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.
How might the study of the first 1,500 years of London's port history (encapsulating profound changes ranging from location, infrastructure and technology to variations in river levels) help when making predictions for the future?
This lecture will begin with Bacon’s imagined garden, then consider the long-term promise of the experimental or scientific garden, which would eventually lead to today’s biotechnologies.
This lecture starts by looking at early-modern understandings of the nature of ‘animal’ and ‘human’ life, before turning to the rise of ‘rights of animals’.
This lecture explores how regulators try to prevent what will hopefully be the ‘last’ bubble and suggests that the most effective regulatory frameworks were developed during the normal operation of markets, not in response to crises.
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.
Narrative, the way a tale is told, is less straightforward than we might suppose. Austen handled irony brilliantly and systematically exploited new ways of narrating, including free indirect discourse. This lecture explores why Austen's way of narrating are so compelling.
In this final lecture we will consider whether we can plot a more successful future than our recent history might suggest and what that implies for our economic and political institutions.
Simon Lancaster believes that the successful speechwriter is less of a puppeteer and more of an impressionist. In his talk, he will share a number of stories and anecdotes from his time as speechwriter.