On Saturday November 22nd, 1913, Mrs. Edith Britten of Lowestoft, Suffolk, gave birth to her fourth child, a boy.  She said, “Today is St. Cecilia’s Day, - the Patron Saint of Music - he must be a musician” – and she imagined that he would become the fourth “B”, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms …. and Britten.  2026 will mark the 50th Anniversary of the death of one of this country’s most original and versatile composers, Benjamin Britten.  A new statue of him as a boy was erected on Lowestoft seafront in summer 2025.  

Roger Askew was a chorister at Wells Cathedral School and a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with an honours degree in English. He combined a teaching career with professional singing in London, and after obtaining a further degree in Music became Director of Music at Daniel Stewart’s and Melville College in Edinburgh. After retiring in 2003 he returned to the south of England. He is President Emeritus of The Stoke Poges Society.

This is the gripping and sometimes hilarious story of how a band of heroic curators and eccentric custodians saved Britain’s national heritage during our Darkest Hour.  As Hitler’s forces gathered on the other side of the Channel to threaten these islands, men and women from London’s national museums, galleries and archives forged extraordinary plans to evacuate their collections to safety.

Dr Caroline Shenton is an archivist, historian and an award-winning writer. She was formerly Director of the Parliamentary Archives in London, and before that was a senior archivist at the National Archives. Her books, lectures and study days focus on political art and heritage in peril. Caroline was Political Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2017, and has appeared at many literary festivals and on radio and TV. In 2023 she was appointed by the government to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA), which considers whether national heritage destined for sale overseas should be saved for the nation.

In the High Middle Ages, Christmas was celebrated with two months of festivities – involving music, drama, games, costume and … armoured combat. It might seem strange that jousting and knightly deeds of arms were an enormously popular way of marking Yuletide, but in fact the concept of knighthood and Christmas had quite a lot in common. In this lecture we explore Medieval Christmas traditions, work our way down into their deeper origins and meanings, and encounter some of the great chivalric figures of the age, including Kings Edward III and Henry VIII, both of whom enthusiastically promoted the English royal tradition of the Christmas joust.

Toby Capwell is an independent scholar and leading authority on medieval and Renaissance arms and armour. Over the last thirty years he has worked with many of the world's great collections, including the Imperial Armoury in Vienna, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Royal Armouries in Leeds, and has served as curator of Glasgow Museums and the Wallace Collection, where he worked for sixteen years until January 2023. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Armourers in London. He is the author of many books on armour, weapons and tournaments, has curated numerous exhibitions, and frequently appears in film, television and online media. 

Image © British Library, MS Cotton Nero AX/2, fol. 94v.

How do you turn a huge sprawling novel like Gone with the Wind into a film to be seen in one evening? Why do some novels make the transition so much better than others? Is there any difference between one adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and any of the others? From Dickens to Austen the classic novels constantly reappear as films but this lecture moves from All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930 through the social realism of the post-war British novel to The Godfather in 1971.   

Colin Shindler has been lecturing on American and British social and cultural history for over 30 years. He was awarded his PhD at Cambridge University and subsequently lectured on film for their History Faculty between 1998 and 2019, exploring its relationship to modern British and American social and cultural history. He also teaches a variety of adult education courses at Madingley and Higham Hall in Cumbria and has lectured on cruises. Between 1975 and 1999 he pursued a wide-ranging career as a writer and producer in television, radio and film. He won a BAFTA award for his production of A Little Princess. His production of Young Charlie Chaplin was nominated for a US Prime Time Emmy. He wrote the screenplay for the feature film Buster and was the producer of various television dramas such as Lovejoy and Wish Me Luck. He has written three novels as well as numerous television scripts and radio plays but regards his greatest cultural contribution as choosing the title music for the police series Juliet Bravo.

THIS LECTURE IS PRECEDED BY THE ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING WHICH STARTS AT 2.15PM

From Sao Paolo to Sharjah and from Liverpool to Gwangju, the biennial has arguably become the favourite mode of exhibition-making in the 21st century. Scarcely a week goes by when some city or province isn’t celebrating the visual and performing arts with a provocatively themed mega-exhibition, purporting to take the temperature (more or less successfully) of the world’s latest art. Tracing the biennale’s surprising roots back to Venice in the 1890s, we look at how the world's first such exhibition moved from being a proto-nationalist, conservative display of art to the avant-garde international extravaganza it has become today – and how it birthed a global artform that shows no signs of abating. 

Jacky Klein is an art historian, publisher, writer and broadcaster, specialising in modern and contemporary art. After studying at Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she worked as a curator at a number of leading galleries: Tate, the Barbican, the Courtauld and the Hayward. In 2008, she moved sideways into the world of art publishing, first as Commissioning Editor at Thames & Hudson, then as Executive Editor at Tate Publishing and subsequently as Director of HENI Publishing, a small independent arts publisher. She has also published several books and has presented and contributed to a range of television programmes for the BBC, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's arts review programme, 'Front Row'