This lecture traces how Puccini’s music has spread from the opera house into digital culture. The sound of Puccini and what it conveys has also changed via high notes, romance, New York and penguins.

In May 1746 the great Venetian artist Canaletto moved to England. For the next 9 years he created nearly 150 works of art showing us Georgian England, from the Lord Mayor's show and the...

In this lecture we look at Oscar’s great literary successes, 5 smash hit plays in 3 years. Focusing on ‘The Importance of being Ernest’, one of the funniest, most performed and most frequently quoted...

Monopoly is one of the world’s most popular and enduring board games, but how well do you really know it? Take a photographic journey around the Monopoly boards and expect some surprises.

Using paintings by the likes of Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Vermeer, Watteau, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence, this talk will chart the various meanings, symbolism and iconography associated with women musicians.

This lecture explores how jewels have played their part in politics and history.

Alice provides a painter’s perspective on famous artworks from the 17th to the 21st centuries. Rembrandt and Turner are revealed as artistic risk-takers, whose new combinations of glazes, surfaces, pigments and processes re-defined the...

British Pop artist Pauline Boty is finally the subject of monographs, a biography and a forthcoming documentary film (Summer 2024). Known in her lifetime as a painter contemporary of Peter Blake, Hockney, Derek Boshier,...

When we walk into any gallery, why do we see so many depictions of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, but not Viking ones? This lecture explores how Norse myths and legends have...

An epic tale of two extraordinary figures from the same valley in Yorkshire who were destined to change the world of fashion and design for all time. A story that takes us from the...

Few artists are as rooted in a place as Stanley Spencer and his beloved home village of Cookham. This Thames-side village was not only his birthplace, his home for most of his life, and...

Jim Thompson arrived in Bangkok as a US army officer in 1945, fell in love with it and stayed. Captivated by the beauty of Thai silk, an ancient craft in decline, he resuscitated it...