Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 3,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” was the voice of a disillusioned generation and reflected a world in disarray. This lecture will consider that conversion with three interlinked questions in mind: From what was he converted? Why did he convert? What was the immediate effect of that conversion?
Jonathan Bate will explain what Hazlitt meant and why Lyrical Ballads, the product of Wordsworth's intimate friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is one of the greatest and most influential volumes of poetry ever written.
Simon Lancaster believes that the successful speechwriter is less of a puppeteer and more of an impressionist. In his talk, he will share a number of stories and anecdotes from his time as speechwriter.
Catherine Roach uncovers what we learn from the romance story about today’s changing norms for gender and sexuality and about the nature of happiness and love.
Starting with literary examples from Dickens, this lecture will untangle the complexity of shadow-meaning by exploring how artists have used shadows since ancient times.
Samuel Palmer, in his Shoreham period in the 1820s and 30s, seized on the long tradition of classical pastoral landscapes, and wrested it into an English idiom.
A dialogue with Philip Pullman's complex 'Dark Materials' trilogy which provides a framework for discussing how human beings relate to the material world, and the origin of evil.