Gresham College Lectures

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 led to its slow and improbable ascent to dominance. A lecture by Alec Ryrie, 21 April The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/anglican-reformation Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or

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 Thomas Grant QC, 29 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/political-judges Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk

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 the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/networks-beyond Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.faceb

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 April The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/lymphoma-leukaemia-myeloma Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http:/

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 lecture by John Mullan, 14 April The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/supernatural-fiction Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.

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 lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/dickens-last-decade Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com

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 The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/owe-unborn Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/Gres

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 marginalised communities. This is food oppression. In partnership with the Fulbright Commission A lecture by Andrea Freeman, 31 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/food-oppression Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are current

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. The lecture also looks at the use of secret communications like codes and cipher. A lecture by Stephen Alford and Sir Richard Dearlove KCMG OBE, 23 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/spying-for-queen-and-country Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free downlo

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 profession? This lecture will sound the clarion call for action. A lecture by Jo Delahunty QC with Mass Ndow-Njie, Derek Sweeting QC, Brie Stevens-Hoare QC and Toby Coupe The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/legal-profession-diversity Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available fo

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 Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/greshamcollege

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 trend in society, but only if we understand the reasons for obesity, what can be changed, and what cannot. A lecture by Chris Whitty 24 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/rising-obesity Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are

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 partnership with the Fulbright Commission A lecture by Tarah Wheeler 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/cyberwar-crimes Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download fr

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 the Descent. A lecture by Jim Endersby 22 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/darwin-legacy Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://w

Stravinsky’s solo piano output may be modest in size, but it contains one of the absolute pinnacles of piano virtuosity, the Three Pieces from Petrushka. To call these pieces “arrangements” from the ballet score would be true, but misleading: they are brilliant recompositions from the ballet’s material, stranger and more elusive, and with the added dimension of extreme virtuosity (he was never brave enough to give a public performance himself). Unlike many composers, Stravinsky always wrote his music at the piano, and the feel of chords-under-fingers, pushing against each other, overlapping and colliding goes a long way towards explaining the unique harmonic imagination that still has an international influence that stretches far beyond the confines of modernist classical music. Where the Romantics had turned the piano from a complex machine into a living, breathing musical being, Stravinsky wanted to unpick the illusion, and bring the mechanical aspects to the fore. He often sought to bypass the pianist’s

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 The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/evil-nurses Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/Gre

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 the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/monmouth-estates Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagr

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 The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/ceo-mistakes Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/Gres

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 by Ian Christie 15 March The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/streaming-film Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twi

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 Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/computer-history Gresham College has been giving free public lectures since 1597. This tradition continues today with all of our five or so public lectures a week being made available for free download from our website. There are currently over 2,000 lectures free to access or download from the website. Website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/GreshamCollege Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greshamcollege Instagram: