Gresham provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on the Gresham website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
Serial murderer Myra Hindley is often portrayed as an “evil icon”. Her crimes of sadistic murder against children continue to shock. There are few artistic sights so terrifying as the giant portrait of Hindley composed of the handprints of children.
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”.
Cinema’s original canons were based on a small number of works most highly esteemed by archivists and historians. But access to the history of film has been dramatically expanded by digital media, as have debates between those arguing from different premises.
Canons of taste and value in other media, such as literature, art and music, have been challenged in recent decades by proponents of sexual and ethnic equality.
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.
For nearly seventy years, what might be called ‘the canon’ of greatest films has been arbitrated by an international poll of critics delivering a ‘ten best’ list every decade, published in the BFI’s Sight & Sound.
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?
China’s media provide a window into the Chinese mind, as the country asserts itself in the world as a great power. What do Chinese people think is the purpose of life? What matters most to them? In what do they believe? How do officials and journalists explain their responsibilities?