This lecture will follow the AGM at 6.30pm. The AGM starts at 6pm.

Art, architecture, and music during Vienna’s cultural heyday are vividly revealed including how the city united musical giants - Mozart, Haydn, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Strauss, Mahler, Bruckner, Schoenberg.

Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières shows Parisians by the Seine; the lecture reveals his ambition, colour theory, Pointillism, and the painting’s place in modern art history.

Blue’s symbolism spans cultures. From ultramarine, a pigment once shipped from beyond the sea, to ancient indigo, and accidental Prussian Blue. The colour inspired Impressionist painters and Japanese printmakers alike.  Monet and Hokusai used it to reshape how art conveys emotion, memory and beauty.

British comedy’s 1970s–80s "Golden Age" defined a generation. In this affectionate lecture, we’ll explore iconic shows, reveal the secrets of their success, and celebrate the stars who transitioned from Variety.

“Sensation’ (Royal Academy, 1997) propelled Young British Artist’s and controversy.  Contemporary art surged mainstream as Saatchi-owned works reshaped careers and Britain’s cultural landscape.

Marking the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death in March 1827, this talk explores the legacy of the transformative composer, featuring contemporary portraits and musical examples from his iconic works.

Whistler, a witty and irreverent American artist, scandalized London society during the 1870s. Having moved from bohemian Paris, his radical ideas met strong opposition in England.

The two "Queens of Crime" are Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. This talk examines how they depicted a rapidly changing London in the 1920s and 30s through their iconic detectives, Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey. While writing in the same genre, they approached it with radically different styles.

Art anchors us in turbulent times. As Dorothea Tanning said, “it’s a raft for sanity”. Through mindful, slow looking, we explore works that ease heartbreak, loneliness, and fear, or spark curiosity, energy, and calm.

In 1893, Edvard Munch’s The Scream gave voice to raw emotion, what we’d now call a panic attack. That piercing cry became the heartbeat of Expressionism: a movement that revealed life not as it looks, but as it feels. From Munch to Kandinsky, Klee, and Schiele, alongside the ideas of Nietzsche, Freud, and Schoenberg, this talk explores how art, music, and thought erupted with new intensity, forever changing how we see the world within.