Sound investment decisions are critical for our long-term financial future. But psychological biases can lead investors to make costly mistakes - overconfidence can cause them to trade too much, and the reluctance to take a loss can encourage them to throw good money after bad. This talk will look at the common investment mistakes that citizens make, and the evidence for how these mistakes affect returns. It will give simple practical tips to overcome your biases and make better financial decisi...
Dec 08, 2020•59 min
Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer in both men and women. A substantial proportion of bowel cancer is preventable. The outlook depends strongly on how advanced it is at diagnosis; caught early the outlook is good, so screening is a major part of the public health response. Other cancers of the gut are changing incidence; stomach cancer rates are falling, while oesophageal cancer is increasing in men. This lecture will consider the prevention and treatment of these cancers. A lecture by...
Dec 07, 2020•58 min
How do we investigate violent and unexpected deaths at the inquest? Who investigates? When do deaths get referred to the Coroner? Are inquests non-adversarial and inquisitorial? When do you have a jury? What are findings, determinations and conclusions (aka verdicts)? Can you appeal? Is the process transparent to the public and user friendly? Fit for purpose or in need of reform? A lecture by Leslie Thomas QC 3 December The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from t...
Dec 03, 2020•1 hr 11 min
Most English people initially saw the Reformation as an unexpected catastrophe, wrenching their religious lives out of shape, and stripping their communities of resources they had naively believed belonged to them. This lecture looks at how this dramatic change was pushed through despite formidable opposition; how most English people eventually reconciled themselves to the new reality; and how England's persistent Catholic minority reinvented itself for a new age. A lecture by Alec Ryrie 2 Decem...
Dec 02, 2020•56 min
China's media provide a window into the Chinese mind, as the country asserts itself in the world as a great power. What do Chinese people think is the purpose of life? What matters most to them? In what do they believe? How do officials and journalists explain their responsibilities? This lecture will use examples - from a report on Coronavirus to a popular soap about rural life - to explore these questions and compare them with Western beliefs. A lecture by Hugo de Burgh 1 December The transcri...
Dec 01, 2020•52 min
When Darwin finally published the On the Origin of Species, he tried to avoid controversy by ignoring human origins. Yet evolution was soon being attacked as the godless 'monkey theory'. However, while some condemned Darwin's book, others found a form of consolation in it, an alternative to an orthodox Christian faith some found hard to maintain. As Darwin tried to make sense of the death of his favourite daughter, Annie, many of his readers found unexpected consolation for their own losses in D...
Nov 30, 2020•51 min
There is no need to introduce Rachmaninov, considered by many to be the greatest composer-pianist in history and the creator of several famous items on the "classical hit parade". But his very popularity has always detracted from the value of his music in the eyes of scholars, who tend to view his music as merely middlebrow. This is a serious misunderstanding of his art, and has left the complexity and subtlety of his music underappreciated. The secrets of his immersive and compelling music stil...
Nov 26, 2020•1 hr 9 min
Plato the Athenian was the philosopher who founded the Academy and whose brilliant writings are the foundation texts of the entire western philosophical tradition. A student of Socrates, his dialogues use the Socratic method of question-and-answer to probe some of the most important questions humans have ever asked about our situation. What is true knowledge? How do we distinguish it from falsehood or mere opinion? Is the human soul immortal, and if so, what happens after death? How can we best ...
Nov 26, 2020•55 min
Ill health has always been concentrated in particular places; tackling these pockets of ill health is an essential role for public health. These may be driven by environmental factors, demography, deprivation and healthcare provision. In the UK, the geography of ill health has shifted widely over time and continues to do so. Specific areas have particular health challenges, including coastal towns, rural districts and inner city areas. This lecture will consider the shifting geography of ill hea...
Nov 25, 2020•55 min
Digital technology from the early 1990s onwards produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question will then be: what does it all mean? Solving the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy (which together account for 95% of the universe) and finding life elsewhere in the universe won't be possible without statistical and data analysis methods that ha...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Digital technology from the early 1990s onwards produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question will then be: what does it all mean? Solving the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy (which together account for 95% of the universe) and finding life elsewhere in the universe won't be possible without statistical and data analysis methods that ha...
Nov 23, 2020•44 min
The Brothers Grimm's tale of Snow White has been retold dozens of times in print and the cinema over the past two centuries. A central character is the Evil Queen, Snow White's malevolent stepmother, who tries to kill her with the help of the occult. Aging women have often been portrayed as Evil Women. What do portrayals of the Evil Queen tell us about witchcraft, fears of the power of aging women, and the valorisation of youth, beauty, and domesticity? A lecture by Joanna Bourke 19 November The...
Nov 19, 2020•46 min
The 2020 Alfred Wiener Holocaust Memorial Lecture Series 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the most lethal of all Nazi camps. This lecture looks back at its final months, from the time the camp reached its murderous peak, after the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary, to the arrival of Soviet soldiers in January 1945. But liberation did not put an end to Nazi murder - it continued elsewhere, until the final German defeat in spring 1945. The lecture follows the fa...
Nov 18, 2020•45 min
Accounts of occasional celestial spectacular events in past centuries have provided crucial information for modern-day astrophysicists. One such example is the so-called Great Eruption of Eta Carinae which was for a time in the mid 19th century the third brightest object in the night sky. Interpretation of the spectacular structure of this so-called supernova imposter would be hard without information from eye-witnesses of days gone by. A lecture by Katherine Blundell OBE 18 November The transcr...
Nov 18, 2020•1 hr 6 min
It has been known since antiquity that there are simple "harmonic" relationships between notes that sound appealing together. This lecture introduces the mathematics of pitch, scales, and just temperament. The pitch of a sound is not its only important property. The same note, played on different instruments, can have a very different quality of sound. We will explore the mathematics governing the relationships between these qualities of sounds, and the shape and dimensions of the instruments us...
Nov 17, 2020•1 hr 1 min
THE 2020 PETER NAILOR MEMORIAL LECTURE Drones, or unmanned air systems, are changing the face of war in the 21st century, for combatants and civilians. We are used to a history of the RAF based on a narrative of the 'bravery of the few' with fighter pilot missions in the Battle of Britain seeing a mortality rate of 20% and a staggeringly higher rate for 'the many' of Bomber Command (over 50% of aircrew died on operations). But in the UK over the last fifteen years, an increasing number of air mi...
Nov 11, 2020•51 min
How has Covid-19 re-shaped our ideas about what we owe society? The lockdown has had a terrible impact on the economic prospects of young people - and the elderly have suffered from high mortality in care homes. Choices have to be made between the generations. Should people save and pay for their own pensions, care in ill-health and old age as an individual responsibility? Or is it a societal duty that should be funded by compulsory payment of taxes? The role of collective versus individual resp...
Nov 10, 2020•56 min
What is meant by 'love' between human and nonhuman animals? Why is sex with animals such a taboo? It is only in very recent years that some people have begun to undermine the absolute prohibition on zoosexuality. Are their arguments dangerous, perverted, or simply wrongheaded? What does it mean to love nonhuman animals? More pertinently: what does it mean to love? This book launch will look at the history of debates about human sexual encounters with other species. A lecture by Joanna Bourke 9 N...
Nov 09, 2020•41 min
Father and son, William and Robert Cecil, not only dominated politics for much of Elizabeth I and James I reign but dominated architectural fashion. Building a series of spectacular houses, they, and not the monarchy, were the great palace builders of their age. Burghley and Hatfield remain, but those that are lost were even more extraordinary in both their form and in how they were used. A lecture by Simon Thurley CBE 4 November The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are availa...
Nov 04, 2020•1 hr 7 min
The story of the deep, biogeophysical planetary connections and how these are intensifying the effects of climate change and economic development, is told through personal research and expeditions to remote locations across the world (including some that were previously unexplored). This will take us on a journey to uncover connections at all levels, including at a molecular clock level, in the biochemistry of plant toxins and medicines, and in the diurnal and migratory behaviours of plants and ...
Nov 03, 2020•38 min
Charles Edward Stuart ('Bonnie Prince Charlie') is one of the most recognisable and romanticised figures of British history. Born in Rome as a Catholic prince on 31 December 1720, he led the Jacobite Rising of 1745, which came closer than anyone expected to changing Great Britain irrevocably. Professor Pittock will ask what kind of man was Charles, what were his ideas and day to day life like, what might have happened if he had won in 1745, and what even in defeat his legacy changed for Britain ...
Nov 02, 2020•1 hr
Air pollution, the usefulness of trees, ideas for a green belt are not concerns we associate with the 1600s. But John Evelyn, writer, diarist and gardener, was unusual. His thinking in Fumifugium (1661) about air quality, and Sylva (1664) about trees, seems astonishingly close to our own today. Evelyn's preoccupation with apparently contemporary environmental problems, and his suggested solutions, are a remarkable legacy and one to be celebrated in 2020. A lecture by Gillian Darley OBE 29 Octobe...
Oct 29, 2020•1 hr 1 min
How does fiction make itself seem like fact? Professor John Mullan begins where novels begin: with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which showed every novel that followed how to make a 'strange surprising' story seem entirely 'probable' (the word that eighteenth-century pioneers of fiction liked to use). He will explore the tradition of factuality in the English novel, ending with the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro and examples of recent auto-fiction. A lecture by John Mullan 28 October The transcript and dow...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Well-trained eyes can be remarkably useful for capturing light curves of evolving objects in the cosmos, even contributing to modern research programmes. This lecture will consider how stargazing with imperfect, non-linear human eyes can accomplish such a feat, and the important contributions that this makes to elucidating the phenomena of nova detonations in our galaxy. A lecture by Katherine Blundell 28 October The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gres...
Oct 28, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Psychological studies show that humans overweight tangible factors and underweight intangible ones when making decisions. This talk shows how these biases affect the stock market - it focuses excessively on short-term profit, but ignores environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors. As a result, all investors - not just ESG investors - can profit by using intangible factors that are not fully valued by the market. It also explains how investors can uncover tell-tale signals of CEOs' confid...
Oct 27, 2020•1 hr 1 min
Caribbean migrants not only came to work in the buses and hospitals. Many - such as the novelists George Lamming and Sam Selvon - came to Britain in search of opportunities to be paid to think and write. Others such as Stuart Hall, Vidia Naipaul and Walter Rodney came as students. London also received a stream of de facto political refugees from the Caribbean and the United States, such C.L.R. James, the poet and publisher John LaRose, and Claudia Jones, the first theorist of 'intersectionality'...
Oct 26, 2020•58 min
This lecture examines the centuries long presence of the African diaspora as an integral part of Britain's history since Roman times. Unfortunately, this history is still too often ignored, its promotion limited only to October. Attempts to restrict it only to the period following the arrival of the Windrush in 1948, lead to a distortion of the past which has serious consequences for all of us. A lecture by Hakim Adi 22 October The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are availabl...
Oct 22, 2020•1 hr 9 min
This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by D'Maris Coffman 21 October The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/reserve-currencies Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with ...
Oct 21, 2020•42 min
This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by Andrew Lewis-Pye 21 October The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/cryptocurrencies Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with a...
Oct 21, 2020•41 min
This event, jointly hosted with the British Society for the History of Mathematics, will focus upon the relationship between mathematics and money, from coinage through to cryptocurrencies. A lecture by Norman Biggs 21 October The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/ Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so...
Oct 21, 2020•37 min
