Gresham College Lectures

The world's population is rapidly expanding and the majority of this population will live in large city conurbations. What will out future cities look like? How will transport system work, how will people move around, and how will we supply them with energy and remove their waste? What sort of houses will people live in in the future and what will our communities look like? The lecture will s...

Musicians make sounds - that much, you'd have thought, is obvious! Yet more than the sounds they make, it's the choices that musicians are making about how and when to play that really matter - choices that are made through listening. John Cage is a composer who revolutionised 20th century music through the choices he has made. This lecture will explore Cage's music, focusing on his...

Although financial bubbles are in some sense banal and a feature of financial capitalism, the seeds of the next bubble are often sown by regulatory responses to previous ones. This has been the case since the South Sea Bubble and Mississippi Scheme, and has recurred at regular intervals in the intervening 300 years. This lecture explores how regulators try to prevent what will hopefully be the &ap...

Forgiveness is often discussed as if it were a single, straightforward, phenomenon. The reality, however, is not so simple. For instance, we can identify three different types of forgiveness: inter-personal forgiveness, God's forgiveness, and self- forgiveness. Moreover there is variety within each of these main types, and connections between them. In this lecture the varieties of forgiveness...

Global trade and traffic, many of Gresham's contemporaries would say, had altered sixteenth-century England beyond recognition, from its food, fashion, and language, to the look and feel of its cities and neighbourhoods. How did its subjects respond to this transformation? Using contemporary print and theatre, this lecture will discuss how England and Englishness was defined, even as the boun...

Ruskin's Bicentenary on 8 February 2019 will be marked by an assessment of his achievement as an art critic. Then, with a close focus on four or five particular paintings, the lecture will explore Ruskin's distinctive genius in evocative word- painting as he celebrates and critiques Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. A lecture by Malcolm Andrews, Professor Emeritus of Victorian and Visual S...

The Children Act 1989 embodied a change in philosophy by making the child's welfare the courts 'paramount' concern, moving away from the concept of parental rights towards the right of the child. It embraced the idea of shared parental rights and responsibilities and that children are best cared for within their families but not at the expense of suffering avoidable significant harm...

The Stuart age saw a much more systematic approach to the elite patronage of art and architecture. Collectors and connoisseurs were more aware of the effect of their activities and the audiences for them. An integral part of the tumultuous political events of the century was the cultural ambition of the principal players who form the subject of this lecture. A lecture by Simon Thurley, Visiting Pr...

The Moon is undoubtedly the next frontier for humanity. The international space agencies are lining up to pursue lunar projects and even develop lunar bases. The potential of the Moon is attracting interest for industrial applications, including mining and tourism. It is essential to avoid many of the mistakes we have made on Earth as we plan the future of lunar exploration. Professor Silk will de...

In celebrating 500 years since the birth of Sir Thomas Gresham, Professor Jones will examine how changes since the sixteenth century have affected the evolution of human beings and that of the animals and plants around us. Professor Jones will deal with the accelerating shifts in plants, animals and humans as they cope with human activities, from gold-mining to global warming, and will speculate a...

Villainous atheists were, like witches, stock figures of the European imagination in the Renaissance. But when Shakespeare and his contemporaries put them on the stage, 'atheists' could be uncomfortably compelling. This lecture will explore how the sixteenth century found ways of distancing itself from religion - like Christopher Marlowe, who raged against its moral constraints, or Miche...

The UK is considered a world leader in corporate governance, but governance failures are blamed for the loss of trust in business. This talk will discuss rigorous evidence on what optimal governance should look like - including issues such as boardroom diversity, independence of directors, employee representation, and whether directors' fiduciary duty should be to shareholders or all of socie...

Musorgsky's opera Boris Godunov (1872) is set in the 'Time of Troubles', using Pushkin's incisive verse tragedy on the chaotic period preceding the establishment of the Romanovs. Such a work was bound to draw the attention of the censors, and Musorgsky's two versions of the opera also led to various 'improved' versions that conflated scenes from each. Despite all...

Certain infections have a particular impact on the peripheral nerves as part of their normal disease process. Some infectious effects are predominately on the motor nerves such as polio (currently heading for eradication); these can cause weakness or paralysis. Other infections affect or invade the sensory nerves including leprosy and the common viral infection herpes zoster which initially presen...

We sometimes hear that 'we know more about Mars than the deep ocean', but is that true? Exploring the deep ocean is a recent enterprise, made possible by new technology in the past two centuries, but what we now know about the dark depths is as remarkable as the unknowns that remain. This lecture examines the deep-sea discoveries that have transformed our understanding of our planet, and...

Berners-Lee's World Wide Web (WWW) was not his original aim, which was closer to what we now call the Semantic or Data Web (SW): documents and images where the system itself 'understands' its content as the WWW certainly does not, any more than a television knows what it is showing. Professor Wilks will describe the Semantic Web and its origin in annotation methods from the humaniti...

What happens when we listen to music that incarnates a divine presence? From our early ancestors, whose listening in the caves of Europe 40 millennia ago opened up gateways to other worlds, sacred places have developed special acoustics for spiritual encounters across religious traditions from Buddhism to Christianity. That means special modes of listening, and unique musical repertoires: simultan...

London was crucially dependent on continental Europe for its economic resilience in the mid-sixteenth century, and Sir Thomas Gresham's fortune piggy-backed off the special relationship with Antwerp. But the Reformation put the relationship under real strain. This wasn't a sixteenth-century Brexit (the division was within Christendom), but it posed similar challenges. How did England cop...

The 2019 Annual Lord Mayor's Event The 2019 Annual Lord Mayor's Gresham Lecture will explore the so called 'digital skills crisis' and question whether this may present an opportunity? As the digital era unfolds and the future demands for talent become evident, what are the implications for our system of education? Could the future provide for a more balanced approach to skills...

One of the biggest advances in modern technology has been the development of GPS systems which allow us to find our position to very high precision. GPS is just the latest advance in the science of navigation, which has had a profound effect on human civilisation. This talk will show how mathematics has played a vital role in making navigation as accurate as it is today and the impact that this ha...

At 3.00 pm on Christmas Eve, millions of listeners around the world will tune in to the live radio relay of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the Chapel of King's College, Cambridge. In this lecture, Jeremy Summerly reverently and enthusiastically celebrates the centenary of the world's most famous carol service and, with the help of live musical examples from the St Luke's...

Executive pay is a controversial topic that is arguably the primary cause behind mistrust in business. Various remedies have been proposed but, just like in medicine, diagnosis precedes treatment. Many of the concerns are based on hand-picked examples and myths rather than rigorous data. Evidence will be presented on which aspects of pay are working well and which are indeed dysfunctional, and on...

When Daniel Defoe rode through the Lake District in the early 18th century, he described the area as 'the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England.' But for Victorians such as Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, the Lakes offered a landscape of supreme beauty. How did this change come about? Jonathan Bate will follow in the footsteps of the 18th-century in...

Most of us have witnessed or had personal dealings with violent people. Why do they act as they do? How have British and American commentators during the past two centuries understood violent behaviour? The media incites anxieties about personal vulnerability; widespread innumeracy leads many people to misread crime-statistics; and an expectation of greater civility makes its breach so much more f...

The consultation is the focal point of medicine. A clinician and a patient, held together in a relationship of care, collaborate in identifying that patient's needs and finding a solution. Scientific knowledge and clinical skill only make sense in the context of that interaction. Each consultation is unique, a close-up live performance with a very small audience. After describing key elements...