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At a time when religions language is meaningless or feels stale for many, we can rediscover its freshness and force in the works of novelists and poets. Lord Harries will be in conversation with Alec Ryrie, the new Gresham Professor of Divinity.
Jonathan Bate will explain what Hazlitt meant and why Lyrical Ballads, the product of Wordsworth's intimate friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is one of the greatest and most influential volumes of poetry ever written.
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.
T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” was the voice of a disillusioned generation and reflected a world in disarray. This lecture will consider that conversion with three interlinked questions in mind: From what was he converted? Why did he convert? What was the immediate effect of that conversion?
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.
This final lecture will show how Shakespeare helped to immortalize the famous figures of ancient Greece and Rome, and how he in turn became famous after his death.