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The USSR in the Cold War Years

After Stalin’s death in 1953, successive leaders tried to find ways to revitalise the Soviet regime and rethink its promises to the Soviet people. Life within a system no longer based on terror and intense industrial transformation offered citizens strange alternatives.

Training in Violence: An Essay in Military Hazing

How have the British and American armed forces been taught to fight and kill in conflicts from 1914 to the present? What role have psychology and technology played in military training?

China: Art, War and Salvation, 1933-1949

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 Fate of the October Revolution under Stalin

When Lenin died in 1924, he had effected a temporary...

Van Eyck's The Virgin with the Canon: Visual Disability and Societal Attitudes as Depicted in the Northern Renaissance

Examples of disease as shown in artworks will be examined, from the medical and surgical point of view as well as the historical and artistic ones, particularly visual loss as portrayed by artists from pre-historic times.

The Zika Virus, Dengue and the Yellow Fever Mosquito

The Zika virus originated in Africa and causes a febrile illness but was little known until it spread within Brazil in 2014. The lecture will also discuss the ‘nightmare scenario’ of the increased range of the mosquito as a result of climate change.