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.
This final lecture will show how Shakespeare helped to immortalize the famous figures of ancient Greece and Rome, and how he in turn became famous after his death.
The Rape of Lucrece set the mould for Shakespeare’s exploration of the tragic consequences of sexual desire turning to violence. Jonathan Bate will show how Shakespeare developed these themes from his reading of the great Roman poet Ovid.
Constable's Stour landscapes of the Regency period, during and just after the War with France, and his publication English Landscape Scenery, champion local and low-key rural England.
A celebration of the heart for St Valentine’s Day. How is it that a simple pump has become a symbol of the highest human emotions of love, truth, conscience and moral courage? How have artists represented this? An interdisciplinary presentation.
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 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.