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.
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.
This lecture provides an insider’s brutally honest guide to what it's like to be a self-employed barrister - the highs and lows of the career, the work behind the scenes that makes a difference to outcomes in court, and the art of persuasion in it.
The lecture discusses their identities, motives and impact, and the forgotten fact that their failure ended British revolutionary fantasies for a century.
Europe’s Wars of Religion were fought against entire populations, and were punctuated by events remembered as atrocities: such as the siege of Leiden in 1573-4 or, most notoriously, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacres in France in 1572.
Advances in medicine challenge allow us to sustain life for longer, but at what cost and at whose choice? Why might the court intervene when a devout Jehovah Witness parent refuses a life-saving blood transfer to their child?
The myth of Santa Claus has been translated into an extraordinary market on a global scale. But how did this marketing success materialise? How did Finland become the home of Christmas?
In 2018 the Bar Council and Specialist Bar Associations acknowledged the issue and a “Retention of Women at the Bar’ survey was launched. It’s time to look at the results and test how the legal profession has responded to the challenge.
During the Civil War Charles I’s court, denied access to its usual country residences, was forced to set itself up in a series of makeshift locations. The most important of these was Oxford which Charles converted into a large and well-organised courtly campus.
This lecture reports on the findings of "The Independent Tribunal into Forced Organ Harvesting from Prisoners of Conscience in China" (June 2019), which examined reports of state-sponsored murder for the harvesting and sale of organs.