Vertical banded gastroplasty surgery (or stomach stapling) has drawn attention in recent decades to the hidden, but unruly, stomach. This organ has been the focus of weight-control regimes for centuries, however. This lecture looks at nineteenth-century fads involving stomachs, including the medical prescription of tapeworms that were supposed to live in a person's stomach and "eat" food on their behalf. It also explores ideas about the relationship between a person's stomach and their personali...
Mar 19, 2020•43 min
For a decade after the execution of Charles I the Stuart courts were based in the Low Countries and France. Always short of money, but determined to maintain splendour and dignity, Charles II rented a series of mansions and used them as the headquarters of the exiled monarchy. These hitherto unknown royal 'palaces' became the nursery of courtly fashion and etiquette where the king and his courtiers developed tastes that were to fundamentally fashion the art and architecture of Restoration Englan...
Mar 18, 2020•55 min
This lecture explores how digital landscape modelling can help unlock the secrets of Britain's ancient pathways. Focusing on "corpse roads", pathways taken by coffin bearers over the countryside before the Enclosures, it discusses the significance of such routes, and how a mapped understanding of factors such as slope, elevation and distance can shed light on the stories behind them. It concludes by reflecting on what Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can offer landscape archaeology more gene...
Mar 12, 2020•56 min
In the age of exploration, Catholic missionaries fanned out across the world, meeting with extraordinary success but also extraordinary opposition: nowhere more so than in Japan, where the fast-growing Catholic community was brutally suppressed in the early seventeenth century. This lecture will explore how this bloody crisis shaped myths of Japanese cruelty and cults of Catholic sanctity in Europe, while also precipitating the 250-year 'closing' of Japan and the intense piety of a small remnant...
Mar 11, 2020•52 min
Mathematics and art are more similar than is commonly thought. Each is concerned with the process of being highly creative with abstract objects and of producing everlasting work of great aesthetic beauty. Early art inspired by geometry, symmetry, numbers and algebra will be considered, as will the role maths played in the art of the Renaissance. Mathematics' influence on other artistic forms will be explored, taking us up to the work of Escher and how this inspired the study of Fractals. A lect...
Mar 10, 2020•54 min
This lecture provides an insider's brutally honest guide to what it's like to be a self-employed barrister - the highs and lows of the career, the work behind the scenes that makes a difference to outcomes in court, and the art of persuasion in it. What are the ways of working that can make a difference to success and failure, for the client and to professional development for the barrister? What transferable skills does the advocate have looking at life Beyond the Bar? A lecture by Jo Delahunty...
Mar 05, 2020•58 min
In the 3rd century BCE, the Sicilian polymath Archimedes significantly advanced human understanding of mathematics, geometry and astronomy. By applying his discoveries to practical problems and physical phenomena, he became the founder of statics and hydrostatics, demonstrating how levers work and in turn creating unprecedented war machines such as "Archimedes' claw" and "heat-ray". A lecture by Edith Hall 5 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gre...
Mar 05, 2020•49 min
Exercise, diet, rest, and sleep are sometimes seen as optional extras that are desirable if you have the time. They are also topics about which many myths and half-truths abound. This talk will provide rigorous evidence on the importance of mental and physical wellness for not only quality of life but also career success and productivity at work. It will also provide practical tips, based on behavioural economics, on how busy professionals can find time to invest in them, and turn them into effo...
Mar 04, 2020•55 min
The laws of physics may be stated in simple and elegant ways that can be made easy to demonstrate and understand on their own. What is immensely hard to predict from first principles are the consequences of the combinations of these laws acting in concert together, and the richness of the exotic phenomena that we can observe to evolve in the night sky. This talk will examine why laws are simple and how the combination of simple laws can lead to rich complexity. A lecture by Katherine Blundell 4 ...
Mar 04, 2020•56 min
Is gender equality a key factor in tackling climate change? Many think so, and in this lecture Environment Professor Jacqueline McGlade will explain why in relation to UN Sustainable Development Goal 5 is to 'achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls'. When women are empowered and educated the evidence shows that they have more control over their lives and dedicate more resources to health and education than men. But does gender also influence the way that environmental issues are ...
Mar 03, 2020•45 min
During the last thirty years of his life, Isaac Newton lived in London, where as head of the Royal Mint he moved in wealthy aristocratic circles, exerted substantial political influence, and profited financially from imperial trade and exploitation. To illustrate these themes, this lecture examines an oil painting by William Hogarth illustrating a children's performance of John Dryden's play The Indian Emperour, a dramatized version of the tussle for power between Hernando Cortez and Montezuma. ...
Feb 26, 2020•54 min
'St Thomas has adorned…London by his rising and Canterbury by his setting'. This lecture will explore how the influence of Thomas Becket permeated city life in medieval London until Henry VIII ordered the destruction of his shrine and the removal of his name from all liturgical books. It will include consideration of the first stone bridge over the Thames made possible by offerings in the chapel dedicated to him; the hospital in Southwark; and the Becket family home in Cheapside (later the hall ...
Feb 25, 2020•54 min
Two hundred years ago a group of conspirators assembled in a Cato Street stable in order to plan the massacre of the whole British cabinet at dinner and bring about revolution. Had they succeeded they would have achieved modern Britain's first terrorist atrocity. They were, however, moved by hunger and by democratic and secular principles, so are comparisons with today's terrorists appropriate? The lecture discusses their identities, motives and impact, and the forgotten fact that their failure ...
Feb 20, 2020•48 min
Scientific knowledge is advancing at dizzying speed and each day brings new breakthroughs in medical understanding. Unprecedented advances are opening possibilities that only a decade ago would have seemed like science fiction. Yet a deep anxiety pervades our society, raising questions about the wisdom and motives of experts and the implications of new technology. This lecture uses examples from cutting-edge science and medicine to explore the ethical questions which advances in robotics, person...
Feb 19, 2020•1 hr
Diaghilev seemed to be the nemesis of traditional ballet, but he was ready to draw on the rigorous classical schooling of his dancers whenever it suited him. Once ugliness had been established as a legitimate option, he was happy to bring back beauty on many occasions alongside the new neoclassical music that he had begun to promote. Stravinsky and Balanchine's Apollo was one such ballet, which also managed to give Greek antiquity the new solemnity, stripped of the exoticism of earlier "Greek" b...
Feb 18, 2020•1 hr 3 min
Is the clitoris simply a female version of the male penis? Many scientists and biologists in the past thought so. It is only in recent decades that the physiology of the clitoris has become understood. What can debates about these two organs tell us about scientific knowledge and gender identities? How have ideas about the "ideal penis" changed since the eighteenth century? What effect have these shifts had on the way men and women know their bodies? A lecture by Joanna Bourke 13 February The tr...
Feb 13, 2020•45 min
Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in both men and women, but kills the most people through a combination of being common and currently having much less effective treatment. Both treatment and prevention are currently improving, slowly. Mesothelioma, a lung-associated cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, is now the commonest occupational cancer. While treatment for these cancers is still at an early stage, they are largely preventable through public health measures. A lecture by Chri...
Feb 12, 2020•50 min
In 2013 Sir Michael Barber declared that "An Avalanche is Coming" and that universities would be swept away by new digital technologies. Six years later nothing seems to have happened, yet there has been change. In this lecture we will review what is commonly called e-learning, including MOOCs, SPOOCs, flipping and DIYU, and see if there are any themes which emerge from the buzzword bingo that is digital learning. Some of it is fascinating, some of it has deep implications for privacy and some o...
Feb 11, 2020•58 min
Mathematics is often thought of as being a dry and logical subject, and its conclusions free from the vagaries of fashion and misconception. However this is far from the truth. Mathematical misunderstandings, or perhaps a misunderstanding of mathematical ideas and conclusions, can permeate the public consciousness, and once there survive for a long time. This lecture looks at the mythology that has gathered around the Golden Ratio, and also consider the fairness of cake-cutting, and changing cho...
Feb 11, 2020•56 min
This lecture examines the work of Hugo de Vries, a Dutch botanist who was one of the first to claim that science would allow plants and animals to be designed to order. It also looks at the early twentieth-century 'Station for Experimental Evolution' in New York, and at the utopian vision of Charlotte Gilman Perkins' Herland (1915), a novel describing a lost world populated by women that took the form of a perfect garden, whose wonderful plants and lack of men were both explained by de Vries' th...
Feb 10, 2020•47 min
Bach's Art of Fugue, Mozart's Requiem, Schubert's Symphony No. 8, Alban Berg's opera Lulu, and Elgar's 3rd Symphony are all pieces that are famously incomplete. This lecture examines the fascination surrounding works that are left unfinished at their composers' deaths. It also looks at the urge that certain of us have to complete these uncompleted works, however unwisely and however unbidden. 'Don't let anyone tinker with it', said Elgar; but several have anyway, and with thought-provoking resul...
Feb 06, 2020•49 min
Europe's Wars of Religion were fought against entire populations, and were punctuated by events remembered as atrocities: such as the siege of Leiden in 1573-4 or, most notoriously, the St Bartholomew's Day Massacres in France in 1572. This lecture will ask how these events came to be so notorious, how and why they were remembered on each side, and how they shaped the history of civil conflict and ideas of coexistence and nationhood in the societies that endured them. A lecture by Alec Ryrie 5 F...
Feb 05, 2020•51 min
The Hubble Space Telescope is rapidly approaching its 30th birthday, and we will explore some of the amazing insights it has provided on the beauty of our universe and our place in it. But as it approaches retirement, its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope is under construction. The speaker is a space scientist who has worked on the Webb's instruments; she will take the audience on a tour of both systems, showing how they can give us an understanding of the life cycle of our universe ri...
Feb 04, 2020•46 min
More council houses were built in Britain than any other country in the 20th century. By the 1970s, one in three households were council tenants. Yet after 1980 £100bn worth of council housing was sold off. How did this expansion come about, what changed - and what lasting effects did the rise and fall of council housing have on our politics, society and economy? Is it now time to reconsider our attitude to public housing? A lecture by Steve Schifferes 3 February The transcript and downloadable ...
Feb 03, 2020•55 min
Albert Einstein's mind-boggling ideas revolutionized our view of the universe. From relativity to curved spacetime, from the Big Bang to black holes and gravitational waves, nothing could be further from our everyday experience than such esoteric concepts, right? Wrong! This lecture will offer a surprising exploration of the wide-ranging consequences of Einstein's ideas, and how they shape our everyday lives. A lecture by Roberto Trotta 3 February The transcript and downloadable versions of the ...
Feb 03, 2020•44 min
Advances in medicine allow us to sustain life for longer, but at what cost and at whose choice? Why might the court intervene when a devout Jehovah Witness parent refuses a life-saving blood transfer to their child? Where does religious devotion end and unsafe thought begin? What about cultural and spiritual beliefs that clash with UK 'norms'? Has the law has kept up with the changing society it regulates? A lecture by Jo Delahunty 30 January The transcript and downloadable versions of the lectu...
Jan 30, 2020•57 min
The shapes of the orbits of many planets and comets orbiting their mother-ship stars are well known to be circles or ellipses (an idea that was explained by Isaac Newton). But we now understand that, depending on the history and the energy of the orbiting system, other geometric shapes are possible and indeed frequently observed. This talk will explore how simple changes to the circumstances can make dramatic differences to the shapes of the orbits, all of which belong to a special family of sha...
Jan 29, 2020•49 min
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 animated combatants on both sides, generating two Americas that were barely comprehensible to each other, and how the truce dec...
Jan 28, 2020•40 min
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 to show that these films are as rich and complex as art in any medium. A lecture by Ian Christie 27 January T...
Jan 27, 2020•56 min
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 The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College websi...
Jan 23, 2020•57 min
