Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
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 changing balance of power and wealth between the aristocracy and the monarchy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has fundamentally influenced today’s national cultural landscape of art and architecture.
This lecture questions this view and shows how, from the sixteenth century, aristocratic families deployed their collections and commissioned their buildings in both town and country in order to further their political and dynastic ambitions.
An integral part of the tumultuous political events of the century was the cultural ambition of the principal players who form the subject of this lecture.
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’.
London is home to two of the oldest working theatres in the world both founded by Charles II’s patents. Professor Thurley looks at the significance and impact of these great institutions on the development of London.
Edwardian architecture in particular provides a fascinating commentary on broader historical themes – not only in its use of style and its remodelling of old buildings but also in the range of new activities it provided for.
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.
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.
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