International negotiations concerning our environment such as on climate and biodiversity, often put the scientific case behind economic and political interests, with potentially disastrous consequences. What does that mean for human prosperity and even survival? Can the tension between science, policy and diplomacy be resolved? What would a new form of environmental justice that internalised nature within economic and social rights look like? A lecture by Jacqueline McGlade, 27 April The transc...
Apr 27, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Where do we get our mathematical symbols from? Why is the set of integers called ℤ ? When was the equals sign first used? How about zero? Good notation tends to catch on quickly, whereas bad notation can obscure beautiful theory. The lecture explores how the introduction of new notation has paved the way for new leaps in understanding, and considers some mathematical quirks of language, such as what the number 4 in English has in common with the number 11 in Russian. A lecture by Sarah Hart, 27 ...
Apr 27, 2021•1 hr 8 min
"In space, no one can hear you scream". The chillingly accurate tagline of Ridley Scott's 1979 space horror classic, Alien, is often belied in science fiction movies, forgetting that in space there is no air, and hence no sound. Space today is terrifyingly silent. But it wasn't always thus: the early universe was filled with hot plasma in which sound waves could travel. The cosmos was quivering with the aftershocks of the Big Bang. It is one of the greatest achievements of modern physics that we...
Apr 26, 2021•41 min
The criminalisation of religious speech before the ordinary courts in England began in 1676. Although the law on blasphemy was finally abolished in 2008, many of the troubling aspects of the old law remain in the form of the offence of incitement to religious hatred. This lecture will explore the current and future scope of the law of incitement to religious hatred in light of our long and troubled history of dealing with religious speech. A lecture by Ivan Hare QC, 22 April The transcript and d...
Apr 22, 2021•49 min
This illustrated lecture marks 150 years since Dickens's death by reflecting on the nature of his creative genius and his legacy. It examines the theatrical performance of Dickens's public readings in relation to his writing practices, and suggests how this gives us an insight into his creative processes as well as the close relationship he forged with his public - a relationship which, as he said, was 'personally affectionate and like no other man's'. A lecture by Malcolm Andrews, 22 April The ...
Apr 22, 2021•1 hr
The English Reformation gave rise to the global Christian communion called Anglicanism: but neither immediately nor directly. This highly distinctive form of Christianity - ritualistic but nondogmatic, self-consciously moderate but staunchly nationalistic - has long been closely tied to English national identity. This lecture asks how it came to emerge over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tracing its roots in the Reformation and showing how political chance and the traumas of civil war ...
Apr 21, 2021•55 min
Networks were seen as a rather arcane and dull area in computer science. Then along came the internet, and everything changed for ever. The internet is actually an amalgam of a number of disparate technologies that evolved at just the right time, indeed several of the key technologies were far from optimal. In this lecture we will look at a bit of internet history, show how it works now and look towards the future. A lecture by Richard Harvey, 20 April The transcript and downloadable versions of...
Apr 20, 2021•59 min
Lymphoma, leukaemia and myeloma arise from different parts of the white blood cell system. Unlike the solid tumours they can be widely distributed in the body, and this means they need a different approach. The outlook for people with these very different cancers varies, but in all cases it is improving, and in some types over 90% will be cured. Different lymphomas and leukaemias occur at different peak ages, including some cancers in children and young adults. A lecture by Chris Whitty, 19 Apri...
Apr 19, 2021•51 min
On 17 August 1982, the first commercial CD was released. Digital recording and editing have changed the face of music by making recordings easy to originate and share. But has this affected musical quality, and what are the financial and artistic consequences? Where does BBC Radio stand within this technological revolution? Has the BBC's ability to adapt effectively signed its own death warrant? And does public service broadcasting have a future in the internet age? A lecture by Jeremy Summerly,...
Apr 15, 2021•1 hr
From Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, renegade novelists of the eighteenth century wanted to claim back the supernatural for fiction and so invented the Gothic Novel. This lecture pursues the gift of Gothic to later novelists, seeing how great Victorian novelists like Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens were entranced by the supernatural. Finally, it looks at how the possibility of supernatural explanation energises contemporary novelists like Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters. A lec...
Apr 14, 2021•1 hr 5 min
In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work. This lecture explores the contrast between the public image and the private life, considering what his writings reveal to us about his deepest preoccupations, both as man and as artist, during this period. A lecture by Michael Slater MBE, 14 April The transcript and downloadable versions of the lectur...
Apr 14, 2021•49 min
Climate change and the over-exploitation of resources now may mean that unless the current generation modifies its behaviour, generations ahead may either not be born or will inherit a world with severe problems. A village or even a nation state can develop rules to prevent depletion of resources so that it does not cut down forests or over-fish the oceans. But how can that be done globally when the action of one country can have a harmful effect on another? A lecture by Martin Daunton, 13 April...
Apr 13, 2021•1 hr 7 min
Emeritus Law Professor Jo Delahunty QC and guests will explore what the future holds for the next generation of barristers: will they better reflect the society they serve in terms of background, ethnicity and gender? Is privilege and income as much of a division at The Bar as it is in society? What can institutions such as Universities, The Inns, The City, and Gresham do to reach out to students who may not have professionals in their family to open their eyes to their potential and the legal p...
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr 15 min
Food-related conditions - cancer, heart disease, and strokes - are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the UK. Common wisdom is that health reflects personal choices and will power. The reality is that law and policy determine individual access to healthy food and contribute to the racial disparities that exist in all these conditions. Partnerships between the government and the food and agricultural industries prioritise profit over personal well-being and disproportionately harm margin...
Mar 31, 2021•33 min
Cyberwar is not waged on physical battlefields following rules of engagement. Aggressors worry less about collateral damage, in part because they aren't forced to confront the sight of an enemy bleeding to death before their eyes. Instead, their victim might be someone with a pacemaker 3000 miles away. We have no words yet for this kind of crime, but there is no doubt that the moment someone targets civilians, whether with a cyberweapon or surface to air missiles, they become a war criminal. In ...
Mar 30, 2021•46 min
The London stock market boomed and crashed in 1720. The financial bubble is known to posterity as the South Sea Bubble. In the three hundred years since, the bubble has been much misunderstood - this lecture separates fact from myth and aims to move beyond simplistic ideas of "gambling mania". A lecture by Dr Helen Paul 30 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/south-sea-bubble Gr...
Mar 30, 2021•49 min
In the wake of the decision in the parliamentary prorogation case Miller (No.2), the question of the politics of the judiciary has been thrust into the public eye. Was it "a constitutional coup" as some have claimed? The Government has promised to "update the Human Rights Act" and review the "relationship between the government, parliament and the courts". Will this limit the power of the judiciary to do justice? Do British judges have too much "power" and are they over-politicised? A lecture by...
Mar 29, 2021•1 hr 6 min
Prokofiev followed in the footsteps of Rachmaninov and Scriabin as a joint graduate in piano and composition, but his final graduation performance made an even greater splash, since he dared to present his own new modernist Piano Concerto (No.1) before his examiners. This distinguished panel of judges had cultivated nationalist and late-romantic styles in their own music, and they were not well pleased by the work of a self-declared "anti-Romantic" who delighted in harsh, provocative dissonances...
Mar 25, 2021•1 hr 21 min
The rising prevalence of obesity is a major threat to current and future health of individuals, the public, and the NHS. It is sometimes seen as too difficult to tackle but there is now progress in this multi-system health problem. In this lecture by Professor Chris Whitty, he lays out the health effects of the rising prevalence if we do not address it. Obesity arises from a complex interaction of genetics and environment. Medical management of obesity is improving. We can reverse the rising tre...
Mar 24, 2021•55 min
Spying for Queen Elizabeth I was very different from modern-day intelligence services - or was it? This lecture brings together historian Stephen Alford and Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, and will discuss Tudor spies and the modern-day secret service. This lecture celebrates 500 years since the birth of William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, an intelligence-gatherer for Elizabeth I across Europe, who also brought his son, Sir Robert Cecil, into the world of secret Elizabethan intelligence...
Mar 23, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Darwin's Descent of Man was dominated by the theory of sexual selection, which Darwin used to explain peacock's tails, but also to argue that white people were as superior to black ones as men were to women. For Darwin and his contemporaries, inequality between races and the sexes was one of the facts that science had to explain. Ever since Darwin, biology has been used to support racial prejudice and gender inequality, but - happily - has also been used to challenge both in the 150 years since ...
Mar 22, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Nurse Ratched is the evil nurse in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). She is the Evil Woman as autocratic, the absolute power in a psychiatric ward, which is the ultimate "total institution". "Big Nurse" is determined to eliminate every trace of male independence and spontaneity, castrating them and rendering them passive. Her machine-like ("ratchet") lack of emotion is monstrous. She is as far from the caring feminine nurse-ideal as possible. A lecture by Joanna Bourke 18 March...
Mar 18, 2021•39 min
Charles II's illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, became one of the most influential and powerful men at the Restoration court. He married a Scottish heiress, Anne Scott, and together they became leaders of fashion and taste. Recent researches have revealed that the Duke and Duchess were major patrons of architecture, leaving some important, but little known, buildings to posterity. A lecture by Simon Thurley 17 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from ...
Mar 17, 2021•1 hr 5 min
We often think that leaders are particularly strong in decision making - that's why they've made it to the top. But evidence shows that even senior executives are prone to psychological biases, such as overconfidence, groupthink, and applying one-size-fits-all rules. The talk will also discuss how boards, investors, policymakers, and executives themselves can address these biases to make better decisions - that affect not only companies but also wider society. A lecture by Alex Edmans 16 March T...
Mar 16, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Cinema's original canons were based on a small number of works most highly esteemed by archivists and historians. But access to the history of film has been dramatically expanded by digital media, as have debates between those arguing from different premises. 'Discoverability' is an important new criterion amid the vast range of works now readily available. Will this new democracy of taste mark the end of traditional canons, and what are the implications for preservation and education? A lecture...
Mar 15, 2021•46 min
When England's Reformation began, only a small band of idealists - or fanatics - truly wanted a Protestant England. Nevertheless, within a single lifetime, they achieved it. The lecture considers how the upheavals of the Tudor era led to the emergence of a genuinely new religious consciousness in England, as reformers set about rebuilding the nation's spirit from the ground up. By their own impossibly high standards, these reformers failed; but their 'failure' was transformative and its conseque...
Mar 10, 2021•56 min
Even the most humdrum of electrical devices nowadays contains at least one computer; yet surprisingly few people are aware of their history, their form or function. In this talk we will see that not only is the history of computers rich and diverse, their architecture likewise. Astonishingly, all the computers ever made can be modelled by one universal machine - the Turing machine. A lecture by Richard Harvey 9 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the ...
Mar 09, 2021•1 hr 2 min
Mathematical concepts have often been used to create new structural forms in fiction, as in the works of Raymond Queneau and Jorge Luis Borges. The members of Queneau's Oulipo group (including Georges Perec and Italo Calvino) sought to create works using various constraints as an impetus to innovation. Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries (2013) continues in this tradition. And mathematical concepts have even been used as plot devices, such as series of dastardly murders made possible by the mathemat...
Mar 09, 2021•59 min
We hear too often about sudden death in adults following prolonged and often unnecessary police restraint. What do people know about the dangers of restraint and how widespread is our understanding of such deaths? This talk by Professor Leslie Thomas QC, with a panel of distinguished guests including Deborah Coles, Director of INQUEST, and Dr Nat Cary, a forensic pathologist, explores the legal implications facing the state and what steps can be taken and implemented to save more lives and have ...
Mar 04, 2021•1 hr 14 min
Plato's most brilliant student and perhaps the most significant intellectual in world history, Aristotle of Stageira built on the doctrines he had studied at the Academy but also radically disagreed with them. The founder of Athens' second great university, the Lyceum, did not believe there was any perfect, ideal world that transcended human ability to see, touch, smell and hear it, and proposed that all philosophy begin from with material reality of being a human animal in a complex natural wor...
Mar 04, 2021•44 min
