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.
From Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, renegade novelists of the eighteenth century wanted to claim back the supernatural for fiction and so invented the Gothic Novel.
In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work.
Climate change and the over-exploitation of resources now may mean that unless the current generation modifies its behaviour, generations ahead may either not be born or will inherit a world with severe problems.
Food-related conditions – cancer, heart disease, and strokes – are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the UK. Common wisdom is that health reflects personal choices and will power.
In the wake of the decision in the parliamentary prorogation case Miller (No.2), the question of the politics of the judiciary has been thrust into the public eye. Was it “a constitutional coup” as some have claimed?
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”).
Spying for Queen Elizabeth I was very different from modern-day intelligence services - or was it? This lecture brings together historian Stephen Alford and Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, and will discuss Tudor spies and the modern-day secret service.
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”.