The passionate and powerful poet re-imagines the way in which the State might raise children placed in its care. Sissay is Chancellor of the University of Manchester. His foster parents placed him into care at the age of 12. He lived in care homes until he was 18. Chaired by Claire Armitstead.
Writer and activist Saci Lloyd’s acclaimed Carbon Diaries is in development with the BBC. Quantum Drop lurches between a shadowy urban sprawl and a dangerous cyberworld. Which is real?
13+ years
A delightful tour of the art, science and literature of The Human Body, Its Parts And The Stories They Tell – from the first finger-printing to the physiology of angels; from the death-mask of Isaac Newton to the afterlife of Einstein’s brain. Chaired by Clemency Burton-Hill.
The deep story of wire-tapping and interception by the NSA and GCHQ. Who ordered it? How it was done? How it’s done now. Jeffreys-Jones is one of the world’s most distinguished espionage and security experts.
How do professionals across all sectors develop the survival skills for a resilient future? Join us to take the great ideas you’ve jotted on the back of beer mats or napkins and make them real.
The interlocking themes of Establishment and Meritocracy form a crucial part of the intellectual compost that made Hennessy’s generation of post-war Britons. The Establishment and the concept of a growing and eventually self-propelling meritocracy were always at odds, and the policies that brought it about dramatically altered British society. He talks to economist Susie Symes, Chair of 19 Princelet Street.
If we are to increase social mobility, redress economic inequality and create a balanced and fair distribution of wealth and opportunity, we need to understand the roots of the problems. Three recent books by members of the LSE’s new International Inequalities Institute aim to do this. Mike Savage is the author of Social Class in the 21st Century, looking at the way new class divides have opened up in the UK, with his work generating the Class Calculator that became a viral phenomenon in 2013. John Hills is the author of Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us, which uses vignettes of families and how they are affected by inequality, the welfare state and austerity over their lives alongside results of large-scale data analysis. Laura Bear specialises in the anthropology of the economy, and is the author of Navigating Austerity, which tells the story of how austerity policies resulting from seemingly technocratic accounting decisions have dramatically changed the lives of those living and working on the Hooghly River in India. The authors discuss parallels between their findings, and exchange thoughts on how inequality can be challenged by public debate and policy.
On the shrouded corpse hung a tablet of green topaz with the inscription: ‘I am Shaddad the Great. I conquered a thousand cities; a thousand white elephants were collected for me; I lived for a thousand years and my kingdom covered both east and west, but when death came to me nothing of all that I had gathered was of any avail. You who see me take heed: for Time is not to be trusted.’
Dating from at least a millennium ago, these are the earliest known Arabic short stories, surviving in a single, ragged manuscript in a library in Istanbul. Some found their way into The Arabian Nights but most have never been read in English before. Tales of the Marvellous and News of the Strange has monsters, lost princes, jewels beyond price, a princess turned into a gazelle, sword-wielding statues and shocking reversals of fortune.
Robert Irwin’s books include For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, The Middle East in the Middle Ages, The Arabian Nights: A Companion and (as editor) The Penguin Anthology of Classical Arabian Literature. Azar Nafisi taught Western literature at the University of Tehran, the Free Islamic University and the University of Allameh Tabatabai in Iran. In 1981 she was expelled from the University of Tehran after refusing to wear the veil. In 1994 she won a teaching fellowship from Oxford University, and in 1997 she and her family left Iran for America. She is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and Things I’ve Been Silent About.
The author of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and The Absolutist introduces his new novel. Eliza Caine arrives in Norfolk to take up her position as governess at Gaudlin Hall on a dark and chilling night…
What and who do we trust with our sense of nationhood? The NHS, the BBC, the PM, the EU? The new chair of the National Trust has been a CEO and board director of many of Britain’s most successful international companies, and he owns the British Pathé Film Archive. He discusses the ideas of ownership, national identity, the interplay of the public, private and third sectors, and the ethical concerns that drive business in an age of social media.
The recent Ebola outbreak highlights the serious threat that emerging infectious diseases can pose to global public health. Despite years of apparent preparations for a devastating pandemic, responses to outbreaks are cumbersome and delayed, and opportunities to save lives are missed. Over the past 15 years, the systematic failure to collect and share clinical data during epidemics, including zoonotic viruses such as SARS, H5N1, Nipah, and MERSCoV, has been a recurring problem. Understanding the inter-relationships between human behaviour, animal health and the environment is essential for mobilising successful responses to future spillover events. Professor Farrar is the Director of the Wellcome Trust.
Thomas Telford invented the modern road. A stonemason turned architect turned engineer, he built churches, harbours, canals, docks, the famously vertiginous Pontcysyllte aqueduct and the exquisite Menai Bridge in Wales. He created the backbone of our national road network. His constructions were the most stupendous in Europe for a thousand years, and astonishingly, almost everything he ever built remains in use today.
This writer tells ancient folktales with the wit of a stand-up and the turn of phrase of a poet. Come and be enthralled as he launches his latest collection. Expect secrets, riddles, mysterious strangers, awful jokes and beautiful lies.
