Gresham College Lectures

The extraordinary effort to ban drink must be understood as part of an American culture war, one framed between the country and the city, between the native-born (white Protestants) and foreign-born (Catholics and Jews), between religion and science, between homogeneity and cosmopolitanism, and, of course, between 'drys' and 'wets'. The lecture will show how Prohibition animate...

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). What can we learn about the imagination of these very different figures by tracing this motif ? This lecture draws on archival sources...

This lecture-recital will explore the life of Clara Schumann (1819-1896) through her music and surroundings, her achievements and influencers. Deservedly revered by all who knew her, she was a pioneer of female composition, who overcame societal norms to rise to fame as one of the most sought after and celebrated pianists and composers of her generation. A lecture by Fionnuala Moynihan 23 January...

Surveys about people's fears commonly feature public speaking at the very top of the list. Many people believe that public speaking is either something you are born with or without. This talk will provide practical tips that everyone can employ, regardless of their experience, to improve their public speaking. It will highlight what is unique about public speaking compared to other forms of c...

The Rite of Spring was the startling result of a collaboration between Stravinsky, Nijinsky (choreography) and Roerich (sets and costumes). In the immediate aftermath, it seemed to be a fiasco because of its riotous reception, but it proved to be the successful introduction of a new modernist aesthetic that cultivated ugliness and machine-like movements. We will trace the musical, visual and chore...

The question "Will AI artefacts ever be conscious?" was raised by Turing seventy years ago, and will not go away even though no one quite knows what it means, nor how we would know they were conscious if they were. This lecture explores what its role might be, and the ways in which AI scientists have explored and tried to simulate the possibility of consciousness in machines, while askin...

On the 200th anniversary of George IV's accession to the throne, this lecture considers whether or not he had any real impact on the fast-industrialising world around him, and the turbulent political times he lived through. When George was young, opposition politicians worried about the 'secret influence' the monarch could wield. By the time he died the limited power of the monarch...

There has been a great deal of research on breast cancer, surgery, and implants. This lecture looks at changing ideas about the healthy breast. It explores notions of beauty, sexual pleasure, and age. Early maturation of girls, coupled with a greater focus on the breasts of older women, have had major effects on cultural expectations and experiences. The lecture also asks: what happens when we tur...

The most common cancer in men in the UK is prostate cancer, around a quarter of all male cancer diagnoses. Testicular cancer, the other male-specific cancer, is rare, but occurs early in life. Neither are preventable. There has been a steady improvement in treatment for prostate cancer, and we can now safely avoid treating many men with them at all. The outlook for testicular cancer if caught earl...

How can we end our intense consumer addiction and change our habits and values to be more sustainable? In this lecture Environment Professor Jacqueline McGlade will look at patterns of consumption and the concepts of sufficiency in communities across the world, linking them not only to poverty and wealth but also to ecosystem health. She will look at how we can achieve UN sustainable development g...

The 2020 Annual Lord Mayor's Gresham event will explore the value of culture for The City of London. The City of London is not only a great place to do business but also has a rich and vibrant cultural offer making it a great place to live, learn, work and visit. It is home to a year round programme in the Square Mile led by the City of London Corporation's Cultural & Visitor Service...

Few patients like to think of their physicians or surgeons as improvisers. Yet clinical care is a human art where there will always be uncertainty. Though doctors spend years learning facts and gaining skills, each patient is unique and every situation holds surprises. Musicians also spend years in training - practising scales, learning harmony, mastering technique. Such musicians celebrate their...

Saving the whales and curing cancer are two of the great challenges of the present day, and mathematics has a part to play in addressing them. This talk will use these two examples to illustrate the process of mathematical modelling to gain insights into how the world works and how we can change it. A lecture by Chris Budd 7 January The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are avail...

1928 witnessed the BBC's first broadcast of the Christmas Eve carol service from King's College, Cambridge. 1928 also saw the publication of The Oxford Book of Carols. By paying tribute to conductors Arthur Mann and Boris Ord, and composers and arrangers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Martin Shaw, Jeremy Summerly and the St Luke's Carollers make a case for 1928 as the year in which the...

The myth of Santa Claus has been translated into an extraordinary market on a global scale. We see Santa everywhere in adverts and products, and people also travel quite long distances to meet the 'real Santa' in his faraway home. The first Concorde flight from Britain to Northern Finland was organised in 1984 with around 100 passengers wanting to experience the magic of Christmas in thi...

A Christmas Carol (1843) is the most filmed and televised of Dickens' works. Many will warmly remember the 1951 Alastair Sim version, but how many are aware of A Carol for Another Christmas (1964), a propaganda film produced in support of the UN, or The Passions of Carol (1975), which attempted to highlight the evil of the pornography industry? How do the different versions reflect the politi...

Many influential leaders stress the importance of pursuing a purpose rather than choosing a career based on salary. While inspiring, such talks can sometimes seem impractical because many people find it difficult to know what their purpose is, and unrealistic given rapidly rising living costs and the view that lucrative careers are not purposeful. This talk will introduce a practical framework to...

Sydney's botanic garden, founded in the early nineteenth century, was expected to ship new plants 'home' to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, from where they could be transplanted to other colonial gardens, to see if they could become valuable new crops to enrich the British Empire. Such plans had varying degrees of success, leaving botanists to question why specific plants would only...

A Gresham lecture that Delahunty gave in November 2017 was one of the first public identifications of the exodus of experienced women from the self-employed Bar - and gave a call for action. That loss affects the number of women who take Silk and that, in turn, drains the pool from which judges are largely drawn. In 2018 the Bar Council and Specialist Bar Associations acknowledged the issue and a...

The study of the natural and physical world from a scientific viewpoint began in Greek cities on the western coast of Turkey around Miletus in about 600 BCE. The first scientists were known as physiologoi, or men who discoursed about nature (physis). Each tried to put his various observations together in a way that constituted a coherent, unified model. This lecture discusses the pioneering physic...

This lecture will consider the treatment and prevention of common cancers in women. The outlook for those with breast cancer and uterine cancer have substantially improved in the last three decades, and the great majority with the diagnosis will be alive and well a decade later. The outlook for ovarian cancer is less good although improving. This lecture will consider the evolving treatments, incl...

Barely a day goes by without some lunatic assertion on social media. Thinking-people shake their heads, but what can be done about this? It turns out that there are a variety of scientific and engineering approaches which might be adapted to tame the trolls of social media. In this lecture we will review the tricky alliance between social media, email and the government, and we will present option...

Mary Ann Evans experienced difficult relationships with her family while growing up in Warwickshire, and with nineteenth-century London society more generally after she moved to the city and lived with a married man, George Henry Lewes. Her seeking of independence in London as a writer (with her later emergence as 'George Eliot'), her experience of rejection, and the widening of her inte...

From ancient times to popular self-help books today, eyes have been viewed as 'windows to the soul'. The interpretation of eye shape and colour have been used to distinguish between different degrees of 'civilization' (scientific racism), to identify personality traits, and to detect terrorists (recent research carried out by the CIA and the U.S. Transportation Security Adminis...

Medieval England was proudly Catholic and ostentatiously loyal to Rome. But from the late sixteenth century until recent times - and even now - anti-Catholic prejudice has been a cornerstone of English and British identity. This lecture will look at how this prejudice grew out of the persecution of Protestants in the 1550s, at the idealistic historian who crystallised it, and at the political cris...