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Fiction and the Supernatural
From Horace Walpole to Ann Radcliffe, renegade novelists of the eighteenth century wanted to claim back the supernatural for fiction and so invented …
4 years, 2 months ago
Christmas Carols and Nostalgia
This lecture takes a trip down Christmas’s unique and emotionally complex memory lane via the Christmas Carol.
Carols paint a colourful picture of th…
4 years, 3 months ago
Judicial Racism and the Lammy Review
Judges, who are typically drawn from privileged backgrounds, wield vast power over the lives of the most marginalised people in society. This lecture…
4 years, 3 months ago
Attacks on Knowledge from Ashurbanipal to Trump
This lecture explores the destruction of libraries, archives and other knowledge, from Babylonian times until now, and its implications for society t…
4 years, 3 months ago
Early Protestant Missions to Jews, Muslims and Pagans: A Dangerous Model
European Protestant and evangelical Christians did not have to look far to find ‘infidels’ in the 16th and 17th centuries: as well as the ‘pagans’ of…
4 years, 3 months ago
Women in Science Fiction
For thousands of years, some men assumed that the original or ideal human type was male, with women being pictured as weaker or imperfect men. This a…
4 years, 3 months ago
Food- and Drink-Borne Diseases
Many major diseases are transmitted by food or drink. Cholera (water), brucellosis (milk), BSE/nvCJD, typhoid and many parasites are ingested as part…
4 years, 3 months ago
Compression
When you tune into Netflix you might not be aware that the box in your living room starts a complex set of negotiations with servers on moving 563 Gb…
4 years, 3 months ago
Free Thinking and the Rule of Law
The law has been used to impose religious and moral conformity and uniformity of thought at many times in history, perhaps most (in)famously in the t…
4 years, 3 months ago
The Maths of Beauty and Symmetry
People have always found symmetry aesthetically pleasing and examples of it are seen in the earliest art. The Platonic solids have been known to huma…
4 years, 3 months ago