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.
England’s Reformation was supposed to bind the nation into a single ‘Church of England’. In fact the country was shattered into a kaleidoscope of religious variety.
The Jewish communities of London have a rich musical-liturgical history, stretching back to the mid-17th century. This lecture will consider some of the main musical developments since then.
Shostakovich had considered the career of a concert pianist, yet his piano music studiously avoids the virtuosity he had assiduously cultivated as a young performer. Almost all his piano writing is in some way experimental and conceptual.
Lord Richard Harries has selected 30 images to convey the essential truths of the Christian faith, some ancient and some modern. Drawn from both the West and the East, a few are well-known masterpieces and others will be unfamiliar.
Serial murderer Myra Hindley is often portrayed as an “evil icon”. Her crimes of sadistic murder against children continue to shock. There are few artistic sights so terrifying as the giant portrait of Hindley composed of the handprints of children.
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.
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?
Prokofiev’s piano music struck his contemporaries as matching the new era: its dynamism was compared to sport (“football music”), and its grinding repeated patterns to industrial sounds (“machine music”).
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.