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.
In the first of a series of lectures on English Romanticism, Jonathan Bate will go on a journey from the Scottish Highlands to a teenage suicide in London to the Geneva of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in search of the origins of Romanticism.
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.
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’.
Simon Lancaster believes that the successful speechwriter is less of a puppeteer and more of an impressionist. In his talk, he will share a number of stories and anecdotes from his time as speechwriter.
Starting with literary examples from Dickens, this lecture will untangle the complexity of shadow-meaning by exploring how artists have used shadows since ancient times.
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 first encountered photography.
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.
The Rape of Lucrece set the mould for Shakespeare’s exploration of the tragic consequences of sexual desire turning to violence. Jonathan Bate will show how Shakespeare developed these themes from his reading of the great Roman poet Ovid.
Catherine Roach uncovers what we learn from the romance story about today’s changing norms for gender and sexuality and about the nature of happiness and love.
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