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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.
In this lecture we follow his early years, when he published The World of Art, a provocative Russian journal, exhibited Russian visual art in Paris, and then brought Russian music there, culminating in his production of Musorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov.
This lecture explores how the partnership worked during the 1940s, drawing in collaborators from many backgrounds who also excelled, and benefiting from the extraordinary conditions of wartime Britain.
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.
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. We will look at the remarkable story of its discove
In the 1960s, British filmmakers broke out of the studio to find new subjects among the young, fashionable and disadvantaged, seen in their natural habitats – not only in the North and Midlands, but in unfamiliar parts of London.
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.
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.
Today's event
Today's event, The Gresham Festival of Musical Ideas, will not be livestreamed. Recordings of all lectures will be published soon!