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John Evelyn: Britain’s First Environmentalist

Air pollution, the usefulness of trees, ideas for a green belt are not concerns we associate with the 1600s. But John Evelyn, writer, diarist and gardener, was unusual. His thinking in Fumifugium (1661) about air quality, and Sylva (1664) about trees, seems astonishingly close to our own today.

Connected Humans

Was Covid-19 the ultimate wake-up call about how we live on planet earth?

Russian Piano Masterpieces: Musorgsky

Musorgsky was a proficient, but not virtuosic pianist, and most of his piano music is comprised of unambitious salon pieces. On the basis of these modest exploits, no one could have predicted his Pictures at an Exhibition.

William And Mary: The Court Divided

Like James I, King William III was fundamentally unhappy with the stuffy formality of England’s vast crumbling royal estate. But unlike James, who virtually abandoned Edinburgh, William maintained a second court, and a parallel suite of royal houses, in the Netherlands.

The Last Mile: Ensuring Access to Affordable Energy to Poor, Rural Communities

Environment Professor Jacqueline McGlade will examine how renewable energy systems, ranging from large scale hydroelectric dams, solar arrays and geothermal plants, to small-scale solar micro-grids can offer immense opportunities for climate mitigation and achieving a clean energy future.

War Games at the Field of the Cloth of Gold

2020 marks the 500th anniversary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, one of the most extraordinary diplomatic events of the late medieval period.

The Future of Our Oceans

Recent evidence about the extent of plastics and litter in our oceans has led to grassroots rejection of single-use plastics.

Choosing Religious Atrocities in Ireland

Nowhere in Europe have the wars of religion lasted longer than in Ireland. At the heart of this are two rival sets of memories of atrocities: above all, Protestants recall the massacres of the 1641 rebellion, and Catholics recall the massacres perpetrated by Oliver Cromwell in 1649.

Good Gardeners of Planet Earth? The Vision of Silent Running (1972)

This lecture explores these notions through an examination of the film Silent Running (1972), which imagined gardens in space, in which the last remnants of Earth’s vegetation are preserved aboard gigantic spaceships.

Charles II: The Court in Exile

For a decade after the execution of Charles I the Stuart courts were based in the Low Countries and France. Always short of money, but determined to maintain splendour and dignity, Charles II rented a series of mansions and used them as the headquarters of the exiled monarchy.

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