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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 trees, seems astonishingly close to our own today.

Convincing Fiction: Daniel Defoe to Ishiguro and Knausgaard

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 that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked t

The Windrush Thinkers and Artists

London in the 1950s and 60s was a crucible in which West Indian writers, artists, thinkers and scholars imagined new futures for the Caribbean, Britain and the world.

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.

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 Shakespeare changed over time?

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.

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.

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.

Can the Law Keep Up With Changes In Society?

Advances in medicine challenge 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?

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 (1951).

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