This lecture explores some truly amazing pieces of embroidery from 10th century metal thread work in St Cuthbert’s stole to the Bayeux Tapestry and on to the high point of English embroidery Opus Angilcanum, meaning English work, which was sought after by Popes and monarchs.

The lecture puts these pieces in to a wider social context while unpacking the materials and techniques and in some cases the people involved.

Immerse yourself in a world of carnations, tulips, hyacinths and roses as you discover the history of Turkey's (Turkiye's) Iznik ceramics. From its origins imitating Chinese porcelain to its 16th-century heyday and subsequent decline. The focus on flowers makes this an ideal subject for spring.

Murder, poison, corruption and incest: all perfect ingredients for sensational popular culture. But in an age known for its brutality and church corruption were the Borgias really so bad?

This lecture reveals the real family that dominated the Papacy and Italian politics during the last decade of the 15th century: the charismatic figure of Pope Alexander VI, living inside his sumptuously decorated apartments, the career of his son, Cesare, cardinal, general, employer of Da Vinci and the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince, and the journey of Lucrezia Borgia from “the greatest whore in Rome” to a devout and treasured duchess of the city Ferrara.

Sometimes truth is more intoxicating than myth.

For the series and film Downton Abbey, Andrew was commissioned to make many jewels for the main characters and this inspired him to create a talk based on this unique period.

Jewellery and Fashion are often seen as two entirely separate and distinct fields of design, but this is very far from the case. In his talk, Andrew guides you through the extraordinary decades and events between 1890 and 1929, where the great couturiers collaborated with the finest of jewellers to produce jewels and clothes of outstanding quality and glittering opulence. Along with this, he illustrates the clients and patrons who commissioned the jewels and shows how they were worn with their sumptuous gowns.

A talk which examines the journey of the musical, from its almost accidental beginnings of The Black Crook of 150 years ago through to the modern phenomenon which is Hamilton.

This illustrated lecture will highlight the great musical productions which have graced London’s West End and Broadway and focuses upon the game changing moments of both composers and productions. From Jerome Kern to Lin-Manuel Miranda, every great musical has its own story; from page to stage. Enjoy the great music, the great stories and the dynamic theatricality of their finest moments.

This lecture looks at western bookbinding, in particular during the age of the printed book.

Aspects of the book trade, including bookbinding practices and materials used in bindings are shown and, as structure and decoration changed as the centuries passed, the individual binders’ fingers tell their own tale as the craft developed. The bookbinding trade has long recycled waste materials, some of which may be more valuable than the books themselves.

Bookbindings also provide an insight into the owner’s wealth and station in life, as books were bought unbound and bindings were therefore generally chosen by the first owner until the 19th century.

This lecture should enhance appreciation of the local Trigge chained library in St Wulfram’s Church as well as collections ( Belvoir, Newark, Mansfield) that members may have worked on as volunteers with Caroline.

Forks and salt-cellars, Bacchus and the Garden of Eden, medieval banquets, Mrs Beeton and coffee-houses - through the centuries, food and its rituals have provided vibrant opportunities for artists to celebrate, to analyse their world and even to develop complex ideas of morality. 

At the heart of the home, a shared fascination with food provides the perfect opportunity to flaunt money and status through elaborate artefacts, and illustrates shifting fashions and styles of eating. From still-lives to the Last Supper, religion, mythology and social traditions are rich in themes of food and shared meals.

In this lecture, we examine the significance of food and feasting and its symbolism for faith, wealth and even gender, through objects and images.

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, was the favourite of King James I - who addressed him as ‘my sweet child and wife’ - and subsequently he became chief minister to King Charles I.

Buckingham was a beauty, and he surrounded himself with beautiful things. He enjoyed exquisite clothes, like the fabulous white silk suit encrusted with diamonds that he wore to visit the Queen of France. He was a superb dancer. When he cut capers during a court masque, King James startled visiting ambassadors by shouting out ‘By God, George, I love you!’   He was a discerning patron. Inigo Jones renovated his houses. John Tradescant was his garden designer.  In his great house on the Strand he put together a collection of art works as fine as King Charles’s. 

At the age of 35 Buckingham was murdered. His collection was scattered, but contemporary inventories allow us to reconstruct it.  You will see some of the magnificent paintings he owned - the Titians, the Tintorettos, the Veroneses.  But Buckingham was not just a collector of old masters: he was also a patron, commissioning boldly innovative new work. Most remarkable are the portraits of himself that he commissioned from painters including Van Honthorst, Van Dyck and Rubens – images by great artists of a man known as ‘the handsomest-bodied man in Europe’. 

There is also local interest given the Villiers connection to places such as Goadby Marwood….

Was Napoleon killed by his green wallpaper? 

This story begins in 1775 with a German chemist and his experiments with arsenic. The resulting powerful green reached its height of popularity when worn by "Queen of Fashion", Empress Eugénie. It was printed on wallpaper by Morris & Co. and was a favourite of plein-air artists, such as Monet, Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, keen to capture the freshness of nature. But a century later, it was rebranded as rat-poison.

In 1856 a chemistry student took home a school project to make synthetic quinine. He failed his home-work, but accidentally invented a vibrant purple dye. Queen Victoria and Empress Eugénie wore dresses in the season’s must-have shade. Punch magazine dubbed the craze: “the mauve measles”!  Scheele’s Green and Perkins’ Mauveine were forerunners of hundreds of synthetic dyes and pigments. You will hear fascinating stories – of serendipitous discoveries, industrial enterprise, and some very sinister secrets.

For over a century, W. Heath Robinson, whom the novelist, Philip Pullman called ‘the immortal contraptioneer’, has been famous for drawing rickety, bizarrely complicated devices that carry out the simplest of tasks like potato peeling, wart removal or pancake making. He became so famous for them that in 1933, he was the obvious person to illustrate Norman Hunter’s Professor Branestawm books and, in 1943, Bletchley Park named one of their code-breaking machines after him.  Much later still, some of the contraptions in Wallace and Gromit’s The Wrong Trousers are based on a scale model of a gadget filled house that he made for the Ideal Home Show in 1934.

This lecture draws on Elizabeth’s time in Morocco in visits spanning more than 25 years. The lecture focuses particularly on the stories behind the blue pigment used for the fishing boats and doorways of photogenic Essaouira on the Moroccan coast, and the Majorelle Blue developed and patented by French artist Jacques Majorelle in Marrakech in the 1920s. The story of Morocco’s blues takes us from Berber veils to Yves Saint-Laurent who restored Majorelle’s Marrakech garden, via Modernist Orientalist art and a protected mollusk...

A fully illustrated talk with in excess of 60 images exploring the relationship between the making of an image and the way in which it is perceived by the viewer. Further discussion around the eye and the brain being an extraordinary double act made up of visual references and intellectual interpretation. 

Landscape photography is a way of life and is an essential method of expression for Charlie Waite. In discussing his work, he refers to 'pre-visualisation' first used by the great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams, from which he draws much inspiration amongst others. "It is the creative act of the artist-photographer who, in visualising a poetic or revealing image within the scene in front of him, anticipates what the final print must convey to express what he sees and feels". Charlie refers to Ansel Adams and other artists and photographers who have inspired him and shaped his work.

His talk is light-hearted and interspersed with humorous tales within which he reveals the thought processes and the techniques behind his own images, binding them into stories and sharing the anxieties and the joys which accompany their creation.

This lecture explores the crucial role played by the music of Sibelius in forging Finnish cultural identity prior to the country's independence in 1917.   As with so many Finnish artists, including the painters Eero Järnefelt and Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Sibelius found inspiration in the ancient runes of the Kalevala, the national epic.   Iconic works such as Finlandia will be discussed in the context of the emergence of a National Romantic style in Helsinki, and the architecture of Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto.

In a purely personal tour of 19th C Venice, we see how the image of this tough city mellowed through the eyes of Turner, Byron, Henry James, Mann, Monet, etc.

Jazz is one of music’s most important genres: a fascinating blend of rigorous structure, free-wheeling creativity, close-knit ensembles and imaginative improvisation. Drawing on his experience both as musicologist and gigging musician, Sandy can shed light on jazz from the inside. His talk covers the early years of jazz up to the Second World War, and touches on the disparate influences which lay behind the emergence of jazz. Musical illustrations range from the blues, ragtime and the very first jazz recordings through to classics by Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and the Duke Ellington Orchestra, and the dawn of the Swing Era.

Why, 229 years after Burns died, do groups of people around the world still come together to celebrate his life and work?  Burns is one of an elite group of poets to achieve cult status, to generate his own myth:  Burns the ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ who becomes Scotland’s national Bard; Burns the loose liver, lover, boozer, libertine; Burns the radical, democrat, egalitarian revolutionary. 
My lecture will examine those myths and offer some answers to the question why we still regard Robert Burns.

Charles Dickens has often been proclaimed as “The Man Who Invented Christmas” and  indeed on hearing that Dickens had died, a cockney barrow-girl said: “Dickens dead?  Then will Father Christmas die too?” Dickens  revived the Christmas traditions with his warm  portrayal of Christmas in the domestic setting; with  plum pudding, piping hot turkey, games, dancing  and family cheer by the hearth. Although he  celebrated Christmas in numerous works it is his  enduring master piece, ‘A Christmas Carol’  published on 19th December 1843 which  immortalises the spirit of Christmas Cheer.

Dickens  was a man of extraordinary energy and talent:  literary genius, reformer, public speaker, actor and  amateur magician. In his lecture Bertie Pearce  reveals a Dickensian Christmas with readings,  biographical details and conjuring tricks.

 It is said in theatrical history that there was a Golden Age in  British comedy, from the 1970s to the 1980s. This was in the  branch of theatre known as Variety – it was a world of  comedians and impressionists, of TV shows, and end-of-the-pier  shows, of unusual acts and eccentric dances, of much loved  people like Morecambe and Wise, and Bruce Forsyth.

In this  unashamedly nostalgic lecture, and sharing my personal  connection with this world, I will go back and explore the acts,  the places and the people that made us laugh. And I will also  ask, “What’s happened to comedy today?”

In The Art of The Cartoonist, Harry will be tracing  the history of his profession through the work of  artists who have made an impact upon language,  culture, history, and most importantly, upon him.  These include James Gillray, Charles Schulz,  Hergé ( Georges Remi), Posy Simmonds and  Ronald Searle. Harry will also be drawing live.

Prepare to hear  some tricks of his trade, learn where to put  eyebrows for maximum effect, find out what a  plewd is and when you should use it, and  discover exactly what the Eskimo brothers said in  The Funniest Joke Ever (possibly).

Hieronymus Bosch’s (c.1455-1516) nightmarish monsters and  demons, his bizarre allegories, and the amorous exploits in his  Garden of Earthly Delights have intrigued viewers for centuries. Little  is known about this remarkable painter, although it has been claimed  that he was a member of a heretical sect, a dabbler in alchemy and  even a drug-user!

This lecture unravels the meanings of Bosch’s enigmatic paintings in  the context of his own time, explaining them in terms of social satire,  mediæval folklore and pre-Reformation spirituality, while also revealing  the beauty and inventiveness of his images.

This light-hearted talk examines the history of wine, an elixir that has sustained much of humanity for almost 10,000 years. Essentially little more than fermented grape juice, this extraordinary and contradictory liquid has caused wars and riots, has helped broker peace and more commonly, served as an aphrodisiac. It has been personified in the form of Gods and been the principal catalyst in civilised entertaining and dining rituals.

Bottom’s Up! traces the story of wine: from its humble beginnings in rotting grapes before the Bronze Age to the present . It examines the extraordinary diversity of paintings and artefacts, including drinking vessels, created by some of history’s greatest artists and craftsmen to enhance the pleasure of wine, and to impress guests. The talk visits the ancient societies of Egypt, Greece and Rome, travels through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and 18th century Britain. It culminates in the present day, when more wine is being consumed than ever before, with its world market now worth over £100 billion.

The acknowledgement for the attached illustration is Wikipedia Commons/b/b9/carafe_iran.jpeg

So many of our historical references for musical instruments can be found in works of art. Not only can these windows into the past show us what the instruments looked like but also the social context in which they would have been played. Music and different instruments also play a strong role within symbolism in art. Sophie explores the instruments in selected works and then gives live demonstrations on replicas of the instruments depicted.

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