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.
Prokofiev’s piano music struck his contemporaries as matching the new era: its dynamism was compared to sport (“football music”), and its grinding repeated patterns to industrial sounds (“machine music”).
Darwin’s Descent of Man was dominated by the theory of sexual selection, which Darwin used to explain peacock’s tails, but also to argue that white people were as superior to black ones as men were to women.
Nurse Ratched is the evil nurse in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962). She is the Evil Woman as autocratic, the absolute power in a psychiatric ward, which is the ultimate “total institution”.
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 English Reformation – unlike many of the other Reformations convulsing sixteenth-century Europe – was at heart more about politics and law than about religion.
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?
Most English people initially saw the Reformation as an unexpected catastrophe, wrenching their religious lives out of shape, and stripping their communities of resources they had naively believed belonged to them.
Rachmaninov is considered by many to be the greatest composer-pianist in history. But his very popularity has left the complexity and subtlety of his music underappreciated.
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