American Art 1845-1945: From Ashcan to the Atom Bomb
We look at the Hudson River Group and the Ashcan School of Painters in New York, concentrating on iconic artists that include George Bellows, Georgia O’Keefe, Edward Hopper and Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’. Oscar winning films and photographs by Lee … More details …
Barchester Chronicles
Delve into the world of Barchester: a study of the first two novels of Trollop’s Barchester Chronicles: The Warden and Barchester Towers.
More details ...From seed to fork: how plants evolved and humans adapted them
This is a day school in two halves. In the morning we explore the extraordinary 450 million-year evolution of plants and the inventive ways they solved the many problems arising from the move on to dry land – gravity, nutrition, … More details …
Revolution in 60’s European Cinema: Six Key Movies
These are films that reflected and embodied the revolutions of the 20th century: political challenges to state and society; but also cultural shifts driven by the emergence of unsettling ideas relating to the mind, body, spirituality, the language of cinema … More details …
French New Wave Cinema
Travel back to the late 50’s/early 60’s France when a group of new, young and dynamic film makers shook up the way films were made. Their films took France by storm and had an influence on film makers around the … More details …
Villanelles, Sonnets and Sestinas
Certain poetic forms have an enduring appeal for poets and readers alike. We shall read and discuss a variety of these, exploring the ways in which metre, rhyme and repetition contribute to a poem’s overall effect.
More details ...Pop goes the Easel – An introduction to Pop Art
Pop brought an end to 100 yrs of modernism. As the world was still trying to come to terms with abstraction, a new generation of artists produced a hard edged, graphic representational style. With its mix of comic book graphics, … More details …
Landscapes in Literature 1
An exploration of British landscape writing through selected texts of poetry and prose, from the discovery of wild nature as a subject for exclamation and delight in the Romantic period, including passages from Defoe (1720s), the Wordsworths and Coleridge (early … More details …
Genetics – the role of DNA
What is DNA? And how is it involved in inheritance, disease, gender, gene therapy? We will consider topics like the birth of ‘three-parent’ babies, and look at DNA in forensic science, viral infections and evolution.
More details ...The Short Stories of Elizabeth Taylor and V.S. Pritchett
Read and discuss selected stories from two authors who have been claimed to have mapped the changes and details of everyday British life from the 1930s to the 1990s.
More details ...Masters of Baroque Music (1600-1750)
Masters of the Baroque (1600-1750) : Discover the seamless beauty of some of the most exquisite music ever written, and how the great composers of this age influenced everything since. We will explore a wide range of works by … More details …
Stained Glass from the Saxons to the 21st century
Following the golden years of the high medieval period, stained glass suffered a major decline for some 200 years. The Victorians were responsible for a major revival, which made way for the Arts and Craft movement to take thing forward … More details …
Landscapes in Literature 2
Further exploration of British landscape writing through selected texts of poetry and prose, from industrial and post-industrial landscapes, to the “new nature writing” of the 21st century. NB It is not necessary to have attended Landscapes in Literature 1.
More details ...England in an Age of Reform 1815-1846
We will consider the reform act of 1832 and the Repeal of the Corn Laws, alongside the flowering of the romantic movement in poetry, the early works of Dickens and the technological advances of the time.
More details ...Thomas Hardy and Gerald Finzi
Thomas Hardy was one of the greatest of English poets, Gerald Finzi one of the subtlest and most sensitive of composers. The conjunction of the two led to a miraculous fusion – songs which are truly more than the sum … More details …