Should we understand Darwin's work in the context of racism? Darwin’s Troubled Legacy #GreshamLecture Darwin’s Descent of Man was dominated by the theory of sexual selection, which Darwin used to explain peacock’s tails, but also to argue that white people were as superior to black ones as men were to women. For Darwin and his contemporaries, inequality between races and the sexes was one of the facts that science had to explain. Ever since Darwin, biology has been used to support racial prejudi

What is the contrast between Charles Dickens’s public image and private life? Dickens: The Last Decade #GreshamLecture In the last ten years of his life Charles Dickens related to his adoring public in a number of different ways; as novelist, as journalist, as public speaker, and in public readings of his own work. This lecture explores the contrast between the public image and the private life, considering what his writings reveal to us about his deepest preoccupations, both as man and as artis

How did Anglicanism develop as a form of Christianity? England’s Anglican Reformation #GreshamLecture The English Reformation gave rise to the global Christian communion called Anglicanism: but neither immediately nor directly. This highly distinctive form of Christianity – ritualistic but nondogmatic, self-consciously moderate but staunchly nationalistic – has long been closely tied to English national identity. This lecture asks how it came to emerge over the sixteenth and seventeenth centurie