Gresham provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on the Gresham website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
In this lecture, I look at what people from the late eighteenth century to the present thought they knew about toes, arches, heels, and ankles. What makes a beautiful foot? How have ideas of foot-beauty changed over time?
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.
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.
The myth of Santa Claus has been translated into an extraordinary market on a global scale. But how did this marketing success materialise? How did Finland become the home of Christmas?
What happens when doctors and parents cannot agree on whether a child should be given experimental medical treatment? Why is there any question mark over a parent’s right to decide if medical treatment for their child continues?
Torture was officially outlawed in France in the 1780s and in Europe during the nineteenth century. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has returned as an instrument of state policy.
World War Two set British filmmakers a challenge: to be relevant and entertaining and to inspire without patronising. Powell and Pressburger brought wit and imagination to their task, questioning what Britain stood for, warts and all.