Gresham College Lectures

This lecture will explore Napoleon's life through his interactions with the natural world and a series of gardens that were important to him during the rise and fall of his power. The point of doing this is to approach his life from oblique angles, exploring material that is often overlooked. It is also a way of evoking the dramatic trajectory of his life. A lecture by Dr Ruth Scurr, 6 May Th...

Every time you look at the world you are building a model. With every new experience these representations of your environment are refined and reconfigured. Each piece of sensory information you perceive makes the model of reality in your head more detailed and complex. The building of mathematical models, designed to capture our complex reality, is the best way we have of making sense of the rule...

International negotiations concerning our environment such as on climate and biodiversity, often put the scientific case behind economic and political interests, with potentially disastrous consequences. What does that mean for human prosperity and even survival? Can the tension between science, policy and diplomacy be resolved? What would a new form of environmental justice that internalised natu...

Where do we get our mathematical symbols from? Why is the set of integers called ℤ ? When was the equals sign first used? How about zero? Good notation tends to catch on quickly, whereas bad notation can obscure beautiful theory. The lecture explores how the introduction of new notation has paved the way for new leaps in understanding, and considers some mathematical quirks of language, such as wh...

"In space, no one can hear you scream". The chillingly accurate tagline of Ridley Scott's 1979 space horror classic, Alien, is often belied in science fiction movies, forgetting that in space there is no air, and hence no sound. Space today is terrifyingly silent. But it wasn't always thus: the early universe was filled with hot plasma in which sound waves could travel. The cos...

The criminalisation of religious speech before the ordinary courts in England began in 1676. Although the law on blasphemy was finally abolished in 2008, many of the troubling aspects of the old law remain in the form of the offence of incitement to religious hatred. This lecture will explore the current and future scope of the law of incitement to religious hatred in light of our long and trouble...

This illustrated lecture marks 150 years since Dickens's death by reflecting on the nature of his creative genius and his legacy. It examines the theatrical performance of Dickens's public readings in relation to his writing practices, and suggests how this gives us an insight into his creative processes as well as the close relationship he forged with his public - a relationship which,...

The English Reformation gave rise to the global Christian communion called Anglicanism: but neither immediately nor directly. This highly distinctive form of Christianity - ritualistic but nondogmatic, self-consciously moderate but staunchly nationalistic - has long been closely tied to English national identity. This lecture asks how it came to emerge over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,...

Networks were seen as a rather arcane and dull area in computer science. Then along came the internet, and everything changed for ever. The internet is actually an amalgam of a number of disparate technologies that evolved at just the right time, indeed several of the key technologies were far from optimal. In this lecture we will look at a bit of internet history, show how it works now and look t...

Lymphoma, leukaemia and myeloma arise from different parts of the white blood cell system. Unlike the solid tumours they can be widely distributed in the body, and this means they need a different approach. The outlook for people with these very different cancers varies, but in all cases it is improving, and in some types over 90% will be cured. Different lymphomas and leukaemias occur at differen...

On 17 August 1982, the first commercial CD was released. Digital recording and editing have changed the face of music by making recordings easy to originate and share. But has this affected musical quality, and what are the financial and artistic consequences? Where does BBC Radio stand within this technological revolution? Has the BBC's ability to adapt effectively signed its own death warra...

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. This lecture pursues the gift of Gothic to later novelists, seeing how great Victorian novelists like Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens were entranced by the supernatural. Finally, it looks at how the possibility of...

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. This lecture explores the contrast between the public image and the private life, considering what his writings reveal to us about his deepest preoccupations, both as man and as artist, during this peri...

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. A village or even a nation state can develop rules to prevent depletion of resources so that it does not cut down forests or over-fish the oceans. But how can that be done globally when t...

Emeritus Law Professor Jo Delahunty QC and guests will explore what the future holds for the next generation of barristers: will they better reflect the society they serve in terms of background, ethnicity and gender? Is privilege and income as much of a division at The Bar as it is in society? What can institutions such as Universities, The Inns, The City, and Gresham do to reach out to students...

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. The reality is that law and policy determine individual access to healthy food and contribute to the racial disparities that exist in all these conditions. Partnerships between the government and the food and a...

Cyberwar is not waged on physical battlefields following rules of engagement. Aggressors worry less about collateral damage, in part because they aren't forced to confront the sight of an enemy bleeding to death before their eyes. Instead, their victim might be someone with a pacemaker 3000 miles away. We have no words yet for this kind of crime, but there is no doubt that the moment someone...

The London stock market boomed and crashed in 1720. The financial bubble is known to posterity as the South Sea Bubble. In the three hundred years since, the bubble has been much misunderstood - this lecture separates fact from myth and aims to move beyond simplistic ideas of "gambling mania". A lecture by Dr Helen Paul 30 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are...

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? The Government has promised to "update the Human Rights Act" and review the "relationship between the government, parliament and the courts". Will this l...

Prokofiev followed in the footsteps of Rachmaninov and Scriabin as a joint graduate in piano and composition, but his final graduation performance made an even greater splash, since he dared to present his own new modernist Piano Concerto (No.1) before his examiners. This distinguished panel of judges had cultivated nationalist and late-romantic styles in their own music, and they were not well pl...

The rising prevalence of obesity is a major threat to current and future health of individuals, the public, and the NHS. It is sometimes seen as too difficult to tackle but there is now progress in this multi-system health problem. In this lecture by Professor Chris Whitty, he lays out the health effects of the rising prevalence if we do not address it. Obesity arises from a complex interaction of...

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. This lecture celebrates 500 years since the birth of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, an intelligence-gatherer for Elizabeth I across E...

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. For Darwin and his contemporaries, inequality between races and the sexes was one of the facts that science had to explain. Ever since Darwin, biology has been used to support racial...

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". "Big Nurse" is determined to eliminate every trace of male independence and spontaneity, castrating them and rendering them passive. Her machine-like ("ratc...

Charles II's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, became one of the most influential and powerful men at the Restoration court. He married a Scottish heiress, Anne Scott, and together they became leaders of fashion and taste. Recent researches have revealed that the Duke and Duchess were major patrons of architecture, leaving some important, but little known, buildings to posterity. A lect...