Still Rocking After All These Years: The Music That Shaped a Generation
Join acclaimed music leader Ben England BEM for a rich and engaging day exploring the rise of rock music and its extraordinary cultural impact. Still Rocking After All These Years: The Music That Shaped a Generation traces the journey from the … More details …
Why do we never have time?
We constantly save time but never have any. We’re the masters of our destiny yet strangely powerless. We live an era of connection, but we’re lonely. Why? A sociological deep-dive into the world’s biggest questions. This is going to be … More details …
Making Paradise on the French Riviera
“The French Riviera is the playground of the rich, the famous, and those who appreciate the finer things in life.” Monet, Renoir, and Cézanne were attracted from the 1870s onwards by the scenery and the light of the French Riviera. … More details …
More Trolloping – Orley Farm
This stand-alone novel, Orley Farm, by prolific nineteenth-century novelist Anthony Trollope is a tale of family relationships, inheritance and suspected property fraud. It provides us with a window into Victorian society and the ideas that underpinned it.
More details ...Early Dickens – Sketches by Boz
Sketches by Boz were the first published sketches by Charles Dickens. This course will look at a range of these sketches over three weeks and consider what themes are raised, discuss them in the wider context of the Dickens canon and … More details …
An Introduction to Artists’ Books
Making an Artist Book combines craft with art and is an art form started in France in the early 1900s. We will look at some examples, then make a Pocket Accordion with separate cover. This book can be used to … More details …
Central Asia – a melting pot or a divided region?
In this course we will explore the fascinating and enigmatic area sometimes referred to as the wild and opaque “black hole” in the heart of Asia. For millennia forming a cultural trading crossroads along the Silk Road, with unmatched prosperity … More details …
Be Still My Beating Heart: Unenviable Proposals in Fiction
This study day will look at marriage proposals across a range of nineteenth-century fiction. Whilst there will be a light-hearted consideration of the many unenviable proposals that appear in fiction from this period. We will also consider the more serious … More details …
Modernism: The Bauhaus 1919-1933
In the wake of the Great War, the Bauhaus strove to create a design ethos for a brave new socialist world. Design needed to reflect the demands of modern industrial society rather than hark back to outmoded historical styles. The … More details …
Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Grey: Literature of the 1890s
The period known as the fin de siècle was a time of rapid change and progress but also a period that saw a huge amount of fear over cultural, social, political and ideological change. Both these texts explore the shifts … More details …
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: The revolution that reshaped France
The French Revolution (1789–1799) reshaped the political, social, and economic landscape of France and beyond. From the storming of the Bastille to the rise of radical revolutionary ideas, this course will explore the key events that led to the abolition … More details …
Pools, Piers and Pleasure: Architecture at the Seaside
This day school explores the distinctive architectural heritage of Britain’s seaside resorts. Starting in the Georgian era, it will cover the evolving range of building types that provided first for health tourists, then for pleasure seekers. Cast iron was the … More details …
Paris 1925: The Birth of Art Deco and Modernism
This course is fully booked. Please contact us if you would like to be placed on a waiting list for any cancellations. A thoroughly French affair, the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationale Des Arts Decoratifs et Industrials Moderne was dominated by … More details …
Did the Berlin Wall Ever Fall
A blow-by-blow account of the most radical, unexpected and peaceful example of regime change ever witnessed, through the lens of contemporary images, videos and texts. We will consider how brave people brought down an oppressive government that, even months before … More details …
The Virgin and The Gypsy, Vile Bodies &, Mapp & Lucia – Portraits of the nineteen twenties?
Do these novels by DH Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh and EF Benson seem an eclectic selection? They’re three titles you might have bought in the years 1930 and 1931. Are they still relevant today? What kind of reader would you be? … More details …