of the birth of the College's founder and benefactor Sir Thomas Gresham. Information will be prov...

Byron and the Age of Sensation

Jonathan Bate will explore the life and work of the original celebrity poet - Lord Byron. He will show how Byron was simultaneously a Romantic and an anti-Romantic, and how his influence spread to almost every corner of Europe, from the Ru...

Wellbeing at the Bar? Is a Legal Aid Lawyer's Work all Stress and Distress?

Over the course of her Professorship, Professor Delahunty has striven to talk openly about the way in which the Family Court deals with emotive and challenging issues such as sexual abuse, child death in infancy, child neglect and child exploitati...

Mergers and Acquisitions: Do They Create or Destroy Value?

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are perhaps the most important decisions that a company ever faces, yet very many deals destroy substantial value. This talk will discuss the correct and incorrect motives for M&A, using both examples and lar...

The Treaty of Versailles: A Hundred Years Later

A century has passed since the Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919. After WWI the treaty imposed peace terms which have remained the subject of controversy ever since. It also attempted to set up a new international order to ensure tha...

Aristotle's Lyceum

In the 330s BCE, the great philosopher and scientist, Aristotle of Stagira in northern Greece, returned to Athens and founded his Lyceum. The first institution in world history to encompass teaching, research and the collection of a vast library, ...

Toothpaste, Custard and Chocolate: Mathematics Gets Messy

THE 2019 JOINT LONDON MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY ANNUAL LECTUREThis talk looks at mathematical modelling of real, complex fluids in flow situations - some with serious commercial applications, and some just for fun. Focusing on the choco...

Creativity: Can Computers Cut It?

Computers are often parodied as machines that kill creativity. Yet modern works of creativity usually have a digital aspect, and many are wholly digital. We will look at technology that enables creativity (not always of a good kind) and the prospe...

The Changing Impact of Infections as We Go Through Life and Age

The very young and very elderly are particularly susceptible to many infections and for many infections, age will predict how likely someone is to die once infected. The immediate and long-term effects of an infection changes throughout our life c...

The Limits of Our Knowledge

There is much in the universe we will never know, and it is equally certain that we will never know all that we do not know. This dilemma has not stopped cosmologists, philosophers and even theologians from exploring and going beyond the limits of...

Exploring Earth from Space

In recent years, multiple space missions have been launched. Many have set out across our galaxy to explore other systems and planets, capturing people's imaginations and helping us to understand more about the origins of the universe. But there a...

Prokofiev's War and Peace

Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace (1953) was an adaptation of Tolstoy's novel begun during WWII. He saw it as a personal interpretation of the novel, but as soon as it went forward for production, the Soviet authorities realised that this was the p...

Energy and Matter at the Origin of Life

The origin of life is one of the biggest questions in science, but until recently it was, experimentally, a question in chemistry. Now, gene sequences and a better understanding of cell growth under extreme conditions are giving insights from biol...

Staying in Touch with Patients

Touch is central to the performance of medicine. Traditionally, doctors depended on touch to diagnose illness. Revolutions in imaging technology, machine learning and artificial intelligence seem to reduce the need for physical examination. Yet to...

The Cockney Romantics: John Keats and his Friends

The word Romanticism makes us think of mountain tops and stormy seas, but the younger generation of English Romantics (above all, John Keats) were Londoners through and through. They were even mocked as 'the Cockney School of Poetry'. Jona...

Is There Danger Ahead With AI: Superintelligence, Ethics, Work, Leisure and Automation

Professor Wilks will discuss the argument that 'superintelligent' AI may turn against us, as Hawking and Bostrom have warned. It will be argued that these worries misrepresent the achievements and potential of AI, and that the ethical dilemmas of ...

Digital Listening: The Future of Music in the Age of Digital Fragmentation

It's a tough time to be a listener. Our present-day cultures of listening are radically fragmented, as our time and attention are fractalised into bits of information. What's the future of listening? What will happen to the ways we give attention ...

Jesus, Hitler and the Abolition of God

This series has argued that the origins of modern secularism lie in the age of the Renaissance. This last lecture will track that legacy down to the present. From Tom Paine through Bakunin to modern humanism and anti-Nazism, religion has not colla...

Gresham's Exchange

'Go to the Exchange, crave gold as you intend.'' (William Haughton, Englishmen for My Money, 1598). Sir Thomas Gresham's first great contribution to the life of London was the Royal Exchange, the purpose-built merchants' bourse which opened in 156...

The Unacclaimed Accompanist

There is far more to piano accompaniment than meets the ear or eye. Vocal celebrities are reliant on an accompanist's skills in indisputably great music composed for an equal partnership of voice and piano, and yet the hard-working pianist's publi...

The Child and Medical Treatment: The Chance to Live, or to Die with Dignity?

What happens when doctors and parents cannot agree on whether a child should be given experimental medical treatment? Why is there any question mark over a parent's right to decide if medical treatment for their child continues? From the p...

Leonardo's Salvator Mundi: Scholarship, Science and Skulduggery

The newly discovered Salvator by Leonardo, the world's most costly picture, is one of his most notable creations, in which he used his 'science of art' to transform a stock subject into a profound expression of the ineffability of the divine. ...

The Intertwined Impacts of Pollution and Inequality on Health

Pollution is a much more complex problem than many realise and cannot be resolved solely through global and regional agreements. Pollution is closely connected with behavioural and technology choices, production and consumption practices, industri...

500 Years of Mathematics: Are We Living in a New Golden Age?

Much has happened in the 500 years since the birth of Thomas Gresham, and mathematics is no exception. Most mathematicians were then in awe of the Greeks and felt little had been done since. But the start of modern mathematics soon followed, marke...

The Meaning, Value and Sanctity of Human Life

Recent advances in medical science have brought complex ethical dilemmas, particularly around the beginning of human lives (abortion, embryo research, IVF, gene therapy, stem cells) and its ending (switching off ventilators, persistent vegetative ...

Does Finance Benefit Society?

Since the financial crisis, there has been a strong view that the financial sector has little benefit for society. The stock market is not a net supplier of capital - as much money is spent on share buybacks as is raised from new issuance. Moreove...

Mining Volcanoes: Diamonds, Copper and Hot Water

Volcanoes provide many natural resources from which society can benefit. Diamonds and most of the world's copper are mined from eroded extinct volcanoes while many active volcanoes offer the possibility of extracting huge amounts of geothermal ene...

Text Mining: How Do Computers Understand Language?

Text is everywhere. From tweets to the gigantic records of governments, machine processing of text is now subtle and pervasive. We can automatically identify authors of works, look for disease within tweets and even construct chatbots which can co...

The Natural Environment of Tudor London

Tudor London is variously reported as a squalid seething mass of humanity choking on its own filth and fumes, and as a delightful garden where babbling brooks and sweet flowers delighted the senses of people such as Elizabeth I, Shakespeare and Er...

AI and Education: The Reality and the Potential

This lecture will consider the current reality of AI in education and its transformative potential. Professor Luckin will introduce what we mean by the term AI and how the development of increasingly smart technologies in the workplace and...

Dying in Today's World

In the 50 years since the hospice movement started, lessons from research have revolutionised care of the dying in the UK and in many places around the world. Yet the cruel myth that opioids shorten the lives of those with severe pain from cancer ...

London Belongs to Us: Street-Life and New Wave British Cinema of the 1960s

Location shooting was a feature of 'new wave' film around the world in the 1960s. In Britain, it meant that British filmmakers broke out of the studio to find new subjects among the young, fashionable and disadvantaged, seen in their natural habit...

The Spiritual Quest Against Religion

The Protestant Reformation set out to purge Christianity of error. But once you have started, how do you know when to stop? Some radicals tore up layer upon layer of tradition in the tireless search for deeper truths, proving their faith by their ...

Crown, Country and the Struggle for Cultural Supremacy

The fourth lecture in this series considers Britain's unique cultural development and how the changing balance of power and wealth between the aristocracy and the monarchy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has fundamentally influenced t...

Political Spending on the Internet

FULBRIGHT LECTUREGovernment officials in the UK and the USA have struggled to find effective ways to regulate political spending on the internet. The question of appropriate regulation is challenging - both in practice and principle. <...

Infections of the Abdominal Organs

Our gut is permanently full of large numbers of bacteria and other organisms but serious infections relatively rarely occur due to its extraordinary immune system. Infections of these organs can, however, occur in specific situations. Specialised ...

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932) was more a personal than a political drama. All was well for the first two years after the opera's première in 1934, but shortly after Stalin went to a performance, it was vigorously condemned in the state press. The...

Deep Listening: Quiet Music and Quieter Audiences

As music gets quiet, so too must listening. But what do the contexts and ideologies of quiet music and quieter listening mean? From different eras, and radically opposed musical traditions, Richard Wagner's innovations in his theatre at Bayreuth (...

Cruelty to Animals

Understanding changing relationships between human and non-human animals is central to our world today. This lecture starts by looking at early-modern understandings of the nature of 'animal' and 'human' life, before turning to the rise of...

Art and Power in the English Aristocratic House

The English Aristocracy is often seen as a rural elite concentrating its patronage of art and architecture in the countryside. This lecture questions this view and shows how, from the sixteenth century, aristocratic families deployed their...

Deep Learning: Miracle or Snake Oil?

Machine Learning has had several excitements over the years with machines that are modelled on the human brain. The invention of the perceptron and artificial neural networks were followed by intense scientific activity and excitement, then by dis...

How to be a Puritan Atheist

Early 'atheism' did not always mean angry rejection of religion. The most earnest believers were often ones who wrestled most seriously with doubts. This lecture will look at how and why Christians in the seventeenth century first began se...

Brexit and the Future of Britain

At the time of writing, it appears that Britain will leave the European Union on 29th March at 11 pm British time, 12 midnight Continental time. How will Britain fare outside the European Union? And how will Brexit affect British politics? Will th...

How Will We Learn Maths in the Future?

Mathematics education is changing rapidly and a big driver for this is the use of new technology. In particular the widespread use of computers has transformed the way that we do mathematics, with computers not only able to mark exam papers, but a...

Gresham's Bequest to Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn

The valuable bequest of Sir Thomas Gresham to the development of scientific interest in seventeenth-century England can be traced through the testimony of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn - not only great diarists but also 'particular friends'.

Politics and the Legal Profession

Cuts to legal aid, the concept of online justice, diversity within the legal profession and the judiciary, the independence of the Judiciary from the State, the impact the press can have on perceptions of fairness of justice: this lecture explores...

The Greatest Speech of all Time: Pericles' Funeral Oration

In 431 BCE the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered one of the most influential speeches of all time, his Epitaphios or Funeral Oration. The occasion was at the funeral of the first Athenian soldiers to lose their lives in the Peloponnesian War. ...

The Stewardship Role of Investors

Poor stewardship by investors has been argued to be a cause of poor corporate governance. Moreover, when investors do engage with companies, they do so to increase short-term profit at the expense of long-run value. This talk will critical...

How Astronomy Changed our View of the Cosmos: from Gresham to the 21st Century

Thomas Gresham lived from 1519 to 1579. The first telescope was designed in 1608 in the Netherlands, and first pointed at the heavens by Galileo a year later. The greatest discoveries since the pre-telescope era have been that of the existence of ...

Food Security: A Poisoned Chalice of Plant Adaptation

Worldwide, over 80 plant species are known to cause poisoning from nitrate accumulation. But droughts are exacerbating this for many staple crops. Even after a drought, the growth in water-stressed crops can result in the build-up of other toxins....

Gender, Marriage, Divorce and Human Sexuality

Is 'morality' principally about sex, or 'naughty vicars'? Despite Henry VIII, the Church has found divorce difficult, especially for clergy and bishops, let alone 'equal marriage' for same-sex couples, the role of women in ordained ministry or tra...

The Myth of the Lone Heroic Surgeon

People often think that surgery is about the skill of a single surgeon. In fact operations depend on teamwork, with nurses, surgeons, anaesthetists and technicians all playing vital roles as they work together. Experts outside medicine need simila...

Zombie Ants and Fearless Mice: Parasites and the Brain

Parasites can dramatically change the behaviour of their hosts. A parasitic worm turns a tropical ant berry-red and causes it to climb high, attractive prey for birds, the worm's next host. A mouse infected by toxoplasma gondii no longer fears cat...

Taking London to the World: Robert Paul Shows his Native City in Motion

Britain's pioneer filmmaker, born 150 years ago in North London, vividly portrayed the variety of life in 'the imperial metropolis' at the end of the 19th century, conscious of its historic appeal but also emphasising the modernity of which he was...

Volcanoes and Society

There are an estimated 800 million people living close enough to active volcanoes to be affected when they erupt. As well as casualties from volcanic eruptions there can be major economic losses and societal disruption, especially when communities...

Psychosis: Making and Inhabiting a Different Reality

One of the most mysterious experiences that we come across in psychiatry is 'Psychosis', which refers to a loss of contact with reality. It has many causes and manifestations and it poses major challenges to our understanding. Professor Fl...

Infections of the Lung and Heart

The lung has a large surface area, is open to the outside world and is the site for some of the most common serious infections, in particular pneumonia. Several bacteria, viruses and some less common lung infections including tuberculosis and fung...

Computer Vision: Machines that See

Human vision seems so effortless: from a young age we see the world in high- definition colour. We can tell the difference between a cat and a hat, and 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' is an anomaly. But despite recent progress, machines s...

Maths in the City: Future Cities

The world's population is rapidly expanding and the majority of this population will live in large city conurbations. What will out future cities look like? How will transport system work, how will people move around, and how will we supply them w...

Music Made of Listening: John Cage and 4'33"

Musicians make sounds - that much, you'd have thought, is obvious! Yet more than the sounds they make, it's the choices that musicians are making about how and when to play that really matter - choices that are made through listening. John...

Bubbles, Manias and Market Failures: The Unintended Consequences of Regulatory Responses

Although financial bubbles are in some sense banal and a feature of financial capitalism, the seeds of the next bubble are often sown by regulatory responses to previous ones. This has been the case since the South Sea Bubble and Mississippi Schem...

The Varieties of Forgiveness

Forgiveness is often discussed as if it were a single, straightforward, phenomenon. The reality, however, is not so simple. For instance, we can identify three different types of forgiveness: inter-personal forgiveness, God's forgiveness, and self...

Gresham's World: Global Traffic, Trade, and the Metamorphosis of England

Global trade and traffic, many of Gresham's contemporaries would say, had altered sixteenth-century England beyond recognition, from its food, fashion, and language, to the look and feel of its cities and neighbourhoods. How did its subjects respo...

Ruskin at 200: The Art Critic as Word-Painter

Ruskin's Bicentenary on 8 February 2019 will be marked by an assessment of his achievement as an art critic. Then, with a close focus on four or five particular paintings, the lecture will explore Ruskin's distinctive genius in evocative word- pai...

The 30th Anniversary of The Children Act 1989: Is It Still Fit For Purpose?

The Children Act 1989 embodied a change in philosophy by making the child's welfare the courts 'paramount' concern, moving away from the concept of parental rights towards the right of the child. It embraced the idea of shared parental rights and ...

Architecture, Images and Image-Making Under The Stuarts

The Stuart age saw a much more systematic approach to the elite patronage of art and architecture. Collectors and connoisseurs were more aware of the effect of their activities and the audiences for them. An integral part of the tumultuous politic...

50 Years of Lunar Exploration

The Moon is undoubtedly the next frontier for humanity. The international space agencies are lining up to pursue lunar projects and even develop lunar bases. The potential of the Moon is attracting interest for industrial applications, including m...

Evolution since Sir Thomas Gresham: How Changes Over The Past Five Centuries Have Moulded Evolution

In celebrating 500 years since the birth of Sir Thomas Gresham, Professor Jones will examine how changes since the sixteenth century have affected the evolution of human beings and that of the animals and plants around us. Professor Jones ...

How to be a Shakespearean Atheist

Villainous atheists were, like witches, stock figures of the European imagination in the Renaissance. But when Shakespeare and his contemporaries put them on the stage, 'atheists' could be uncomfortably compelling. This lecture will explor...

Reforming Corporate Governance

The UK is considered a world leader in corporate governance, but governance failures are blamed for the loss of trust in business. This talk will discuss rigorous evidence on what optimal governance should look like - including issues such...

Musorgsky's Boris Godunov

Musorgsky's opera Boris Godunov (1872) is set in the 'Time of Troubles', using Pushkin's incisive verse tragedy on the chaotic period preceding the establishment of the Romanovs. Such a work was bound to draw the attention of the censors, and Muso...

Infections and the Nerves

Certain infections have a particular impact on the peripheral nerves as part of their normal disease process. Some infectious effects are predominately on the motor nerves such as polio (currently heading for eradication); these can cause weakness...

Exploring the Hidden Face of our Dark Deep Ocean Planet

We sometimes hear that 'we know more about Mars than the deep ocean', but is that true? Exploring the deep ocean is a recent enterprise, made possible by new technology in the past two centuries, but what we now know about the dark depths is as re...

The Search for Meaning on the Web: The Semantic Web and Managing a Lifetime's Information

Berners-Lee's World Wide Web (WWW) was not his original aim, which was closer to what we now call the Semantic or Data Web (SW): documents and images where the system itself 'understands' its content as the WWW certainly does not, any more than a ...

Sacred Listening: The Voices and Music of the Gods

What happens when we listen to music that incarnates a divine presence? From our early ancestors, whose listening in the caves of Europe 40 millennia ago opened up gateways to other worlds, sacred places have developed special acoustics for spirit...

Sir Thomas Gresham, London, and Europe

London was crucially dependent on continental Europe for its economic resilience in the mid-sixteenth century, and Sir Thomas Gresham's fortune piggy-backed off the special relationship with Antwerp. But the Reformation put the relationship under ...

'RUDQ?' Digital Skills: Crisis or Opportunity?

The 2019 Annual Lord Mayor's EventThe 2019 Annual Lord Mayor's Gresham Lecture will explore the so called 'digital skills crisis' and question whether this may present an opportunity? As the digital era unfolds and the future demands for t...

Can Maths Tell Us Where We Are?

One of the biggest advances in modern technology has been the development of GPS systems which allow us to find our position to very high precision. GPS is just the latest advance in the science of navigation, which has had a profound effect on hu...

Carols from King's: Centenary Celebration

At 3.00 pm on Christmas Eve, millions of listeners around the world will tune in to the live radio relay of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. In this lecture, Jeremy Summerly reverently and...

Executive Pay: What's Right, What's Wrong, and What Could Be Fixed?

Executive pay is a controversial topic that is arguably the primary cause behind mistrust in business. Various remedies have been proposed but, just like in medicine, diagnosis precedes treatment. Many of the concerns are based on hand-picked exam...

The Romantic Lakes from Wordsworth to Beatrix Potter

When Daniel Defoe rode through the Lake District in the early 18th century, he described the area as 'the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England.' But for Victorians such as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, the...

Understanding Violent People

Most of us have witnessed or had personal dealings with violent people. Why do they act as they do? How have British and American commentators during the past two centuries understood violent behaviour? The media incites anxieties about personal v...

Dissecting the Consultation

The consultation is the focal point of medicine. A clinician and a patient, held together in a relationship of care, collaborate in identifying that patient's needs and finding a solution. Scientific knowledge and clinical skill only make sense in...

Childhood Malnutrition: Exporting Violence or Happiness?

Half of all child deaths are associated with under-nutrition, with devastating impacts and far-reaching health consequences. Left unchecked, under-nutrition will potentially create an inter-generational, self-reinforcing pathogenic cycle of violen...

Mind - the Gap: What's Missing from Medical Training?

Over the past 150 years medical science has developed beyond all recognition yet there is a huge gap between these scientific developments on the one hand, and our understanding of the psychological demands of medical work on the other.Thi...

Sexual Harassment at the Bar

2018 saw a seismic change in the willingness of women to speak out about sexual abuse they had suffered at work and the willingness of others to hear and act on it. This year (2018) saw the creation of a #metoo movement called 'Behind the Gown' cr...

The Theatre of Dionysus

Medea, Antigone, Oedipus and Lysistrata - these are just some of the characters from ancient Greek drama who still walk our contemporary stages and haunt our imagination. One of the classical Athenians' most important inventions was the medium of ...

In the Beginning

Where did we come from? This question has always intrigued human thought. Professor Silk will describe the modern scientist's view of the origin of the cosmos. Here is the sequence: from an uncertain beginning, due to limitations in our kn...

Speech Processing: How to Wreck a Nice Peach

Alexa, Siri and Cortana are among a number of voice-enabled digital assistants that can not only speak to us but understand us. Sci-fi films had talking computers many years ago.Why has it taken so long to crack the speech processing puzzl...

Plastics from Potatoes, Rubber from Rice

With over 80% of organic carbon being present in the form of cellulose, lignin and starch, it is unsurprising many groups have attempted to use these as feedstock chemicals and materials. Extensive hydrogen bonding makes the plasticisation of star...

Infections and the Brain

The brain is well protected against most infections, but once they get into or around the brain they can cause fatal or serious long-term consequences. Some bacterial, viral and parasitic infections are particularly well adapted to the brain, rang...

The Romantic Child

The Romantics invented the modern idea of childhood. In the third of his lectures on the rhetoric of Romanticism, Jonathan Bate will explore how they did so, with particular emphasis on the role of children in the poetry of Blake and Words...

Glinka's A Life for the Tsar

The rousing finale of Mikhail Glinka's patriotic A Life for the Tsar (1836) guaranteed it a place as the traditional season opener in Russian opera houses. A Life was a powerful and attractive presentation of the Romanov dynasty's foundation myth,...

Classical Music, Noisy Listening

Shh! You're in a classical concert - quiet! What has become, in the 20th and 21st centuries, a musical tradition of as-quiet-as-possible, cough-free contemplation and passive disengagement in concert halls was not always that way. In fact, it wasn...

Has the Internet Changed News for Better or Worse? 250 Years of Technology

Many claims have been made, both positive and negative, for the transformative nature of internet news in the age of social media. An historical perspective is brought to that debate, by looking at the effects that earlier changes to news producti...

Enormous Volcanic Eruptions

Huge volcanic eruptions are the only natural hazard apart from the impact of an asteroid that can cause a global catastrophe. In the short history of civilisation, there have been few volcanic events with global effects. Much larger magnitude erup...

Nanomaterials: A Tale of Two Alices

With over 80% of organic carbon being present in the form of cellulose, lignin and starch, it is unsurprising many groups have attempted to use these as feedstock chemicals and materials. Extensive hydrogen bonding makes the plasticisation of star...

The Mathematics of Climate Change

Climate change is important, controversial, and the subject of huge debate. Much of our understanding of the future climate comes from the use of complex climate models based on mathematical and physical ideas.In this talk, Professor Budd ...

Money: The Root of All Evil, Or Our Salvation?

Jesus talked more about money than about anything else. Can the teachings of a penniless ancient ascetic be applied to debates about Brexit, protests about global capitalism, and wider investment not only in defence, alcohol or tobacco but also po...

The Ending of World War I: The Road to 11 November

This lecture will re-examine how the First World War ended, anticipating the centenary commemorations in 2018. It will discuss both why Germany requested a ceasefire, and why the Allies and America granted one. It will argue that the German army w...

Shakespeare's Stages

Leading actor and Shakespeare scholar Michael Pennington discusses the direct effect on the dramatist's writing of the theatres he wrote for, so different from ours. From cinematic intimacy to heroic spaciousness, his plays reflect his actors' tec...

Making Information Personal: Companions

Professor Wilks will discuss the notion of an artificial Companion, a long-term software agent that could be present in any device: a screen, handbag or even a furry toy - and which understands the person it 'lives' with and whose memories and kno...

How the Reformation Trained Us to Be Sceptics

The Protestant Reformation confronted Europeans with a clamour of religious alternatives. Catholics and Protestants taught their people to doubt the other side's religion (while still believing their own) and taught them to be incredulous while ma...

Performing Medicine, Performing Surgery

Medicine demands factual knowledge, physical skill and the ability to work with patients and colleagues. Most of the time clinicians learn from other clinicians, studying hard within a frame that discourages exploration outside medicine. F...

Bribery and Corruption in the City

Crime thrives in a social environment which is conductive to its commission, and it harms the society which spawns it most of all. That is as true of bribery and corruption as it is true of knife-armed postcode gangs. If the common ethical code th...

Strategy and Democracy

THE 2018 PETER NAILOR MEMORIAL LECTURE ON DEFENCEToday's cry in democratic states, and not just from representatives of populist parties, is government with the people rather than government for the people. This presents a problem for issu...

Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith

In his new book, Haunted by Christ, Richard Harries explores the role of faith in the lives of twenty novelists and poets. Non-believers like Samuel Beckett and Philip Pullman as well as believers like T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden all struggled with ...

Mathematics in War and Peace - Stories about Mathematicians Killed in WW1

THE 2018 BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS / GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTUREAs a commemoration of the end of the First World War, the event will focus on the theme of mathematics in war and peacetime. The main speaker, ...

Mathematics in War and Peace - Flying Mathematicians

THE 2018 BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS / GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTUREAs a commemoration of the end of the First World War, the event will focus on the theme of mathematics in war and peacetime. The main speaker, ...

Mathematics in War and Peace - Euler's Work on Ballistics

THE 2018 BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS / GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTUREAs a commemoration of the end of the First World War, the event will focus on the theme of mathematics in war and peacetime. The main speaker, ...

Dark Matters

The dark side of the universe is pervasive. Most of the matter in the universe is dark, most of the energy in the universe is dark. Many searches are underway, on mountain peaks, in deep underground mines, and in space, to discover more about dark...

It from Bit: The Science of Information

Physicist John Wheeler asked the famous 'It from bit?' question: what if at its heart the universe is not a collection of particles, forces and fields but rather a collection of bits? If this is true, it leads us to new insights in compression, ma...

The 'Autism Advantage' in the Workplace

Adam Feinstein will examine the strengths of many people on the autism spectrum which make them an untapped human resource in the workplace. Using case studies, he will analyse potential employment openings across the autism spectrum and demonstra...

State Torture

Torture was officially outlawed in France in the 1780s and in Europe during the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has returned as an instrument of state policy.The defence of torture is no longe...

How Natural is Natural? Historical Perspective on Wildlife and the Environment in England

THE 2018 ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLIN MATTHEW MEMORIAL LECTUREWe often think of the British countryside as 'natural' but it is anything but. Not only its fields and hedges, but also its woods, heaths, moors, and fens are largely the prod...

Wordsworth, Coleridge and the Poetic Revolution

'The sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me', wrote William Hazlitt, recalling the day in 1798 when he heard William Wordsworth reading aloud from Lyrical Ballads, 'It partakes of, and is carried along with, the revolutionary...

Epidemics, Pandemics and How To Control Them

Some infections come in repeated epidemic waves, others are new to human populations. A known human threat such as influenza may mutate or a new infection jumps the species barrier from animals to humans: recent examples include HIV and Ebola, and...

Brexit: Recovery of Sovereignty or Loss of Rights?

Was Brexit (the 2016 referendum) argued on the basis of accurate information fairly presented? Slogans were, and may always be, better at gathering votes. With the reality of Brexit a few months away, a sober look at what we actually gain or lose ...

Can Maths Predict The Future? The Maths Behind Chaos Theory and Sudden Change

Since Newton, we are used to science making confident predictions about the future. For example, the motion of the planets and the times of the tides. However, some things seem very hard to predict, such as the stock market, or the weather in six ...

No Listening, No Music: Why Listening Matters

What does it mean to listen to music? How might the concepts and practices of 'listening' and 'music-making' have first emerged in the story of human development? We journey back in time, to the origins of human society - in the company of...

Ethics In and Out of the Court Room

If you are a barrister you will be asked 'how can you act for someone who is guilty?'. This is just one of the ethical questions the Bar has to confront. Barristers have a Code of Ethics that governs the working relationship with the client, the c...

Purposeful Business: The Evidence and the Implementation

Do businesses exist to make profits, or to serve a purpose? This talk will present rigorous evidence showing there need be no trade-off between purpose and profit, contrary to conventional wisdom. It will then turn to the practical 'so wha...

Ultra-Compact Objects: Astronomy with Gravitational Waves

The most compact objects that shine in the universe are neutron stars. Black holes are even more compact objects that we view indirectly as matter accretes and heats up around them.Professor Silk will describe the state of our knowledge of...

How To Be An Atheist In Medieval Europe

There was no intellectually sophisticated or articulate 'atheism' in the Middle Ages, but there was plenty of raw scepticism and incredulity. Church courts regularly heard blasphemy cases which went as far as outright denial of God.This le...

Antibiotic Resistance: Calling on Citizens to Help Tackle the Problem

Antibiotic resistance has emerged as an issue that threatens public health around the world. Even simple operations may no longer be possible due to the risk of lethal infection. What is less well-known is the role of environmental components in a...

Gothic London: Recreating the Ancient City on Screen

The earliest London-made films showed the Victorian city doing everyday business, before its fictional screen image became increasingly shadowy and sinister. Gothic or 'gaslight' visions of London have remained popular with cinema audiences, provi...

Painting, Patronage and Politics under the Tudors

Tudor England was a dangerous place for the wealthy and powerful. The cultural ambitions of the elite open a window into contemporary attitudes. A lecture by Professor Simon Thurley CBE, Visiting Professor of the Built Environment 19 Septe...

The Origins of Romanticism

"What is 'Romanticism'? Jonathan Bate goes in search of what Isaiah Berlin described as 'the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West'.A lecture by Sir Jonathan Bate CBE FBA, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric 18 September...

The Gray's Inn Reading - The Rule of Law: Good for the Economy?

It has become the conventional wisdom that the rule of law is a necessary ingredient of economic progress. Along with an independent judiciary, individual rights, a free media, free association, strong political parties and a rich civil so...

Terrorism in Historical Perspective

THE PROVOST'S LECTURE Terrorism has become one of the most destructive and worrying aspects of life in 21st-century European cities. Seemingly random and unpredictable attacks have placed us all at risk of injury or death. How new is this ...

Climate Change: A Defining Challenge for the 21st Century

THE SIR THOMAS GRESHAM ANNUAL LECTURE 2018 The scientific evidence for climate change will be examined, describing how simulations of the Earth's weather and climate are constructed and how these can be used to make assessments of what our...

The Conversion of T.S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" was the voice of a disillusioned generation and reflected a world in disarray. Then in 1928 Eliot announced to a startled world, and the disapproval of his contemporaries, that his general point of view could be descr...

Computers and the Future

The invention of the computer in 1948 has changed our world radically but we are only in the early years of this industrial revolution. What disruptions will quantum computing bring? What else can we foresee and what can we learn from the ...

Remembering London: The Story of the Faith Communities of London and their Prospects

Bishop Richard Chartres will present a survey in five acts of the history of London's faith communities, with a word about their prospects in the 21st century.The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the G...

The British Economy: Can We Build a Successful Future?

The challenges faced by the UK are very large. And they have not been convincingly challenged for a generation or more. We may have suffered from short-termism and an inability to develop a balanced economy. In this final lecture we will c...

Nelson Mandela in the 21st Century

To mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, the legacy of Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), first president of democratic South Africa, will be considered - both within his country and in the wider world. Mandela's was famously a world life, that is, he...

Who's to Blame for Britain's Floods?

In the last ten years, the UK has been devastated by floods that have caused enormous physical and economic damage, seriously affecting the mental health of local residents. Media coverage has included allegations about the incompetence of scienti...

Russia After Communism

Russia's emergence from Soviet Communism, 'a revolution without shots', did not result in civil war and bloodshed, as in 1917. But the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 still came as a shock and the subsequent chaos (with hyperinflation, politi...

Computers and Warfare

Stuxnet, the attacks on the Ukrainian power grid, and autonomous armed guards are only the beginning. Computers are changing warfare profoundly because military strategy has always been geographically based but there are no borders in cyberspace. ...

The Riddle of Ancient Sparta: Unwrapping an Enigma

Ancient Sparta has been handed down in a tradition radically conflicted and confused by rival political and social ideologies. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, one might say. This Spartan tradition is still alive and lively today. <...

Transparency in the Family Court: What Goes On Behind Closed Doors?

Who does the story belong to: the family or society? Where and how are the lines drawn? Until relatively recently the Family Court door was closed to all save the parties and professionals involved in the case. A 2014 initiative aimed to secure 'a...

Media Reporting of Medical Advances: Helpful or Misleading?

The media and medicine have different perspectives. At least in part, this is due to a preference for individual human stories over detailed analysis of results. This lecture will use examples of how the public may be misled and consider t...

The 30 Years' War (1618-48) and the Second Defenestration of Prague

Professor Wilson will examine the causes, conduct and consequences of the Thirty Years' War, Europe's most destructive conflict prior to the two 20th-century world wars. The talk takes place on the 400th anniversary of the defenestration of three ...

Mathematical Research from Toy Models

JOINT LONDON MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY/ GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTURE 'Toy' here has a special sense: an object of daily life which you can find or make in minutes, yet which, if played with imaginatively, reveal behaviours that keep seasoned ...

Samuel Pepys the Guitarist

At first, Samuel Pepys could see no virtue in the guitar at all and regarded it as a toy or 'bauble'. Yet he soon changed his mind as he became more interested in Italian music. He arranged for an English merchant in Italy to send him an instrumen...

From Two-Party to Multi-Party Politics

Between 1951 and 1959, over 95% of voters supported the two major parties. Since 1983, fewer than 80% have voted Conservative or Labour. How is the decline of the two party system to be explained?The transcript and downloadable versions of...

China: Art, Power and Revolutions, 1950-1976

The establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 gave Chinese artists a government that had explicit policies for the arts, seeing them as an essential part of the creation of 'new China'. Resources were put into the support of art and ...

Speechwriting: Creating Authenticity

The image of the speechwriter in televised programmes (such as The Thick of It, The West Wing or Yes Minister) is something of a puppeteer, a sinister figure operating in the shadows, malevolently manipulating our political masters. Simon Lancaste...

Shakespeare's Fame

Ever since classical antiquity, poets and playwrights have written about famous heroes and anti-heroes, lovers and politicians. But they have also yearned for posthumous fame themselves. How do they achieve it? This final lecture will show...

Facts Matter, But They Aren't Enough: Science, Faith and Meaning in Life

In our post-truth age, facts often don't seem to meet the deepest human longings. So do we need to go against facts, or beyond them? What does the relatively new discipline of the cognitive science of religion, which suggests that human beings are...

Karl Marx - 200 Years On

To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx (5 May 1818) and 150 years since Das Kapital was published in 1867, the lecture will explore the possible affinity between Marx's work in human history and Darwin's in natural history. Enthus...

In Search of the Medieval Outlaw: The Tales of Robin Hood

The rulers of the medieval English kingdom discouraged resistance to authority by the widespread use of execution, outlawry, and exile. Yet medieval English society also applauded such resistance. Encapsulated in the tales of Robin Hood, the good ...

What Really Happened at the First Moving-Picture Shows

The reception of moving pictures in 1894-96 has been much mythologised. Were spectators really frightened of an approaching train? Did they imagine seeing their departed relatives reanimated on screen? How much attention was actually paid to this ...

The Child in the Family Court Room: Whose Child is it Anyway?

What role do children play in the family trial? The case concerns their future: how is their voice heard? What happens if they hold the key to the issues before the court? Should they give evidence, hear evidence? Should they meet the judge decidi...

Air Pollution: Its Impact on Health and Possible Solutions

Lung disease, heart disease, stroke, dementia and learning difficulties have been associated with different forms of air pollution including gasses and particulate matter. It is a difficult policy area because there is an economic and social cost ...

Minor Political Parties

In the past, these were of two types (1) Breakaway parties such as the Liberal Unionists before the First World War and the SDP in the 1980s or (2) Extremist parties such as the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and the Communist Party. Most ...

Can You Do Mathematics In A Crowd?

We all find ourselves in crowds every so often. Whilst human behaviour in general can be very hard to predict, it is possible, to a certain extent, to predict the behaviour of large numbers of people in a crowd. In this lecture I will explain the ...

Regional, Industrial and Infrastructure Policies

There are large disparities in economic performance at the regional level in the UK. We need to consider what kinds of policies might raise regional performance and the extent which directed industrial policies and infrastructure spending might be...

The Birth of Modern Theatreland: Covent Garden and the Two Theatres Royal

London is home to two of the oldest working theatres in the world both founded by Charles II's patents. They shaped a whole quarter of London, and continue to do so today. In a second lecture on 'Buildings in the West End of London', Profe...

King Henry III and the Communication of Power

Against the backdrop of King John's ignominy and the political challenge posed by Magna Carta, which encouraged demands for greater representation in parliament, King Henry III used art, architecture and apparel to exalt his authority and to commu...

The Philosophy of Time: Does Physics Have The Last Word?

Time's mysteries seem to resist comprehension and what remain can stretch even the most profound philosopher. Professor Tallis seeks to rescue time from the jaws of physics, examining the claims that time is merely the fourth dimension of ...

How Spontaneous Gestures Connect to Thinking

Human beings often make frequent hand movements whilst they are talking. There has been considerable psychological debate about their function, but it is now clear that they often convey core parts of the underlying message. Since we have little c...

Existential Risks in the Solar System

There are strong reasons to believe that the survival of life on the Earth is under threat. Human activity is one example that we are able to control, at least in principle. We might irreversibly pollute, or destroy the planet with thermonuclear d...

The USSR in the Cold War Years

After Stalin's death in 1953, successive leaders tried to find ways to revitalise the Soviet regime and rethink its promises to the Soviet people. Life within a system no longer based on terror and intense industrial transformation (yet still stri...

Shakespeare's Ghosts and Spirits

Where do the ghosts in Shakespeare come from? And what about the magic? In this lecture, Jonathan Bate will summon up the ghosts of Old Hamlet, the victims of Richard III and Julius Caesar, revealing their origins in the bloody plays of Seneca. He...

Are We Lost In The Cosmos?

There have been dramatic changes in our scientific understanding of the universe in the last hundred years. It used to be thought that the universe was eternal; now it is thought that it came into being in the 'Big Bang'. So what does this say abo...

Is 'Green Business' a Contradiction in Terms?

Posters in shops and on trucks shout 'carbon neutral business', and more organisations are boasting of reducing their environmental impact by using environmentally-friendly, responsibly sourced materials. And yet we also have diesel car emission f...

The Guitar at the Restoration Court

When the most famous diarist in English, Samuel Pepys, accompanied Charles II back to London for the Restoration of the monarchy he was given the task of carrying the king's guitar. From this moment on, the instrument had a the royal seal of appro...

The Internet of Things

Many televisions, baby monitors, central heating and even light-bulbs are already connected to the internet but this is only the start. Over the next few years, many billions of devices will be connected and machine-to-machine data will become the...

The Structure of Finance

In the traditional model of finance, households saved and firms borrowed through financial intermediaries. Those financial intermediaries might be banks or pension funds but the experience of intermediation in the UK does not encourage the thought...

Personalised Medicine - Made For You

Everyone is different, and treatment options increasingly reflect that. As we understand more about our genetic makeup, our varying response to conventional therapies means that we can design drugs and build devices tailored for individuals ('besp...

Architecture and the Edwardian Era

Descriptions and reconstructions of houses can illuminate other histories and provide a sense of the relationships between people and places. Edwardian architecture in particular provides a fascinating commentary on broader historical themes - not...

The Quantum Mathematician

Quantum science has been one of the most successful and useful theories ever invented. Indeed quantum technology was added as the ninth of the original eight great technologies. However, quantum mechanics is also, at the same time, one of the most...

Trust-Busting or Trust-Building: How Can The City Earn Trust?

In recent years, the reputation of the financial services and related professional services industries has been corroded by a series of scandals. In 2017, the largest ever decline in trust across the institutions of government, business, media and...

Slave Stories: Aesop and Walter Crane

In 1887 the influential arts-and-crafts book illustrator Walter Crane published The Baby's Own Aesop, bringing the homespun wisdom of ancient Greek peasants to a new generation of children. This lecture uses these fables to tackle the least attrac...

Palace, Park and Square: St James's and the Birth of the West End

Based on new research into the origins of St. James's, Simon Thurley looks into the ingredients that went into making a court quarter there and the way it formed a blueprint for the new West End of London. This is the first of two lectures...

Nationalist Parties

Between 1886 and 1914, British politics was dominated by the Irish Question, and the Irish nationalist party exerted considerable pressure on British governments. Since 1974, the rise of the SNP has brought the Scottish Question into the forefront...

Grasping Shadows: The Dark Side in Painting

FULBRIGHT LECTURE What's in a shadow? Danger and death? Or the vital life-force of whatever object casts it? Are shadows seductive nothings or truth-telling images of repressed sexuality and violence? Starting with literary example...

Dealing with Sex Abuse: How Does the Family Court Assess Risk?

Sexual abuse is always an abuse of power. It can be opportunistic or premeditated; furtive intra-familial abuse or acts shared online. It can be multigenerational and inter-sex: grandmother to grandson; father to daughter; sibling to sibling. The ...

Training in Violence: An Essay in Military Hazing

How have the British and American armed forces been taught to fight and kill in conflicts from 1914 to the present? What role have psychology and technology played in military training? How do combatants contribute to, and endure, harsh military d...

Elementary Particles and Their Interactions

Matter consists of a mêlée of elementary particles. There are protons and neutrons, made up of quarks, and many other short-lived massive particles. All atoms consist of protons, neutrons and an accompanying cloud of electrons - then there are ele...

Shakespeare's Politics

It is well known that Shakespeare lived in an age of monarchy and wrote powerfully in his English history plays about the duties of the sovereign. In this lecture, Jonathan Bate will tell another, forgotten story: of how Shakespeare was al...

The 19th Century Craze for Stereoscopic Photography

Stereoscopic photography rapidly became a worldwide craze after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Cheap viewers and mass-produced stereographs brought startlingly vivid images within reach of a mass audience, making this the form in which most people ...

Asthma and Chronic Airways Disease

Asthma, an intermittent disease, is the commonest lung disease in the UK. The second is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), now the 4th leading cause of death globally. In both a combination of environmental and genetic factors are impor...

Justice Online: Getting Better?

In 2017, the Government paved the way for the civil and family courts of England and Wales to provide 'innovative methods of resolving disputes.' New legislation will underpin a £1bn investment in digitising the courts, that may see defendants con...

If Humans Are So Great, Why is the World Such a Mess?

Human beings often have generous views of themselves - not always easy to defend. Massive scientific advances are sometimes used for destructive purposes. This lecture looks at our changing understanding of ourselves, focussing on Charles ...

China: Art, War and Salvation, 1933-1949

After the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, many artists and intellectuals in China saw the overthrow of 'tradition' as the means to rescue the nation from poverty and backwardness. Rejecting what thev saw as irrelevant avant-garde ...

Euler's Equation: 'The Most Beautiful Theorem in Mathematics'

Euler's pioneering equation, the 'most beautiful equation in mathematics', links the five most important constants in the subject: 1, 0, π, e and i. Central to both mathematics and physics, it has also featured in a criminal court case, on a posta...

Does a Good Bedside Manner Matter?

There is an apparent conflict between the increase in technology in medicine and the importance of a relationship between patient and doctor. This Valentine's Day lecture considers the importance of that relationship.The transcript and dow...

Should We Vote Online?

Online voting in local and national elections could be more convenient, greatly increase voter turnout and deliver results within a few minutes of the polls closing. Some countries have adopted online voting and some have regarded it as extremely ...

Is a Mathematician a Robot?

Robotics is another of HM Government's 'eight great technologies'. Is it possible that in a few years we might have machines with artificial intelligence? In this lecture I will describe the mathematics of machine learning and explain its ...

National Parks and National Park Cities

National Parks were designated to protect some of the world's most loved landscapes from being eaten away by industrial and housing development. But Britain's National Parks are exploited by intensive agriculture and sucked dry of their water for ...

An Englishman (with a Guitar) Abroad

In 1643 an English landowner, Sir Ralph Verney, fled to France in the depths of the Civil War. He settled in Blois and, while there, amassed a vast archive that is still unpublished. The letters Verney kept, and his financial accounts, show that a...

How Energy Flow Shapes the Evolution of Life

Despite the explosion of genetic information in recent years, we have surprisingly little insight into the peculiar history of life on our planet. Most genetic variation - natural experiments in evolution - is found in simple bacteria, yet they ha...

Computer Bugs in Hospitals: A New Killer

Computer bugs, reported in heart pacemaker software and many other devices, are but one example of the risks that IT systems can create for patients. The extent of the problem of software bugs in the medical arena, and elsewhere, suggest an increa...

Votes for Women: A Centenary Celebration

The campaign to achieve the parliamentary vote for women (6 February 1918) took 52 years, from 1866 to 1918. During that time women and their male supporters employed both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary tactics, ranging from the presentatio...

Vulnerable Clients and The Family Justice System

Do the courts respect diversity or punish it when it comes to parenthood? What disabilities does it encounter? How can the learning disabled parent ensure their voice is heard in court? What to do when the wish to parent might not be matched by an...

The Fate of the October Revolution under Stalin

When Lenin died in 1924, he had effected a temporary stabilisation of the Soviet order. But many political, economic, social and international trends grew more worrisome to Bolsheviks who still wished to preserve 'the gains of October'. The soluti...

The High Energy Universe

View the sky through an x-ray telescope and the conception of the universe changes dramatically. Black holes are best seen in x-rays, because impinging gas collides with the black hole at near light speed, resulting in intense x-ray and gamma ray ...

The Labour Party

The Labour Party was formed in 1900 as a coalition between trade unions and socialist intellectuals with the aim of securing representation for the working class in parliament. During the First World War, Labour was transformed from a pressure gro...

The Housing Market

Housing represents the main asset class held by UK households and we shall try to understand why it is held as such a large share of assets. We shall then outline whether this choice has other knock on effects in the economy such as labour and soc...

Here Comes The Sun: Sunshine and its Effects on Health, Sleep and Memory

Professor Steve Jones will consider sunshine and its effects on health, on sleep, on memory and more: and why today's twilight world of tablets and smart-phones is taking us back to the middle ages.The transcript and downloadable versions ...

Shakespeare's Lovers

William Shakespeare made his name as a poet before he became famous as a playwright. His erotic poem Venus and Adonis was the most popular work of literature of the Elizabethan Age, while its dark companion piece The Rape of Lucrece set the mould ...

The Clockwork God: Isaac Newton and the Mechanical Universe

Isaac Newton saw his demonstration of the regularity of the universe as having great religious significance. Newton's ideas were initially seen as very supportive of religion; yet within 50 years, they were being seen in a very different light.

Ecotowns or Egotowns?

A sustainable solution to the UK's housing crisis, or a flimsy excuse for high-profile, profitable construction activity in the green belt? Architects may love them, but most ecologists are sceptical. Eco-town proposals have attracted controversy,...

The Age of Tyrants: Sappho via Gounod's Opera

The heroine of Charles Gounod's French opera Sapho (1851) sings her last aria O My Immortal Lyre on a Greek cliff before plunging to her death. Sappho, the most famous poet of the 'Lyric Age' of Greece, in the 7th to 6th centuries BC, addressed pa...

London Merchants and Their Residences

During the Middle Ages London was home to one of the largest and richest merchant communities in the world. These men and their families invested heavily in fine architecture both for business and pleasure. Simon Thurley, Visiting Professo...

The Guitar in the Age of Charles I

The courts of James I and his son Charles I were more cosmopolitan than their Elizabethan forebears. Many courtiers had now visited the Continent in early adulthood with a tutor, mostly after a period of residence at a university.The guita...

Can We Prevent Coronary Artery Disease: Investing in your Arteries

Professor Deanfield is currently Professor of Cardiology at The Heart Hospital, as well as at Great Ormond Street Hospital and is British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology at University College London. His main clinical interests are paedia...

Will Bitcoin and the Block Chain Change the Way we Live and Work?

The block chain is the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) that underlies the successful Bitcoin cybercurrency. What is it, how does it work, and why does a Government report say that DLTs have the potential to be radically disruptive to f...

Maths is Coded in Your Genes

We live in an information age, with vast amounts of data constantly sent around the world. This lecture will introduce you to the mathematics of information. I will explain how data is transmitted and received over vast distances by using carefull...

Happily Ever After: The Romance Story

This talk delves into one of the most powerful and omnipresent cultural storylines: Find your one true love and live happily ever after. How does this narrative function in popular culture and especially in the massive global market of women-orien...

The Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Party was formed in the 1850s and was the dominant force in British politics for the next 30 years. But, after the First World War, it fell into decline, and it was almost extinguished in the 1950s. Since then, however, the Liberals an...

House, Shop and Wardrobe in London's Merchant Community

During the Middle Ages, London was home to one of the largest and richest merchant communities in the world. These men and their families invested heavily in fine architecture both for business and pleasure. In the first of two lectures wi...

How Special Is Our Universe?

If the fundamental constants of nature differed from their measured values, life as we know it would not have emerged. Stars are witness to the forces of electromagnetism and gravity - displace this equilibrium and the existence of nuclear-burning...

NOW That's What I Call Carols: 1582!

Some of the world's most influential carol tunes were published in 1582. These Pious Songs' were collected by a student of Danish parentage, who was born in Finland, grew up in the Russian Federation, studied in Germany, worked in Sweden, and died...

What Do Judges Do In The Family Court?

What do judges do in the Family Court? Follow me through a virtual week as a Roving Judge. Learn what goes on behind the scenes: how the family court room works and who is needed to make it work.A judge's approach to a case can fundamental...

Half a Century of Heart Transplantation

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first human heart transplant. This talk will celebrate that achievement and consider what we have learned over those 50 years and what is to happen in the future.The transcript and downloadable v...

Shakespeare's Heroes

What do we mean by a hero and where does our understanding of the 'heroic' idiom come from? In this lecture, Jonathan Bate will show how Shakespeare's idea of the hero was shaped by the classical tradition, going back to the ancient tale o...

Homer's Iliad via the Movie Troy (2004)

Homer's Iliad, the earliest Greek poem, narrates the archetypal war between 'Europeans' and 'Asiatics' divided by the Hellespont. Looking at Wolfgang Peterson's blockbuster Troy (2004), the lecture describes the genesis of the Iliad between the My...

A Global History of Sexual Violence

In England and Wales today, 11 people are raped every hour. 85,000 women and 12,000 men are affected annually. Another half a million adults are sexually assaulted - not including large numbers of women, men, and children who never report being at...

Watching the Heavens: Astronomy and the Meaning of Life

What did the sky-watchers of the ancient world think about the night sky, and its implications for human existence? Moving on to the great discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, we will consider the basic science and ask about the deeper ...

China: New Nation, New Art, 1911-1932

As the imperial system collapsed in China, the 'New Culture Movement' focused debate on new categories of 'modernity' and 'tradition'. For artists, it posed the questions of what it meant to be both modern and Chinese - challenging them to show ho...

Diabetes: A Rising Tide

Diabetes is an increasingly common disease causing raised blood sugar with serious long-term consequences. Type 1 diabetes was almost always fatal until the discovery of insulin, and causes serious medical consequences. Type 2 diabetes, where the ...

Buying, Selling and Owning Guitars in Elizabethan England

What kind of people owned a guitar in the London of Elizabeth I and where did they go shopping for one? It is possible to assemble a remarkably full picture of the instrument's place in the social life and trade and trade of Tudor England.

Maths Goes Into Space

Space science is one of HM Government's 'eight great technologies'. In this lecture I will explain the mathematics behind satellites, showing how they are controlled, how they are sent to distant planets and how they transmit and receive data over...

Organic Food: Rooted in Lies?

Organic food production is environmentally benign, better for animal welfare, has human health benefits and tastes better - or so say its proponents. Conversely, detractors allege that the rising global population cannot be fed without using artif...

Mobilising Savings for Investment

We will carefully outline the categories of savings held by households and link that to the operation of financial intermediaries in providing loanable funds. We shall ask whether the allocation of savings and the availability of funds pro...

Lenin and the Russian Revolution

Why did Lenin's Bolsheviks take power in October 1917? The earlier (February) revolution and the hopes it raised, the complex realities of power, and the political and social history of Russia leading up to the coup will be explored, asking why li...

English Landscape: Samuel Palmer and the Pastoral

Samuel Palmer, in his Shoreham period in the 1820s and 30s, seized on the long tradition of classical pastoral landscapes, and wrested it into an English idiom. He effectively 'naturalised' a foreign import, bringing an idyll to life in a Kentish ...

The 2016 US President Election - One Year On

One year ago, Donald Trump won the American presidency - the first president in modern times to be elected without any previous political experience. Few predicted his election. Indeed, he entered the Republican primaries as a rank outsider. How i...

Martin Luther and his Crusade Against the Pope

When Luther was close to death he reportedly exclaimed: 'Living I was your plague O Pope, Dead I will be your Death.' This lecture marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther nailing his famous 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedra...

English Landscape: Constable and Clare

Constable's Stour landscapes of the Regency period, during and just after the War with France, and his publication English Landscape Scenery, champion local and low-key rural England. John Clare's vernacular poetry in the same period celeb...

Jane Austen: Patriotism and Prejudice

Professor Todd will be discussing patriotism in Austen's time and her particular attitude to it; her sense of what Englishness is, materially and politically, and how it manifests itself in daily life; what aspects should be a source of both pride...

Defence and Security in an Unstable World

The 2017 Peter Nailor Memorial Defence Lecture, to be presented by General Sir Nick Parker and followed by a response from Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield.Sir Nick will consider the evolving challenges facing defence and security in a fast-mov...

Pi and e and the the most beautiful theorem in mathematics

GRESHAM COLLEGE WITH THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICSThis year's event will focus on the beauty of Mathematical Relationships. The main speaker, Professor Robin Wilson will discuss Pi and e, and the most beautiful theorem...

Just Imagine! The Tale of i

GRESHAM COLLEGE WITH THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICSThis year's event will focus on the beauty of Mathematical Relationships. The main speaker, Professor Robin Wilson will discuss Pi and e, and the most beautiful theorem...

Zero is a Hero

GRESHAM COLLEGE WITH THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICSThis year's event will focus on the beauty of Mathematical Relationships. The main speaker, Professor Robin Wilson will discuss Pi and e, and the most beautiful theorem...

English Landscape: The Picturesque

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth- century vogue for the Picturesque and for forging an English landscaping tradition (with frameable landscape scenery and managed wildness) will be the starting point for discussion. Proponents of t...

Is Society Ready For Driverless Cars?

Driverless cars will affect us all profoundly. They will save many lives, destroy many livelihoods and change our behaviour in unexpected ways. What are the barriers to achieving the benefits of this new technology and how can they be over...

Justice For All

During his tenure as Gresham Professor of Law (2012-2016), Geoffrey Nice tackled subjects as diverse as genocide, the law's role in sexual conduct, and whether lawyers really are scoundrels. To mark the publication of these lectures, Sir G...

What is Value in Healthcare?

Value is the importance, worth or usefulness of something. In healthcare, it has been argued that the only value that matters is that to the patient. This lecture considers this hypothesis and the relationship between clinical outcome and ...

Are We Alone In The Universe?

The question of whether we are alone in the Milky Way (or in the universe) is one of the most intriguing questions in science and astronomy. Our solar system formed half way through the history of the universe, and many sun-like stars that host pl...

Shakespeare's London and Ancient Rome

William Shakespeare spent his schooldays learning Latin. When he arrived in London and became an actor and playwright, he discovered a city and a culture that modelled itself on ancient Rome. Jonathan Bate tells the story of how and why Sh...

How Maths Can Save Your Life

Many of us have been in a medical scanner and benefited from its use in medical diagnostics. But how many of us have considered how it works? The maths behind modern medical imaging (showing how CAT, MRI and Ultrasound scanners work) will be expla...

The History of Pain

Pain is often seen as universal and timeless, but how have people's understandings of pain changed over time? Did the invention of more effective analgesics and anaesthetics really revolutionise medical practices and human relationships to sufferi...

The Guitar in Tudor London

Few people now remember that the guitar was popular in England during the age of Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare, and yet it was played everywhere from the royal court to the common tavern. In 1559 Queen Elizabeth herself received a case o...

Roman London's First Voices

Excavations have recently uncovered much evidence of Roman London, including fragments of 405 waxed stylus writing-tablets that can be dated to AD 50-90. Roger Tomlin explains how her deciphered the tablets and what can be learned from the...

Women Lawyers: Equals at the Bar?

The times they are a-changing - or are they? Do female lawyers need to be Superwoman to survive? Is motherhood welcomed, tolerated or rejected at the Bar? What makes for a successful advocate? Is gender relevant? What about career progression? Are...

Are Science and Faith at War?

Science and religious faith are two of the most important elements of western culture. Yet the authority of both is under threat in our pragmatic culture, which emphasises relevance over truth. So what is their relationship? Are they perma...

Cleaning Up The Thames: Success or Failure?

The Thames is often hailed as an international success story. Engineering works solved 19th century sewage problems, improving Londoners' health. Salmon, otters and birdlife are now reported to be flourishing along the Thames and the waterfront ha...

Discovering the Port of Roman London

Roman London was founded on the banks of the Thames to take advantage of the tidal river for traffic trade and communications. But precisely where were the bridge and the harbour, and what did they look like?The remains of Roman vessels ha...

The Conservative Party

The Conservative Party is the oldest and one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world. It has been, for many years, the natural party of government.During the 20th century it was in government, alone or in coalition...

Multimedia 1900: Experience and Entertainment in Everyday Life

We know a great deal about media gadgetry in retrospect, but much less about how it was perceived and experienced by early users. Historians at the end of the 19th century have traditionally paid little attention to 'new media' experiences, even t...

The Productivity Puzzle

Productivity growth in the UK economy has lagged behind that of our major trading partners. With little or no growth in labour or total factor productivity, there can be no solution to our economic problems and a return to what we have come to con...

How Were The Stars Formed?

The Milky Way galaxy was once ablaze with bright young stars. Today, star formation has calmed down, but we glimpse intense pockets of gas that are forming massive stars, testifying to the brilliant past. Stars form in clouds of interstellar gas t...

From Royal Highway to Common Sewer: The River Thames and its Architecture

The Thames is the reason that London is where it is and the river has had a decisive influence on the growth of the city since Roman Times. For 500 years it was the only reliable way to move about but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cha...

The Gray's Inn Reading - The Great Divorce: Brexit and the Law

Helena Ann Kennedy, Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws, QC, is a British barrister, broadcaster, and Labour member of the House of Lords. She will be speaking on legal issues of topical interest.The transcript and downloadable versions of the l...

Britain and the EU: In or Out - One Year On

One year ago, Britain decided, in the Referendum, upon its future relationship with the European Union. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/britain-and-the-eu-in-or-out-one-year-onWhat have been the consequences of that decision?...

A World Without News?

THE GRESHAM SPECIAL LECTURE 2017An economic model for news that has existed for 200 years or more is disappearing. Are we facing the prospect of societies without 'news' as previously understood? And why does it matter?Alan Rusbrid...

Migration: A Historical Perspective

Migration from the Middle East and North Africa to Europe has reached mass proportions in the last few years. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/migration-a-historical-perspectiveThis is only the most recent development in a lon...

The Right Stuff: How Do We Make 'Good' Doctors?

In this talk, the concept of the 'good' doctor will be explored and how we can ensure that our doctors are 'good'. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-right-stuff-how-do-we-make-good-doctorsThis question is crucial at time wh...

Artificial Intelligence

Alan Turing famously proposed a test of artificial intelligence. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/artificial-intelligenceWhat has been achieved? Professor Stephen Hawking has said that real artificial intelligence will mean th...

Fifty Years of Conservation Areas

Are the streets now paved with gold? The first Conservation Areas were designated in 1967, today at the golden anniversary there are some 10,000 sites. The presentation will explore the origins, variety and some challenges for the future. The wide...

Escher and Coxeter - a Mathematical Conversation

The artist M.C. Escher's work often used ingenious tilings of the plane with interlocking figures such as fish and birds. Although these tilings could in principle extend forever, Escher could not show this on a finite picture. But a diagram from ...

The Policy Responses

We need to think of economic policy as some path co-ordinating monetary, financial and fiscal policy. The economic landscape that has been outlined implies some new cyclical and structural economic policy options facing the UK. These concepts will...

From Mr Pickwick to Tiny Tim - Charles Dickens and Medicine

Charles Dickens's expert eye for detail enabled him to describe many medical conditions in his writings. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/from-mr-pickwick-to-tiny-tim-charles-dickens-and-medicineHe supported hospitals, childre...

Gene Therapy - The Future has Arrived!

Using DNA and gene-based therapy to treat human diseases may sound like science-fiction, but there are already several gene therapies in use today, for diseases such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis. This lecture will describe what gene t...

Nice Work If You Can Get It: Life as a Children's Heart Surgeon

My job has been one of duty and privilege, working worldwide with wonderful colleagues. Few people are lucky enough to save lives or change them for the better. Few also experience the horror of losing lives or worsening them. In this lecture I wa...

Mathematics Can Make You Fly?

JOINT LONDON MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY/ GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTUREhttps://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/mathematics-can-make-you-flyWell, not quite. But it can make you seem to be flying, virtually. Some of the mathematical ...

The Right Stuff: Information, Privacy and the Ethics of Disclosure

Personal information is understood as the property of individuals, especially in the domain of health care and no information can be disclosed without permission of its 'owner'. This way of thinking about information raises questions about the eth...

Queen Elizabeth II

The reign of Elizabeth II has been the longest in British history. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/queen-elizabeth-iiIt has coincided with the transformation of the mystical monarchy into a welfare monarchy, and the developme...

'All Must Have Prizes': Citizen Science and the Environment

Prior to the twentieth century, most environmental observations such as rainfall amounts and air temperatures were made by lay observers with interest and time on their hands. Later on, such measurements moved largely into the realms of profession...

What is Noise? Beauty and Taste in 20th Century Music

Since the premiere of John Cage's infamous 'silent' work 4'33", scholars have been fascinated by the question of what noise is, how it differs from music, and whether it can ever be beautiful. Drawing on ideas from musicology and philosophy, this ...

Is Matter Evil?

One of the great theological debates in the early church arose from Gnosticism. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/is-matter-evilIt was movement in late antiquity which held that the material world was evil. Salvation was unders...

'Two Point One Children': Why There is no Typical Family in the Family Court

This lecture will explore vulnerable parties and children in the Family Court. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/two-point-one-children-why-there-is-no-typical-family-in-the-family-courtThe common denominator is frequently one ...

Singers in the Making of Europe

By the twelfth century the West could be imagined as a soundscape of Latin plainsong and be given a name: Latinitas. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/singers-in-the-making-of-europe The Gregorian chants for the Mass figured p...

Making Software 'Correct by Construction'

Is it possible to build software so that you know that it is correct? How could this be done? Has anyone tried? What would it cost?This lecture discusses the Tokeneer experiment conducted by the US National Security Agency, and casts some ...

The External Financing Position

For most of the period since we have had records, the UK has held a positive net international investment positions versus the rest of the world. But the UK is now a net debtor versus the rest of the world. We shall examine the reasons for this ex...

The Gospel of Apartheid

South Africa's Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) and the Afrikaner people it served had, since the 17th century drawn a distinction between white 'Christians' and the apparently unconvertible 'heathen' peoples around them. The Afrikaners' identity as a ...

The Eradication of Infectious Diseases

Eradicating an infectious disease for all time is one of the greatest gifts a generation can give to all subsequent ones. To date only one human disease, smallpox, has been eradicated, with two more (polio and Guinea worm) being tantalisingly clos...

King George VI

George VI was the unexpected king. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/king-george-vi As the second son of George V, he had no reason to believe, until less than a month before his accession, that he would succeed to the throne. ...

Energetic Mathematics

The annual consumption of electricity in the UK is 300 TWh https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/energetic-mathematicsIt is supplied over a complex network starting, usually, with power being generated at a power station. This is then ...

Expert Witnesses: A Zero-Sum Game?

The use of experts in the family courts can make a significant difference to outcomes. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/expert-witness-a-zero-sum-game The debate about the use of experts in court cases reflects the conflicted...

The Poetry of Robert Frost, The Power and Intrigue of Simile

Frost's line, 'I found a dimpled spider... holding up a moth like a white piece of rigid satin cloth' exploits simile. But how can a moth be like cloth? What does likening one material, the fragile, semi-transparent wing of a moth, to a woven fabr...

The Environmental Challenges of MegaCities

Faced with escalating population pressure and new construction technologies, western architects are designing cities in the skies, and under the sea. If built, these will sit alongside older metropolitan areas such as London, Tokyo and Shanghai, w...

Observing the Dark Ages

Long before there were stars, there was the stuff that stars are made of. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/observing-the-dark-agesThis era of the universe is called the dark ages, when the universe was transparent before the g...

What Really Happened in Y2K?

As the year 2000, 'Y2K' - approached, many feared that computer programs storing year values as two-digit figures (such as 99) would cause problems. There is a widespread belief that the millennium bug was a myth, invented by rapacious consultants...

Is Humanity Naturally Good?

One interesting area of debate concerns human identity and whether we can give a purely scientific account of human nature in terms of its physical, chemical and biological components. Or do we need additional perspectives to deal with the complex...

What will happen when Artificial Intelligence and the Internet meet the Professions?

Two futures are outlined for the professions. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/what-will-happen-when-artificial-intelligence-and-the-internet-meet-the-professionsBoth rest on technology. One is reassuringly familiar. It is a m...

Suspect Communities in Anglo-American Law

In the UK and USA, counter-terrorism efforts have had disparate impacts on racial, ethnic or religious minorities, with members of these allegedly 'suspect communities' subjected to various adverse government actions (eg surveillance and detention...

The Rise and Fall of Sourdough: 6000 Years of Bread

The lecture will cover the history of the western world as seen through the food that nourished builders for the Great Pyramids, free men of the Roman Empire, the expansion of Christianity, and the development of Europe until modern science and te...

Bach's 'Orgelbüchlein' (Little Organ Book)

Bach's title page to the Orgelbüchlein reads: "Little organ book in which guidance is given to an inquiring organist in how to accomplish a chorale [prelude] in all kinds of ways, and at the same time to become practised in the study of pedalling....

Xtreme Everest: Taking Medicine from Mountainside to Bedside

In 2007, a team of doctors and scientists ascended to the roof of the world to understand more about how we adapt to high altitude - and why some of us adapt better than others. The Caudwell Xtreme Everest expedition was central to a fifteen year ...

Debt and the Household Balance Sheet

The period since the start of the financial crisis has been dominated by talk of the "balance sheets" of households, the banking system or the government. We shall concentrate on the evolution of the asset and liability position of the UK's househ...

I Won't Have Blood! A Battle Between Belief and Duty?

Most open-heart surgery in children requires the use of donor blood. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/i-wont-have-blood-a-battle-between-belief-and-dutyJehovah's Witnesses believe, on the basis of biblical texts, that blood sh...

King Edward VIII

Edward VIII reigned for just 325 days. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/king-edward-viiiThe history of his reign is in large part the history of the abdication. However, as Prince of Wales, Edward had been the first heir to th...

Mathematical Materials

We all rely on materials: natural ones like wood and stone - or manufactured ones such as steel, glass and concrete. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/mathematical-materialsWith modern technology, we can now design and manufact...

The Art of Astrophotography

The richly illustrated talk will show one can start making beautiful images of the night sky https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-art-of-astrophotographyArmed with just a digital camera and a tripod allied to the use of free s...

Two Kingdoms in the Third Reich

Nazism was not a Christian movement in any meaningful sense https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/two-kingdoms-in-the-third-reichGerman Protestants of the 1920s and 1930s shared many Nazi assumptions and voted disproportionately fo...

The Value of Heritage and the Heritage of Value

There was a time when old places were valued simply for their beauty and interest. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-value-of-heritage-and-the-heritage-of-valueSince the 1980s, for many, this is not enough. There is now a w...

The February Revolution in Russia

To mark the anniversary of the Russian Revolution. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-february-revolution-in-russia The dilemmas of modern empire and monarchy will be discussed, firstly in general terms and then specifically...

Guilty until Proven Innocent

The issue of Shaken Baby or Natural Cause will be examined. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/guilty-until-proven-innocent A case study involving a bereaved parent, the transformation of a family home into a crime scene, with t...

The Accelerating Universe

The universe was static, that was the credo of all scientists and philosophers until three decades into the twentieth century, when the expansion was discovered. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-accelerating-universeThree ...

Living Without Electricity

Storm Desmond brought unprecedented floods to Lancaster in December 2015 https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/living-without-electricity Electricity supplies were cut off and not fully restored for six days. The disruption reveale...

"Numberless Diverse Acts of Courage and Belief": The Struggle Against Slavery in History and in the Present

This lecture on slavery will present an overview of the challenges and an outline of what is needed to prevail, by one of the world's leading activists and thinkers on the subject, Dr Aidan McQuade, Director of Anti-Slavery International, the worl...

Justice Online: Just as Good?

Early in 2016, the criminal and civil courts of England and Wales embarked on a modernisation programme aimed at reforming procedures that have survived for centuries. The judges themselves are helping to design the computerised courts of the futu...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and Poetic Technique

In the line, 'The Western wave was all aflame', the 'Western wave' refers to the sea. But is it this simple? What do forms of substitution, synecdoche (a figure of speech in which the name of a part is used to stand for the whole) for example, len...

Respecting and Transcending Nature

One of the most distinctive characteristics of human beings is their capacity to alter their environments through technology. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/respecting-and-transcending-natureThis raises important ethical and...

The Christian Singer: Charlemagne and Beyond

In the year 754 the first pope ever to cross the Alps came to a small chapel in what is now northern France and prostrated himself before the king of the Franks, beseeching him for military aid. The pope came with singers from the Roman song schoo...

From Test-Tube to YouTube

This lecture explains how my participation in making some videos for the University of Nottingham's 'test-tube' YouTube channel led to collaboration with the video-journalist Brady Haran, and the creation of the YouTube channel, The Periodic Table...

Affairs of the Heart: An Exploration of the Symbolism of the Heart in Art

A celebration of the heart for St Valentine's Day. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/affairs-of-the-heart-an-exploration-of-the-symbolism-of-the-heart-in-art How is it that a simple pump has become a symbol of the highest human...

How Much Maths Can You Eat?

We all eat and have an interest in food! https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/how-much-maths-can-you-eatIndeed food and beverage processing is the world's largest manufacturing industry with a UN Forecast that the world food outpu...

Apprenticeship: Politics, Education, or Reality Television?

International competition drives schools and universities around the world as never before, and an increasingly complex world places more demands for evidence of qualifications and standards. Clashes with constraints of state funding created enorm...

Under the Sea: What's Happening in Our Oceans?

Oceans have been the least well-known major component of the Earth's environment. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/under-the-sea-whats-happening-in-our-oceansWhilst deep ocean exploration has enabled great advances in understa...

The Right Stuff: How Do We Make Moral Choices?

In this lecture, I will present and review developments in moral psychology over the last two decades. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-right-stuff-how-do-we-make-moral-choicesSpecifically, I will explore the neuroscience ...

The Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance

Cyberspace must not be an unpoliced area of society - it is much too important for that. But the courts have ruled that mass surveillance of citizens by their Government is disproportionate and unacceptable in a democracy. After Edward Snowden rev...

The History of Local Anaesthesia

Most equate 'anaesthesia' with general anaesthesia. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-history-of-local-anaesthesia This is likely because the introduction of general anaesthesia (1847) pre-dated that of local anaesthesia (1...

Macroeconomics, Capitalism and Inequality

Rapid economic growth in the emerging worlds has taken many families out of poverty but has placed downward pressure of manufacturing wages in the advanced world. Along with increasingly lower real interest rates that have placed upwards pressure ...

Perfection or Pastiche? New Buildings in Old Places

The blight of the concrete municipal buildings of the 1960s and 70s in the historic centres of our cathedral cities is all too familiar. Everyone wants to avoid the same mistakes being made again, but there is a fissure between those who wish to b...

Should We Trust a Theory?

Can a scientific theory ever be confirmed? https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/should-we-trust-a-theoryMust a scientific theory be falsifiable? These are deep questions that have fascinated philosophers from David Hume to Karl P...

Cheats, Liars and Fornicators: The Hidden Face of Mother Nature

Many creatures manipulate their fellows, their partners, their enemies and even their friends in an attempt to gain advantage for themselves. Professor Steve Jones (Department of Genetics, Evolution & Environment at University College London) will...

When Legal Worlds Collide

This lecture will explore and explain the difference in outcomes between cases in Crime and Care, considering the framework of 'Beyond reasonable doubt' versus 'the balance of probabilities' and the concept of the judge's role to determine the law...

America's Advents

The United States in the early nineteenth century was one of Christian history's great moments of sectarian creativity. The religious entrepreneurs of a newly democratic society rebelled against the proliferation of denominations by creating new m...

Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Use of Personification

'When well-appareled April on the heel/ Of limping winter treads'. A calendar month cannot dress, nor can a season walk.This lecture will explore the magic of personification in Shakespeare's poetry.The transcript and downloadable ...

Is Reality Limited to what Science can Uncover?

Is science complete in itself, or does it act as a pointer or signpost to matters beyond its boundaries? This discussion is often framed in terms of 'natural theology', understood as a way of interpreting nature as bearing witness to the existence...

Roman Singing and its Influence Across Europe

Amidst the increasingly material penury of the early medieval world, Rome and Byzantium (that is to say New Rome, now Istanbul) offered a continuing example of opulence and luxury that was expressed in worship with expensive textiles, precious met...

Sudden Death in the Young: A Terrible Waste

Sudden death in the young is more common than you think. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/sudden-death-in-the-young-a-terrible-waste It is, as my own family knows only too well, an appalling injustice in terms of lost life and...

The Mathematical Skyline

The study of perspective in art has led to a branch of mathematics called projective geometry, which addresses the relationship between landscapes viewed from different locations. One of the key features of the subject is the concept of 'point at ...

King George V

It was during the reign of George V that constitutional monarchy reached its maturity. It came to be taken for granted that the powers of the sovereign would be used in a genuinely impartial way. This proved of particular importance with the adven...

Did Sir Walter Scott Invent Scotland?

FULBRIGHT LECTUREWalter Scott's phenomenally popular novels and poems created an image of Scotland as a land of sublime scenery and heroic chivalry. Why is it Scott's version rather than any of the many other nineteenth-century literary re...

Something in the Air: The Insidious Challenge of Air Pollution

Smoke from burning forests, and photochemical smog in Beijing and Delhi are visible from space. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/something-in-the-air-the-insidious-challenge-of-air-pollutionMost of the air pollution in cities ...

Safety-Critical Systems

Professor Martyn Thomas CBE provides an in-depth analysis on the concerns surrounding today's safety-critical systems https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/safety-critical-systemsSoftware is an essential part of many safety-critica...

Mathematics Goes To The Movies

Professor Chris Budd OBE offers an insight into the world of Hollywood through the eyes of a mathematician. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/mathematics-goes-to-the-moviesAn enormous amount of our leisure time is spent interac...

Medieval Carols

From the first Christmas song by a 12th-century Northumbrian hermit, through the earliest surviving Christmas carol of the mid-14th-century, to the heyday of the carol in 15th-century England, Jeremy Summerly traces the early history of the world'...

Schooling Singers in the Cathedrals

A singer in a church of 450-650 was generally appointed in the same way as a gravedigger - too lowly to demand the bishop's attention. While the task of selecting a reader required the bishop to hear reports of the candidate's reputation for hones...

Tough Choices: Heritage or Housing?

The one built environment issue on which there is political consensus is an urgent need to build more houses. For many, especially in historic towns and villages, this has raised huge opposition. The housebuilders are branded vandals; their oppone...

The First Three Minutes of Creation

The essence of life as we know it was produced in the first three minutes after the beginning of the universe. By this, I mean the stuff that we and the Earth are made of, particles of matter that we call baryons. But well before the baryons were ...

The Founder of the Feast? Dickens and Christmas

Dickens is often credited with virtually inventing Christmas as we now know it and is in any case strongly identified with this festival. This is primarily owing to the immense and enduring popularity of his first 'Christmas Book', A Christmas Car...

The Curious Case of the Decapitated Frog

FULBRIGHT LECTUREIn 1853, the German Physiologist Eduard Pflüger published the first in a series of startling experiments on living, decapitated frogs. He elicited behaviours in these compromised animals that seemed more than just reflexiv...

Shakespeare's Astronomy

Amongst all his astronomical allusions, Shakespeare demonstrates a deep knowledge of the night sky and its movements. Although he gives the conventional view of his age that astronomical events offer portents for human affairs, his characters som...

Does Faith Make Sense of Things?

One of the most common themes underlying both the natural sciences and Christian theology is that the world is ordered or structured, and that this order can be discerned by an inquiring mind and represented theoretically. Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-...

Is One Individual's Radicalism Another's Right to Free Speech?

When should intervention take place to safeguard a child? Areas where harm may arise include children at risk of being radicalised; parents promoting terrorism; or planning or being groomed to travel to Syria (with or without their parents). But r...

Employment and Unemployment

In the commerce second lecture, trends in the labour market will be considered, examining patterns of unemployment, employment, hours worked and real wages. Do high participation rates in the labour market reflect and/or represent economic progres...

Seeing Through the Lies: Innovation and the Need for Transparency

Doctors' careers can be sometimes built on publication rates and citation indices. Medical journals preferentially publish positive results, which also benefits industry. It is not surprising that scientific fraud occurs. When discovered, reputati...

Thomas More's Magnificent Utopia

Thomas More's Utopia was first published 500 years ago. Its central idea, of a perfect but impossible place, has since become part of our mental furniture. But what does this very amusing (though also rather stern) book mean? It has sometimes been...

In the Context of the Common Law: The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg

The European Court of Human Rights has been at the crossroads of two legal civilizations: the Continental Civil Law on the one hand and the British Common Law on the other. The common-law construction with its analogical reasoning is based on the ...

The Prevention of Cancer

There is wide variation in how easy cancers are to prevent but greater understanding of modifiable risk factors will lead to many cancers becoming substantially less common in the future. Some, such as cervical or lung cancers are already complete...

Charles Dickens, 'Hard Times' and Hyperbole

Dickens' use of exaggeration is key to his style. But its use has myriad effects from making a character's disposition unmissable, to adding whimsy and humour.The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the G...

The Challenge of Big Data

Information plays a huge role in the modern world, with vast amounts of data literally at our finger tips. The Internet is leading to an ever-increasing amount of data, leading to the 'challenge of Big Data', in which we have to deal with huge amo...

Hotting up: Meeting the Challenges of Climate Change in the Twenty-first Century

Human-induced climate change has been identified by scientists and politicians as the greatest threat encountered by humanity. Deserts, oceans, forests, icecaps, shorelines and reefs all seem threatened, with catastrophic consequences for human li...

The Republic of King Jesus

The English Civil Wars of 1642-8 began as the last of Europe's wars of religion and ended as the first modern revolution. Parliamentarians had been fighting for the chance to finish England's Reformation, but the experience of war convinced some ...

Leonardo, Rapunzel and the Mathematics of Hair

From Leonardo da Vinci to the Brothers Grimm our fascination with hair has endured in art and science. We love it for its "body" or "volume", the fluffiness and elasticity that comes from its random waves and curls. But apart from a purely tactile...

King Edward VII

Edward VII had an instinctive understanding of the human side of monarchy. Both at home and abroad, he sought to conciliate, and was known as Edward the Peacemaker. He helped to create the good feeling with France which prepared the way for the En...

Towards a Ministry of Singing

At some time in the fourth century some bishops assembled for a synod in a city whose site is now in Turkey. Today, the place where they met retains little of the grandeur that made it an appropriate choice for such a gathering; there are only bro...

Saving the Twentieth Century

For some, twentieth-century buildings are not heritage, but for an increasing number, they are the most threatened buildings in Britain. Post war modernism is now at the centre of the hardest fought and most controversial conservation debates. Whi...

A Little Light Relief

A lecture by Professor David Phillips from Imperial College London http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/a-little-light-reliefLight, particularly sunlight, has always occupied a mystical power and is commonly held to bestow good hea...

The Port of London and its Future

With London already Europe's biggest metropolitan consumer market and continuing to grow, and the move to ever larger container ships in the Port, what is the future for the River Thames? Will it continue to be an industrial hub, a centre of popul...

Leibniz (1646-1716) and the Curve of Quickest Descent

The main speaker, Professor Jan van Maanen will discuss Leibniz (1646-1716) and the Curve of Quickest DescentThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/...

Fractal Curves: From the Esoteric to the Ubiquitous

Professor Kenneth Falconer delievers his lecture on 'Fractal Curves: From the Esoteric to the Ubiquitous' http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/curves-in-honour-of-leibnizs-tercentenaryThe transcript and downloadable versions of the...

Archimedes and the Mathematics of Spirals

Dr Lawrence takes up the theme of spirals and the work of Archimedes http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/curves-in-honour-of-leibnizs-tercentenaryThe transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresh...

The Treatment of Cancer

The treatment for people with many cancers has been transformed in the last two decades, and further major improvements are expected to occur over the next twenty years. Improved surgery and radiotherapy have been joined by less toxic chemotherapy...

The Expanding Universe

Professor Joseph Silk FRS embarks on an illustrious journey through the universe to explain the paradigm shift in today's scientific view on the physical expansion of space http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-expanding-universe

Van Eyck's The Virgin with the Canon: Visual Disability and Societal Attitudes as Depicted in the Northern Renaissance

Examples of disease as shown in artworks will be examined, from the medical and surgical point of view as well as the historical and artistic ones, particularly visual loss as portrayed by artists from pre-historic times. The special mystery in th...

From Sail to Steam: London's Role in a Shipbuilding Revolution

London at one time was the largest port and industrial city in the world. Bermondsey, Deptford, Blackwall and Greenwich were all major centres for shipbuilding. This lecture will look at the industrial river and consider the changing needs of ship...

The Beauty and the Horror: Searching for God in a Suffering World

In dialogue with Professor Alister McGrath, Lord Harries (Emeritus Gresham Professor of Divinity) will discuss his new book. Life is at once so wonderful and so appalling. We glimpse something of God in the beauty of the world, but then this seems...

Are you the Customer or the Product?

It has been said that if you are not paying for a service, then you are the product, not the customer. To what extent is this true for free software, social networking, and other free IT services and products? If we are the product, are we selling...

The Growth of London as a Port from Roman to Medieval Times

There were dramatic changes in the Roman, Saxon and medieval ports of London, which directly reflected the equally dramatic changes taking place in contemporary society, economy and culture. How might the study of the first 1,500 years of port hi...

Scratching the Surface? Looking from Space at Human Impact on Earth

Recent developments in space technology have allowed us to view the Earth in new ways, and to identify our impact on land, atmosphere, oceans and freshwater in astonishing detail. Our planet's fragility as a life support system is being revealed t...

The Rhythm of Life: The Beat and Dance of the Heart

The heart beats continuously to sustain life. Its basic rhythm is well known, and has been used as a soundtrack to evoke romance, tension and horror. In this lecture, Professor Elliott will describe how the rhythm is generated. With the help of a...

Jane Austen, 'Persuasion': Irony and the Mysterious Vagaries of Narrative

Narrative, the way a tale is told, is less straightforward than we might suppose. Austen handles irony brilliantly and systematically exploited new ways of narrating, including free indirect discourse.This lecture explores why Austen's way...

What have Mathematicians Done for Us?

Mathematics has played a vital role in the development of human civilisation, and is the foundation of much of modern technology and popular culture. However, the achievements of mathematics and mathematicians are often unknown or misunderstood. T...

The Early River Thames: The Iron Age and Before

The lecture will examine the changing shape of the Thames Valley (the London end in particular), evidence of population movement and urban growth and the appearance of agricultural and industrial activity from the earliest times to the arrival of ...

'Sex, Death and Witchcraft' - What Goes On In The Family Court Room?

Professor Jo Delahunty QC offers an inside perspective of the family justice system and discusses some of the issues family courtrooms deal with http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/sex-death-and-witchcraft-what-goes-on-in-the-family-court...

The Music of the First Christians

Professor Christopher Page looks at the early Christians singing and illustrates it with performances by the world-renowned tenor Christopher Watson http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-music-of-the-first-christiansEarly in the sec...

Ten Cities that Built an Empire: Understanding British Imperialism Through the Urban Past

Discussion of Britain's imperial past is increasingly bifurcated along populist 'good' and 'bad' narratives. An account of the UK's colonial legacy through the prism of urban history allows for a more nuanced and reflexive critique of Empire. The...

Does Science Rob Nature of its Mystery and Beauty?

Professor Alister McGrath explores how the natural sciences and Christian theology might offer an enriched or deepened vision of reality, which transcends the limits placed on each http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/does-science-rob-natu...

Recession and Recovery

In this first lecture, economic performance will be considered in terms of income and productivity growth, prior to and following the recession. We shall examine the so-called "productivity puzzle" and explore the possible explanations and solutio...

Black Holes

Supermassive black holes lurk in the very centres of galaxies. The Milky Way has a central black hole of four million solar masses. Today it is quiescent. But we have reason to believe that millions of years ago it was active....

Ten Things You Really Should Know About Ancient Greek Democracy

Professor Paul Cartledge explores the democracy in ancient Greece and the origins of the word, and how that distinguishes from today's notion of democracy http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/ten-things-you-really-should-know-about-ancient...

Proving Einstein Right

A gentle introduction to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity will discuss the curvature of space that gives rise to 'Gravity' and Gravitational Lenses. Experiments since 1915 have been undertaken to test its accuracy with recent observations b...

To Die or Not to Die: That is the Question

When Hamlet posed the like question as he contemplated suicide, he faced the voyage to 'the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns'. Similar dread was faced by judges when considering the possibility of a death sentence, due to...

'The Cradle of Stonehenge'? Blick Mead - a Mesolithic Site in the Stonehenge Landscape

The discovery of a spring and a Mesolithic land surface at Blick Mead about 2 km from Stonehenge, that has well preserved and substantial Mesolithic deposits, potentially transforms our understanding of the Mesolithic use of the pre-Stonehenge lan...

Queen Victoria

Queen Victoria was the first constitutional monarch. During her reign the power of the monarchy declined but its influence grew. When Victoria came to the throne, the monarchy was probably less popular than at any time since the seventeenth centur...

The Zika Virus, Dengue and the Yellow Fever Mosquito

The Zika virus originated in Africa and causes a febrile illness but was little known until it spread within Brazil in 2014. It is now found from Mexico to Paraguay as well as in other parts of the world and has been linked to serious birth defect...

Bug World: Sex, Violence and a Cast of Billions

Insects are the most abundant and enduring multi-cellular life form ever to have evolved. They are fast breeding, highly evolvable and, thanks to their body-plan, are future-proofed like no other animal. There are 40 tonnes of insects for every hu...

What is the Value of Finance and Insurance to the Economy?

A debate on the theme: "What is the value of finance and insurance to the economy and are the right regulatory frameworks in place to underpin this value?" with a follow up discussion session. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/conference/what-is-the-value-...

What is the Value of Finance and Insurance to the Economy?

A debate on the theme: "What is the value of finance and insurance to the economy and are the right regulatory frameworks in place to underpin this value?" with a follow up discussion session. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/conference/what-is-the-value-...

What is the Value of Finance and Insurance to the Economy?

A debate on the theme: "What is the value of finance and insurance to the economy and are the right regulatory frameworks in place to underpin this value?" with a follow up discussion session. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/conference/what-is-the-value-...

London Fog and the Impressionists

A detailed account of London Fog and its various artistic representations by Dr Christine Corton http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/london-fog-and-the-impressionistsThe lecture will explore different artistic representations of L...

Judicial Leadership

The Rt Hon Sir Peter Gross explores the aspects of and changes in judicial leadership in the 2016 annual Gray's Inn Reading http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/judicial-leadership History portrays judges as passive umpires, ensuri...

Canaletto's London Legacy

This lecture will explore the extent to which Canaletto built upon the existing visual landscape of London and how much he adapted and innovated works by artists like Samuel Scott to produce stunning aspects of London.The transcript and do...

Conspiracy Theories: A Threat to Democracy?

In this talk Professor Sir Richard Evans FBA looks at recent and current conspiracy theories research to come up with some surprising answers http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/conspiracy-theories-a-threat-to-democracyConspiracy ...

Changing Minds and Changing Risk

Professor Gwen Adshead looks at the risks factors and the common types of violence, within the context of treatment and therapy issues http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/changing-minds-and-changing-risk In this talk, I explore th...

Big Data: The Broken Promise of Anonymisation

Professor Martyn Thomas CBE explores some of the triumphs and pitfalls of Big Data http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/big-data-the-broken-promise-of-anonymisation It is often claimed that your personal data is safe because it has...

Rubens and London

In 1635, King Charles I asked his friend, Peter Paul Rubens to adorn the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace with a vast mural cycle glorifying the Stuart dynasty.The lecture will discuss the importance and impact of Rubens on English cul...

Universities: Some Policy Dilemmas

The Gresham Special Lecture 2016What kind of system of higher education do we need? How should it relate to secondary schools and other forms of post school education and training? How shall we pay for it? What kind of international role s...

The Criminal Mind: The relationships between criminology and psychology

Professor Gwen Adshead explores violence, offenders and the criminal personality through the perspective of psychology and psychiatry http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-criminal-mind-the-relationships-between-criminology-and-psycholo...

Hans Holbein the Younger: 'a man very excellent in taking of physionamies'

An extensive overview of the art of Hans Holbein the Younger by Dr Susan Foister: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/hans-holbein-the-younger-a-man-very-excellent-in-making-of-physionamies Hans Holbein the Younger, portraitist, m...

Assessing the Economic Risks from Brexit

Professor Jagjit Chadha evaluates the short- and long-term economic effects should the UK votes to leave the EU on 23 June, 2016: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/assessing-the-economic-risks-from-brexit In this lecture, Profes...

London's Great Fire and its Aftermath

A historic overview of the effect, which the Great Fire had on London by Dr Stephen Porter http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/londons-great-fire-and-its-aftermath What does it feel like to hold a baby's heart in your hands? To 'f...

EU Debate - Should the UK Leave or Remain? Panel Discussion

Leading up to the vote on whether the UK should leave or remain a part of the European Union, Professor Sir Richard Evans chairs a debate on this vital issue. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/eu-debate-should-the-uk-leave-or-remain...

EU Debate - Should the UK Leave or Remain?

Leading up to the vote on whether the UK should leave or remain a part of the European Union, Professor Sir Richard Evans chairs a debate on this vital issue. http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/eu-debate-should-the-uk-leave-or-remain...

The Size of a Walnut: Your Heart in Their Hands

Professor Martin Elliott interviews paediatric cardiac surgeons from around the world gathering their thoughts and observations of 'what makes them tick' http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/changing-minds-and-mental-development Wh...

Mathematics, Measurement and Money

An overview of Mathematics, Measurement and Money and their evolution over time http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/mathematics-measurement-and-money THE JOINT LONDON MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY/ GRESHAM COLLEGE ANNUAL LECTUREThr...

Learning from History? The 1975 Referendum on Europe

Close examination of the events leading up to the Iraq War 2003 and detailed analysis of the decision making process by Professor Vernon Bogdanor FBA CBE http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-iraq-war-2003 Britain held her first...

Cultural Heritage and War: Panel Discussion

As part of the symposium entitled 'Cultural Heritage and War', Sir Derek Plumbly, Dr Elisabeth Kendall and Dr Mark Altaweel answer questions from the floor in panel discussion chaired by Professor Tim Connell.The transcript and downloadabl...

Manipulation and Re-Interpretation: al-Qa'ida, Islamic State and the Re-Claiming of the Arab Poetic Tradition

As part of the symposium entitled 'Cultural Heritage and War', Dr Elisabeth Kendall shares her experiences of poetry within the Arab world and how it is interpreted and manipulated by different cultural groups across the Middle East. The t...

Patterns of Looting in Syria/Iraq and the Western Art Market

As part of the symposium entitled 'Cultural Heritage and War', Dr Mark Altaweel discusses the situation in Iraq and Syria since the Fall of Mosul in 2011 and the looting of historical objects and artefacts coming into the Western Art Market and be...

Cultural heritage in times of war and the present crisis in the Middle East

As part of the symposium entitled 'Cultural Heritage and War', Sir Derek Plumbly shares his perspective on the present crisis in the Middle East, with a history and an overview. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are a...

Cultural Heritage and War: Welcome and Introduction

As part of the symposium entitled 'Cultural Heritage and War', Professor Tim Connell opens the debate with an introduction to the topic.The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:...

Changing Minds and Mental Development

Professor Gwen Adshead explores how psychological therapy affects the mind and its implication on mental development http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/changing-minds-and-mental-development In this talk, I will discuss what happe...

The Iraq War, 2003

Close examination of the events leading up to the Iraq War 2003 and detailed analysis of the decision making process by Professor Vernon Bogdanor FBA CBE http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-iraq-war-2003 Britain and the United...

Development, Developers and the Water Environment

An overview of the impact of development and developers on the water environment by Professor Carolyn Roberts http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/development-developers-and-the-water-environmentWould you want a quarry near your ho...

The Five Catastrophes That Made London

Professor Dr Simon Thurley identifies the five events that shaped London's landscape as we know it today http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-five-catastrophes-that-made-london London is the most dynamic old world city on the p...

Theatre and Love: Tom Stoppard, 'The Real Thing'

When referring to the play within the play 'The Real Thing' entitled 'House of Cards', Professor Jack explains the different meanings of this phrase in her lecture 'Theatre and Love: Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing'.The transcript and downloa...

Why God won't go away?

This concluding lecture considers a leading theme of Christian theology - that we have some innate tendency to believe in God (e.g., Pascal, George Herbert, and C. S. Lewis). The lecture then considers the evidence from recent "evolutionary cognit...

Medieval Music: The Lands of the Bell Tower

Law and Lawyers - Not All Bad? A Life in the Law - Not All Good?

In his last lecture, Geoffrey Nice reviews what he has discussed over the last four years. Law should not be of that much concern, most of the time, to non-lawyers if it delivers what the public needs. So identifying what may interest and inform a...

Cybersecurity

Detailed overview of the variety of cybercrimes and cyberattacks presented by Professor Martyn Thomas CBE http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/cybersecurity The current approach to cybersecurity is flawed. Effort is spent trying to...

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis

The talk explores the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) and its effects on today's financial markets http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-efficient-markets-hypothesis The essence of financial prices is that they should reflect...

Dementia: At Risk of Being Forgotten?

An extensive overview of the disease of ageing - dementia by Professor Chris Whitty http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/dementia-at-risk-of-being-forgottenThe remarkable improvements in child health, cardiovascular disease and can...

Our Future Off Earth

An extensive overview of the current global effort for space exploration and the challenges mankind faces http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/our-future-off-earth The Space Age is half a century old. Its early successes were drive...

Sir Christopher Wren: Buildings, Place and Genius

Who makes great buildings patrons, architects and builders? Are successful places, like London, made by careful planning or by serendipity? The career of Wren, often thought as the greatest English architect, tells us a lot about what leads to arc...

Leaving the ERM, 1992

The Britain's love affair with the the European Monetary System (ERM), precursor to the euro, and its political ramification http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/leaving-the-erm-1992 In October 1990, in the last days of her premier...

Turing and von Neumann

An overview of the major contributions of two of the founders of computer science - John von Neumann and Alan Turing http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/turing-and-von-neumann Alan Turing (1912-1954) and John von Neumann (1903-1957) h...

The Queen at 90

This lecture seeks to analyse the tensions between the Queen's changing roles as head of state, head of the nation and Head of the Commonwealth http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-queen-at-90The sixty four years of the Queen's...

What Would Jesus Do? Christian Culture Wars in the Modern West

In depth analysis of Christian Protestantism and how that shapes the contemporary world http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/what-would-jesus-do-christian-culture-wars-in-the-modern-west Christian Culture Wars in the Modern West Eu...

Theatre and Language: Samuel Beckett, 'Waiting for Godot'

In depth analysis of the language tools in Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' and its numerous interpretations http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/theatre-and-language-samuel-beckett-waiting-for-godot Beckett's Waiting for Godot has...

Britain's Damaged Rivers

Extensive overview of Britain's rivers and the reasons for their destruction http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/britains-damaged-rivers From the nineteenth century onwards, growth in the UK's towns and cities damaged rivers environme...

Human Rights: Whether in Europe or Out?

With the in/out Europe vote to come (or having gone) what will the result mean for Human Rights? How is or has the debate been framed?The lecture will present a review of what has happened in the courts since 2015, with an opportunity for ...

The Dark Side of the Universe

Inspirational talk by Professor Joseph Silk FRS on the giant clusters of galaxies dominated by dark matter http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-dark-side-of-the-universe Dark matter dominates the contents of the universe. The Milky...

Computers, People and the Real World

An exploration of some spectacular failures of modern day computer-aided systems, which fail to take into account the real-world http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/computers-people-and-the-real-world Almost nobody wants an IT system....

Religion, Morality and Meaning: How do we know what's right to do?

This lecture opens by exploring the relation between religion and morality, looking at some issues raised by writers such as Iris Murdoch and C. S. Lewis, including whether ethics can be "read off" nature, and whether some transcendent ground is n...

Homo Sapiens, an Endangered Species

What are the effects of genetic variations on the human population throughout the ages? http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/homo-sapiens-an-endangered-species Mankind, now so abundant, has for long parts of its history been reduced to...

Gardening Entrepreneurs

The business methods and achievements of Lancelot "Capabilitity" Brown, Joseph Paxton and Henry Wise will be demonstrated as well as their place in British society and their relationships with their clients and employers.Part of the Monday...

Why Doesn't Capital Flow From High To Low?

Capital should flow from countries with low marginal rates of return to countries with high marginal rates of return. The former tend to be high income countries, where investment possibilities have been exhausted, and the latter are low income co...

The Artificial Heart: A New Ending?

Fully-functioning artificial hearts are now a reality. How did we get here? What are the real risks, to individual and society? http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-artificial-heart-a-new-endingSince the development of the hear...

Why Society Needs Astronomy and Cosmology

It will be argued that fundamental research into astronomy, cosmology and particle physics is a luxury that humankind cannot do without. This cultural, technological and scientific returns of such an enterprise far outweigh the costs. The ...

Hardy, Littlewood, Cartwright and Ramanujan

The story of the most productive collaborations in mathematical history: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/hardy-littlewood-and-ramanujanThe collaboration between G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) and J.E. Littlewood (1885-1977) was the mo...

Chelsea Physic Garden Through the Ages

With over 5000 species of plants - many of them medicinal or otherwise 'useful' to our lives - Chelsea Physic Garden still serves the same purpose almost 350 years after it was founded by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. This lectur...

The World's Local Religion

This lecture follows the adaptation of evangelical Christianity in East Asia, Southern Africa and Latin America in the post-imperial age: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-worlds-local-religionIn the post-imperial age evange...

Set Square and Stethoscope: The Architecture of London's Medical Profession

This lecture follows the architectural journey of the medical profession in the capital from a closed shop to a nationalised democratic institution.The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham Coll...

The Falklands War, 1982

An overview of the political turmoil that went on in Britain in the lead up to the Falklands War in 1982: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-falklands-war-1982In 1982, Argentina, which had long claimed the Falklands, invaded ...