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.
Mata Hari was an erotic dancer who, in 1917, was executed by the French army for treason. She has been portrayed as the ultimate femme fatale, extracting information from hapless men through exploiting her sensual charms.
Despite the controversy, evolution was widely accepted by many naturalists within a few years of the Origin’s appearance. An important reason for this rapid triumph was Darwin’s botanical works. Seen through evolutionary eyes, plants proved to be mobile, carnivorous, sensitive – even crafty.
When Darwin finally published the On the Origin of Species, he tried to avoid controversy by ignoring human origins. Yet evolution was soon being attacked as the godless ‘monkey theory’.
How has Covid-19 re-shaped our ideas about what we owe society? The lockdown has had a terrible impact on the economic prospects of young people, and the elderly have suffered from high mortality in care homes.
Following the Beagle voyage, Darwin settled down to a quiet married life, relying on correspondence to gather facts. He wrote thousands of letters as he gathered facts to support his still-secret theory.
Jonathan Bate will track Keats to Hampstead and tell of the extraordinary circle of writers – opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, essayist Charles Lamb, master-critic William Hazlitt – who wrote for The London Magazine, until its gifted editor was killed in a duel with a rival critic.
This lecture explores how regulators try to prevent what will hopefully be the ‘last’ bubble and suggests that the most effective regulatory frameworks were developed during the normal operation of markets, not in response to crises.
Using contemporary print and theatre, this lecture will discuss how England and Englishness was defined, even as the boundaries between the home and the world became increasingly diffuse.