Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/MB73qh4pIYM Offsets, politely called carbon credit markets, are essential to many net-zero strategies, yet remain highly controversial. They seem an efficient solution for “unavoidable” emissions – but who decides what is unavoidable? This lecture will discuss several plans to achieve our climate goals, from emission compensation schemes to tackling fossil fuels by planting trees. This lecture was recorded by Myles Allen on 4th March 2025 at Barna...
Mar 28, 2025•52 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/W5EKhMWdjP4 In this lecture we will discuss a hierarchy of rights. Is the American First Amendment the most important of all, given its five foundational rights – no establishment of religion; free exercise of religion; freedom of speech and the press; the right peaceably to assemble; the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. How might this apply to the UK? This lecture was recorded by Clive Stafford Smith on 27th February ...
Mar 21, 2025•59 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/TRCkgDWKTdY Mapping the stars is, perhaps, the oldest of astronomical pursuits, but it has been perfected by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which is providing an exquisitely precise map showing the positions and movements of the nearest two billion stars. Starting with a history of mapping the cosmos, this lecture describes the new and dynamic history of our Milky Way galaxy that results, and will move to explaining the dynamic and grow...
Mar 18, 2025•45 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/7mW52bW23go It has become something of a cliché to say that data is the new oil. That isn’t the full story. For centuries it has proved itself to be infinitely re-usable. It has enabled the creation and reinforcement of collective memory. It has been documented in innumerable formats, from maps to databases, taxonomies, and infographics. We make sense of the world through the technology we use to process and visualise data. This lecture is an expl...
Mar 14, 2025•50 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/IAilwM_WdbI Until the nineteenth century, the favourite ancient pagan gods in Western culture were those related to human qualities and activities. During that century, especially in Britain, attention switched to a horned divinity associated with the countryside and wild nature, usually personified as the Greek Pan. This lecture explores how and why this happened, and the impact on British culture, when the full subversive potential of this deity...
Mar 11, 2025•46 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/Et8_myknHq8 Most of us rarely think about plant immunity. But, like us, plants can distinguish between different pathogens, trigger a ‘bespoke’ immune response and retain a memory of past infections to boost future immunity. However, plant immune systems also exhibit enviable features like the ability to inherit immunological memory from a parent, or to warn distant individuals of an impending pathogen attack. This lecture investigates how they do...
Mar 11, 2025•46 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/gQdabAQT3Jw Sophocles’ Antigone refers to “unwritten laws,” as does Thucydides’ Pericles. From the late fifth century BCE, the idea that laws are more effective when learned by memory and observation than when put into writing, forms a distinctive current in political reflections. Plutarch would even claim that the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus had prohibited the writing down of his laws. This lecture will present Greek authors’ reflections on the int...
Mar 04, 2025•47 min
As we navigate towns and cities, public spaces are all around us. These offer a respite from our often-busy routines. Public spaces are more than just the leftover areas between buildings; they depend on how interests are designed and negotiated, and its success is measured by the interactions that take place in it: the passage of the sun, the root of trees, and even the way they are used by children. However, these areas are constantly threatened by the way local and commercial funding invest i...
Feb 28, 2025•37 min
The UK's income inequality has remained stable since the 1990s, but household wealth has nearly doubled, mainly driven by soaring house prices. This has widened the wealth gap between generations, with younger people less likely to own homes. Furthermore, weak income growth since the mid-2000s has disproportionately affected younger cohorts. This lecture unpacks these economic trends to reveal how they have created tensions between generations by exacerbating disparities in their respective livi...
Feb 28, 2025•51 min
The discharge of raw sewage into rivers, and the financial problems of major water companies, have become serious political and social concerns for the public. British cities have faced similar challenges in the past, most notoriously with the ‘Great Stink’ in London in 1858 that led to the construction of Bazalgette’s sewer. Consequently, many cities took utilities into public ownership in the late nineteenth century in what is termed ‘gas and water socialism’. Why did this happen, and why were...
Feb 27, 2025•58 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/7pvF4FdbYWU This lecture explores how information asymmetry leads to adverse selection and moral hazard, with a focus on their presence in financial markets and institutions such as insurance and credit markets. It will examine how regulations intended to solve a particular set of issues might exacerbate problems, potentially resulting in financial crises or other disastrous events. This lecture was recorded by Raghavendra Rau on 20th January 2025...
Feb 21, 2025•57 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/gWJmpSO4WZI Finance involves a group of people attempting to make rational decisions on valuation, but people are complicated. People can be self-interested, they can make mistakes, or, in stark contrast, they can act altruistically. This lecture will introduce the concept of agency problems in the finance sector, focusing on the conflicts that arise between different groups of stakeholders. It will discuss examples of fraud, insider trading and o...
Feb 14, 2025•54 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/bKMV8i9Mq40 The brain is mostly organised in small modular regions connected to each other. Typically, each region performs different cognitive tasks, from image processing to language. This organisation leads us to model the brain as a network, the ‘brain connectome’. This fundamental view of the brain has become a central paradigm for neurosciences linking topological properties of networks to brain functions. This lecture presents ideas from gr...
Feb 11, 2025•56 min
Sound and music hold a strange and powerful role in film, TV and video games, aiding narrative and emotional impact. They can even exist in the world of ‘the film’ – heard by the characters – or in the world of the audience. Music can even break the fourth wall, travelling through and blurring these conventionally separate worlds. By examining films through history from Blazing Saddles, Elf, The Truman Show to Birdman, we explore this ‘fantastical gap’ and its transformative effect on the audien...
Feb 07, 2025•55 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/LUyFLOUi-D4 This lecture traces the history of this famous series by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, starting from its conception in 1947. It describes the research and writing of the original forty-six volumes for England and the extension of the books to Scotland, Wales and Ireland. It then assesses their significance alongside a reflection on the 2024 achievement of the full updating of the English series. This lecture was recorded by Charles O'Brien on ...
Feb 04, 2025•59 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/t6kkq6dI6hc When and why do written laws emerge in ancient societies? This lecture will consider these questions in light of evidence including the law code of Hammurabi; the earliest attestation of written laws in Greek (found in Dreros on Crete); and the full-blown commitment to written laws by the Athenian lawgiver Solon. Such cases will be used to explore how writing bears on the the functions of law more generally, in light of debates in cont...
Jan 31, 2025•42 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/pXoU-nZmhn8 Despite its familiarity, the Sun is a very different presence from the friendly yellow circle in children's paintings. Our star is a broiling mass of plasma, with its powerful magnetic fields, twisted by its rotation, capable of producing dramatic events of spectacular beauty and power. Using results from NASA's Parker Solar Probe - the fastest moving human-made object ever - and ESA's Solar Orbiter, this spectacular lecture takes a ne...
Jan 24, 2025•53 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/lQBdqGrfWKU Over half the world’s largest companies have a net zero strategy. But what stops “Science-based Targets” from becoming box-ticking exercises too often immune to environmental scrutiny? Instead of decarbonizing companies and financial portfolios, this lecture will discuss the need to focus on decarbonizing products and services themselves so that companies must explain how they plan to stop what they sell from causing global warming. Th...
Jan 22, 2025•56 min
Recently, the UK has got into a muddle over how to approach Scottish independence and Brexit. What can we learn from the U.S. which took much of its system from the theory behind the U.K. structure: the King as the Executive; a Legislature made up of the House of Commons balanced by the House of Lords; and the judiciary? And what role should the judiciary play? Have the British got confused about the notion of ‘Parliamentary Supremacy’, deciding that this meant that Parliament was supreme not ju...
Jan 17, 2025•43 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/0ZK1Y1QnFDg This looks at how and why a particular form of the non-Christian divine feminine came to take over the Western European imagination from the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was a great goddess representing the natural world, or the moon and stars, or both. It traces the development of belief in the importance of this being, and her impact not only on creative literature but upon the developing disciplines of ancient history a...
Jan 15, 2025•47 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/d6Ao4KmGXBc Artificial Intelligence is a very recent invention…or is it? Humans have been fascinated by intelligent machines for thousands of years. Some exist only in our collective imagination, in art and literature. Others have seen the light of day as mechanical marvels, although a few were later exposed as elaborate frauds. The robots of today might not be what our ancestors imagined. This lecture argues that the relationship between humans a...
Jan 10, 2025•49 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/f6Z9L2dnxSA This lecture explores the emergence of the "femme au piano" genre in 19th-century French painting, depicted by artists like Renoir, Van Gogh, and Matisse. What suddenly made this topic so popular, and what does it tell us about the role of women in music-making at the time? Tracing the genre's roots from the Italian Renaissance clavichord depictions to Vermeer’s Dutch domestic scenes, and 18th-century harpsichord portraits. Discover ho...
Jan 07, 2025•52 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/wpF0oB9Mz-0 The US Constitution, both in its structural element and the Bill of Rights, reflect a catalogue of colonial complaints about the British system as well as centuries of evolution in the law. In general terms, contrary to the slightly complacent attitude of the British legal authorities. This lecture will demonstrate, most of the original complaints still hold true. This lecture was recorded by Clive Stafford Smith on 7th November 2024 a...
Jan 03, 2025•43 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/JCTgxcPu78I The human immune system rivals the brain in its complexity. Billions of cells coordinate their activity with amazing precision to protect us from infection. Immune cells can respond to millions of different pathogens within seconds and yet rarely respond to a false alarm. This lecture explores how cells achieve this, what happens when they go wrong and how you can keep your own immune system in top condition. This lecture was recorded ...
Dec 31, 2024•40 min
This lecture will explore corporate governance mechanisms designed to address agency problems, including executive compensation, boards of directors, and shareholder activism. Additionally, it will examine how solutions addressing one agency problem might create another. This lecture was recorded by Raghavendra Rau on 5th November 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London Raghu is the Mercers School Memorial Professor of Business He is also the Sir Evelyn de Rothschild Professor of Finance at Cambridge...
Dec 27, 2024•1 hr 1 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/LW0DLhTxfCE This festive lecture explores the unusual roots of the song ‘White Christmas’ and its role in establishing the concept of the commercial Christmas song. It will explain how the song’s release during the summer months hints at how its potential as an enduring seasonal classic was not anticipated, and then examine how the music and lyrics helped it to resonate in a time of war. The lecture will also consider Berlin’s patriotism and his a...
Dec 24, 2024•54 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/VeJxEXZfT2Y This lecture analyses the ‘psychedelic era’ of the Beatles, from Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band to Let it Be, a period of staggering musical invention and experimentalism. We explore the mechanics behind the magic, untangling the layers of harmony, melody, lyrics, structure and technology, and how these all combine in ways both accessible and ground-breaking. This ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ pulls back the curtain on these timeless tr...
Dec 20, 2024•59 min
Shakespeare lived in a period of exciting mathematical innovations, from arithmetic to astronomy, and from probability to music. Remarkably, many of those innovations are mentioned, or at least hinted at, in his plays. Rob Eastaway will explore the surprising ways in which mathematical ideas connect with Shakespeare and reveals that the playwright could be as creative with numbers as he was with words. Along the way you will discover surprising new mathematical insights on the Elizabethan world....
Dec 17, 2024•43 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/pP3FzqYcMOA We communicate when we have information to share. The development of signals from signs visible over short distances to wireless transfer of billions of data-heavy messages worldwide is full of surprising characters, none more so than the Hollywood starlet who made Wi-Fi and GPS possible and received public recognition only in the final few years of her life. This lecture traces the development of technologies for messaging and signals...
Dec 13, 2024•50 min
Watch the Q&A session here: https://youtu.be/6hEOINeTYTU As the leaders of the oil and gas industry flew into Houston for CERAWeek, 2024, oil was over $80 per barrel and demand higher than ever. There was little discussion of “transitioning away from fossil fuels” as agreed at COP28 in Dubai. In the run-up to COP29, this lecture will set out the critical need to change the narrative, so those with the ability and resources to solve the climate problem have less incentive to shuffle responsib...
Dec 10, 2024•51 min
