There is nothing which has been yet contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn’ Samuel Johnson

Pubs and their signs are a fundamental part of our history and cultural heritage. However, we must all be aware of the alarming rate of pub closure, but there are many reasons for this. In June 2023 there were 39,970 pubs in the UK down by more than 7,000 since 2012. There are some 17,000 different pub names but why are there so many pubs called the ‘Red Lion’, the ‘Crown’ or ‘White Hart’?

Mexico has a vast range of festivals. Visually splendid, many feature lavish processions and masked dances with richly decorated costumes. Although some festivals commemorate national events, most are religious in inspiration. After the Spanish conquest of 1521, priests used theatrical representation as a method of instruction. Traditionally, people display elaborate nativity scenes in their homes. The Christmas story is acted out in towns and villages: adults and children perform as shepherds and shepherdesses, hermits and devils. Other important celebrations include Saints' Days, All Souls' Day, and Carnival.

Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner, Schoenberg – it reads like a list of the great and good in classical music – but the amazing thing is that every one of these musical geniuses lived and worked in Vienna. 

With slides showing Viennese art and architecture as well as audio excerpts by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Johann Strauss and Mahler, this talk brings Vienna in its heyday to life.

In the wake of World War One, the Bauhaus, the Dutch De Stijl group and Le Corbusier, strove to create a design ethos for a brave new world. Buildings and interiors, domestic commodities and appliances, needed to reflect the demands of modern industrial society rather than hark back to outmoded historical styles. The modernist aesthetic was driven by the sleek lines of cars, ships, and airplanes. Practical imperatives ousted decoration, now condemned as superfluous.

This highly illustrated talk explores 900 years of stained glass, with at least one window from each of England’s 43 cathedrals, Westminster Abbey and St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and exploring medieval masterpieces via the Reformation and nineteenth century Gothic Revival to striking contemporary commissions, revealing how coloured light has shaped worship, storytelling and space. Divine Light has gone from book to nationwide campaign run by the Association of English Cathedrals, attracting over 100,000 social media engagements and culminating in a hugely successful public vote - sparking fresh interest in cathedral stained glass and its power to move and inspire today.

In the last few years the top end of the art market has flourished, and collectors have been prepared to pay astonishing amounts to own a modern masterpiece. This lecture is about the works that have sold for over $100 million and is an excuse to examine some beautiful and varied art. These artworks would not achieve such sky-high prices if they were no good. So, we’ll see some wonderful paintings including those by Picasso, Cézanne, Leonardo, Rembrandt, Modigliani, Klimt, Bacon and Pollock, all held together by the common thread of their extraordinary commercial value.

This talk combines the lives of the Astors, the Sackville Wests and the Rothschilds and their family history with the story of the gardens they have all created, despite their very different backgrounds, here in the English countryside.

The Impressionists were so named because of what appeared to be the slapdash way they applied paint to the canvas.  Several 19th century scientists encouraged an interest in the power of colour juxtapositions and this proved fascinating for artists.  Seurat chose to reduce the swift, visible brushstroke to a tiny dot that may have been entirely unspontaneous, but encouraged Impressionists such as Pissarro to radically change their style.  Seurat died young, but through his contemporaries Signac and Van Gogh, 'Pointillism' survived.

It was during the 18th century that the rituals of tea drinking were established.  Tea drinking was both a private and public affair.  The painter William Hogarth, famous for recording middle class life, shows us exactly how tea was drunk at the time.  In the 19th century the paraphernalia associated with tea drinking mushroomed, from infusers to strainers and drip-catchers. Manufacturers had to cater for a mass market. The cafe boom of the late 19th century resulted in Miss Cranston's Teashops in Glasgow, designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Lyons Corner houses.

This lecture explores how Antarctica was carried home – not in crates of specimens, but in images. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, during the Heroic Age of polar exploration, watercolourists, oil painters, photographers and early film-makers translated the white vastness of the Ice for the wives and mothers waiting in Britain. I begin by asking the audience to imagine themselves as ‘first footers’: the first human beings to step onto that frozen continent. The wind cutting like glass. The silence. The blinding, horizonless white. What did Antarctica mean to them, standing there at the edge of the known world? And what does it mean to us now?

In 1911, in Munich, Germany, a loose alliance of artists, led by Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) and Franz Marc (1880–1916), sought to express spiritual truth through colour and form rather than realistic likeness. Their moment was brief – cut short by the First World War – yet Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) became one of the most influential groups in early twentieth-century art, paving the way for abstraction across Europe.

In my books Victorian Christmas and Dickens and Christmas I looked at how the Victorians assimilated earlier customs and turned their festive season into one that is still emulated today. In this talk I look at how 19th-Century imagery of the festive season has influenced and created the way people still celebrate in the 21st Century, looking back through history at some of the earliest images of the season and at the evolution of depictions of Father Christmas, to become the fat, jolly, red-suited man we recognise today.