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.
The Brothers Grimm’s tale of Snow White has been retold dozens of times in print and the cinema over the past two centuries. A central character is the Evil Queen, Snow White’s malevolent stepmother, who tries to kill her with the help of the occult.
What is meant by ‘love’ between human and nonhuman animals? Why is sex with animals such a taboo? It is only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality. Are their arguments dangerous, perverted, or simply wrongheaded?
Eve was the original Evil Woman. She was tempted by Satan, introducing sin into the world. In turn, she seduced Adam, bringing the wrath of the Creator upon humanity for all eternity.
In 1920, Nellie Melba’s singing was transmitted to Europe and Newfoundland via the wireless. In 1922 the BBC began broadcasting, and from the outset sponsored new music and relayed outside broadcasts to the nation (and from 1932, to the world).
Stories about islands punctuate the careers of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, from Powell’s breakthrough with Edge of the World (1936) to the Hebridean journey of I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), and the final act of their Tales of Hoffmann (1951).
World War Two set British filmmakers a challenge: to be relevant and entertaining and to inspire without patronising. Powell and Pressburger brought wit and imagination to their task, questioning what Britain stood for, warts and all.
This lecture explores how the partnership worked during the 1940s, drawing in collaborators from many backgrounds who also excelled, and benefiting from the extraordinary conditions of wartime Britain.
Jonathan Bate will track Keats to Hampstead and tell of the extraordinary circle of writers – opium-eater Thomas De Quincey, essayist Charles Lamb, master-critic William Hazlitt – who wrote for The London Magazine, until its gifted editor was killed in a duel with a rival critic.
In the 1960s, British filmmakers broke out of the studio to find new subjects among the young, fashionable and disadvantaged, seen in their natural habitats – not only in the North and Midlands, but in unfamiliar parts of London.
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