Gresham College Lectures

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...

We often think that leaders are particularly strong in decision making - that's why they've made it to the top. But evidence shows that even senior executives are prone to psychological biases, such as overconfidence, groupthink, and applying one-size-fits-all rules. The talk will also discuss how boards, investors, policymakers, and executives themselves can address these biases to make...

Cinema's original canons were based on a small number of works most highly esteemed by archivists and historians. But access to the history of film has been dramatically expanded by digital media, as have debates between those arguing from different premises. 'Discoverability' is an important new criterion amid the vast range of works now readily available. Will this new democracy o...

When England's Reformation began, only a small band of idealists - or fanatics - truly wanted a Protestant England. Nevertheless, within a single lifetime, they achieved it. The lecture considers how the upheavals of the Tudor era led to the emergence of a genuinely new religious consciousness in England, as reformers set about rebuilding the nation's spirit from the ground up. By their...

Even the most humdrum of electrical devices nowadays contains at least one computer; yet surprisingly few people are aware of their history, their form or function. In this talk we will see that not only is the history of computers rich and diverse, their architecture likewise. Astonishingly, all the computers ever made can be modelled by one universal machine - the Turing machine. A lecture by Ri...

Mathematical concepts have often been used to create new structural forms in fiction, as in the works of Raymond Queneau and Jorge Luis Borges. The members of Queneau's Oulipo group (including Georges Perec and Italo Calvino) sought to create works using various constraints as an impetus to innovation. Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (2013) continues in this tradition. And mathematical c...

We hear too often about sudden death in adults following prolonged and often unnecessary police restraint. What do people know about the dangers of restraint and how widespread is our understanding of such deaths? This talk by Professor Leslie Thomas QC, with a panel of distinguished guests including Deborah Coles, Director of INQUEST, and Dr Nat Cary, a forensic pathologist, explores the legal im...

Plato's most brilliant student and perhaps the most significant intellectual in world history, Aristotle of Stageira built on the doctrines he had studied at the Academy but also radically disagreed with them. The founder of Athens' second great university, the Lyceum, did not believe there was any perfect, ideal world that transcended human ability to see, touch, smell and hear it, and...

Highly energetic particles from outer space travelling at the speed of light, known as cosmic rays, originate from the sites of extreme particle acceleration in the Universe. This lecture considers just how energetic these rapid particles are, the origins of their extreme energies and the implications for Earth. A lecture by Katherine Blundell 3 March The transcript and downloadable versions of th...

There is a seismic shift underway in economics, hastened by the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Communities and countries around the world are beginning to adopt/consider adopting well-being and prosperity as major guiding principles. The aim is to deploy new forms of economic theory and policy to reflect the importance of nature in their future development. This lecture explores the issue of...

Stravinsky's solo piano output may be modest in size, but it contains one of the absolute pinnacles of piano virtuosity, the Three Pieces from Petrushka. To call these pieces "arrangements" from the ballet score would be true, but misleading: they are brilliant recompositions from the ballet's material, stranger and more elusive, and with the added dimension of extreme virtuosi...

Why did stories of criminals become irresistible for novelists? Starting with works like Moll Flanders in the eighteenth century, this lecture goes on to examine the role of criminals in Dickens, keen to let his readers and characters experience what Pip in Great Expectations calls 'the taint of crime'. To what ends? How does the recent genre fiction of novelists like Patricia Highsmith...

Clinical practice depends on the acquisition and analysis of evidence - detailed information from each patient's clinical history, laboratory tests, imaging scans and biopsies. Yet data on its own is not enough, and must always be interpreted in the context of each unique person. Similarly in forensic science, analytical data must be interpreted to make sense of a crime. This lecture discusse...

Transfer of resources between currently existing generations. There is a clear link with the previous time scale, for a collective solution will mean that the cost of those currently drawing benefits is paid by those currently in employment. But there are further ramifications. Should the assets of the older generation pass to the younger generation or not? One tradition, going back to JS Mill and...

Italo-Byzantine art will be considered as background to the early or 'proto' Renaissance at a time when Italy was a focus of stylistic cross-currents from different parts of Europe. The heritage of Rome and the influence of earlier traditions on artists like Cimabue, Duccio, Simone Martini and Giotto will be examined in the context of the 'rebirth' of the arts in Renaissance It...

Canons of taste and value in other media, such as literature, art and music, have been challenged in recent decades by proponents of sexual and ethnic equality. Film's 'ten bests' are open to similar charges, and their dominance may actively hinder efforts to raise awareness of and achievement by filmmakers outside Hollywood and predominantly European art cinema. This lecture consid...

Mata Hari was an erotic dancer who, in 1917, was executed by the French army for treason. She has been portrayed as the ultimate femme fatale, extracting information from hapless men through exploiting her sensual charms. She was white, beautiful, and heterosexual, yet had to be punished for transgressing the boundaries of femininity. Similar to many Evil Women, she was believed to be deceitful, r...

All of the UK adult population is to be offered a COVID-19 Vaccination by September 2021. Many other countries are aiming for similar roll-outs in one of the largest and fastest vaccination drives in history. In this lecture Professor Chris Whitty will explain how vaccines came to play such a central role in healthcare, and the role they serve today in tackling an increasing range of diseases, inc...

Literary satire has long used mathematical concepts to reinforce its points. Gulliver's Travels (1724) played with ideas of dimension, size, and shape, and a century later, Edwin Abbot's novel Flatland (1884) explored the mathematics of higher dimensions, through the experiences of its two-dimensional protagonist, "A Square". Both novels have spawned a host of sequels, commenta...

Despite the controversy, evolution was widely accepted by many naturalists within a few years of the Origin's appearance. An important reason for this rapid triumph was Darwin's botanical works. Seen through evolutionary eyes, plants proved to be mobile, carnivorous, sensitive - even crafty. As Darwin "exalted" his favourite flowers, the orchids, he also narrowed the once-unima...

Is there is a level playing field between participants at inquests? What does 'equality of arms' mean? Is such a concept appropriate when looking at inquests? Are inquiries better? How have they developed since the IRA Death on The Rock case? What are the problems faced by those representing families, is there a case for fundamental change? If so what model should we adopt to replace the...

The English Reformation - unlike many of the other Reformations convulsing sixteenth-century Europe - was at heart more about politics and law than about religion. It created the English state as we now know it, and established relationships between the nations of Britain and Ireland which still endure. This lecture asks how a religious dispute came to rewrite the English constitution and traces t...