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Mata Hari: Femme Fatales

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.

The Secrets of Darwin’s Greenhouse

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.

Amelia Dyer: Baby Killers

Amelia Dyer was one of the most prolific murderers in Victorian Britain. She made a living as a “baby farmer”, or someone paid to care for unwanted or abandoned infants – except she killed around 400 of them. How could a mother and nurse murder so many defenceless babies?

Making a Monkey out of Darwin

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’.

Darwin, Breeding and Barnacles

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.

The Man Who Invented Christmas: Film Adaptations of Dickens' A Christmas Carol

How do the different versions reflect the politics and culture of their own particular times? What makes a good Carol movie? Is it truth to the original or is it something else?

Freedom Song: The Fisk Jubilee Singers' Story

A choir of ex-slaves, raising funds to build their University, toured America from 1871, suffering discrimination and hardship.

The Mathematical World of C. L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

This illustrated lecture and book launch will attempt to answer these questions by outlining his mathematical life, labours and legacy in the context of Victorian Oxford.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891) And the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis

The illustrated lecture will examine Bazalgette’s achievement and the work involved in building this latest addition to it.

The Cockney Romantics: John Keats and his Friends

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.

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