LECTURE SEASON 2024-25

This lecture focuses on the design impact of the Great Exhibition and the need for a 'legacy institution' in the form of the South Kensington Museum.  In this lecture, Anna Warrillow looks at the building as a work of art and explore the work of William Morris, Fredrick Lord
Leighton and other influential designers of the Victorian Age.

British film making was rejuvenated by young directors wishing to reflect the changing perceptions of life in 60s Britain. As Empire fades and the gritty realities of life in the North were explored, society’s moral and social values were challenged as the search for a new optimism continued. This lecture looks at the emergence of the North in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, A Taste of Honey, This Sporting Life, etc; Swinging Britain – Julie Christie in Darling, Michael Caine in Alfie, the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night and the James Bond movies; the last days of Empire as seen in Tony Richardson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, Zulu and, comically, Carry On Up the Khyber; and, finally the drastic change in the depiction of sex from Dirk Bogarde in Victim (1961) to Alan Bates and Oliver Reed famously wrestling nude in Women in Love (1969).

The Austrian carol Stille Nacht Heilige Nacht – Silent Night, Holy Night – came into being just over 1800 years after the birth of Christ, and has become the quintessential Christmas song, sung the world over.
However, the carol is not without its mysteries and this seasonal lecture unravels a few of them to tell the story of Stille Nacht Heilige Nacht’s genesis and subsequent history.

This unique lecture presents the Top 20 most popular paintings and other artworks in Britain today. In putting this talk together, Raymond Warburton has looked at the results of eight polls carried out from 2005 to 2020 have been aggregated and analysed.  The polls began with Radio 4’s poll of its listeners from 2005, and includes the Samsung/Daily Mirror poll of 2017 when buyers of Samsung products and readers of the tabloid were asked for their favourite artworks. There will be a brief description of some of the paintings that did not make it into the Top 20; followed by a ‘Pick-of-the-Pops’ style countdown of the Top 20 Prior to the lecture, individual members of the audience will be asked to name their favourite paintings in Britain today.

When Jane Austen declared that she wrote ‘only for fame’, she was, of course, being ironic: she published anonymously; there is no record on her gravestone that she was a writer; and her books fell out of print shortly after her death.  But now, Jane Austen is one of our best loved authors, with legions of adoring fans throughout the world.  Her novels have inspired countless stage and screen adaptations, and even provided solace to soldiers in the trenches.  She is the face of the £10 banknote, and she adorns tea towels and fridge magnets everywhere.  Jane Austen is now very famous indeed.    But how did it all happen?  This lecture will chart Jane Austen’s rise to fame; it will explore the making of a literary celebrity and examine Austen’s legacy, 250 years after her birth

Frederic Leighton’s studio-house (now Leighton House Museum) is one of the most remarkable buildings of the nineteenth-century. First built in the 1860s, Leighton continued to extend and embellish his home over the next thirty years, transforming what had been a relatively modest house into a palace of art filled with fascinating collections of fine and decorative art. The construction of the exotic Arab Hall, lined with Islamic tiles collected as Leighton travelled through the Middle East brought new fame to the house as Leighton’s reputation continued to grow.  This lecture explores Leighton’s motivations in lavishing such attention on the construction of his home and how it came to embody the idea of how a Great Artist should live.