Barca: Simon Kuper & David Triesman
Speakers: Simon Kuper, David Triesman FC Barcelona is not only the most popular sports club ever, it’s one of the world’s most influential organisations, with four million visitors to its Camp Nou stadium each year and some 250 million followers on social media. Simon Kuper was given unprecedented access to the inner sanctum as he […]
Anatomy of a Nation
Speakers: Dominic Selwood, Claudia Rubenstein Best-selling author, novelist, historian and barrister Dominic Selwood investigates Britain’s identities from 950,000 BC to the present, examining 50 documents that tell the story of what makes Britain unique, from medieval folk music to Hitler’s kill list of prominent Britons. From an obscure outpost on the fringes of the Roman […]
Steven Isserlis on Bach
A unique insight into one of the greatest composers of all time, from a leading light of contemporary classical music, in a world-class concert hall. Acclaimed worldwide for his profound musicianship and technical mastery, cellist Steven Isserlis is also an author and broadcaster. In addition to a discussion of his latest book The Bach Cello […]
Mourning and Evening
Speakers: Sally Berkovic, Nessa Rapoport From burials to sitting shiva, join the authors of two intriguing new books on how Jewish communities mark death. Nessa Rapoport, author of Preparing for Sabbath and A Women’s Book of Grieving, returns with Evening: A Novel, with a Jewish family mourning the death of one of two sisters. And […]
Jewish Magic
Speakers: Yoel Finkelman Dr Yoel Finkelman discusses cosmic forces and the supernatural within Jewish history to today. The deliberate manipulation of supernatural forces for human ends has a long and surprisingly robust place in the history of Jewish ideas and practice. Jews throughout history cast spells, wrote amulets and crafted magical objects in order to […]
Love & Loss
Speakers: Amy Bloom, Devorah Baum New York Times bestseller Amy Bloom has won international acclaim for her novels, essays, children’s books and short stories, with Roddy Doyle calling her “one of the USA’s most consistently brilliant writers”. Her powerful new non-fiction work, In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss is an illuminating story of […]
Ruth Wisse: Free as a Jew
Speakers: Ruth Wisse, Josh Glancy “Ruth Wisse’s intellectual autobiography is a lasting work of profound moral force and scathing political discernment.” High praise from Cynthia Ozick for Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation. Harvard Professor Emerita Ruth Wisse escaped the Nazis as a child and devoted her life as a female […]
Stars and Spies
Speakers: Christopher Andrew, Robert Hutton Espionage relies on secrecy and show business on publicity, but both require high levels of creative thinking, improvisation, disguise and role-play. Stars and Spies is the first history of the lively crossover between the two, which has produced some of the most extraordinary undercover agents as well as dangerous failures. […]
The Sassoons
Speakers: Joseph Sassoon, Sara Manasseh One of the great commercial dynasties of the 19th century, the Sassoons were as eminent as traders as the Rothschild were bankers: a handful of Jewish refugees exiled from Ottoman Baghdad who forged a mercantile juggernaut trading cotton and opium, whose vast network of agents, informants and politicians bridged East […]
The Passenger
Written in the wake of Kristallnacht in a frenzied four weeks, 23-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s unbearably suspenseful and disturbingly prophetic posthumous novel recounts the plight of German Jewish businessman Otto Silberman, fleeing his home in the wake of the pogrom as he races to escape this homeland that is no longer a home. Writers Eva […]
The Man From The Future
Smartphones; game theory; nanotechnology; nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann. Born into a Jewish family in culturally dazzling fin de siècle Budapest, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived, reputed by his colleagues to have the fastest brain on the planet – […]
The Father: A Revenge
Speakers: Franziska Frank, Philippe Sands Niklas Frank was just seven when his father Hans Frank, Hitler’s legal adviser and governor general of occupied Poland, was executed at Nuremberg as a Nazi war criminal. In the decades since he has attempted to come to terms with the enormity of the horror unleashed; The Father: A Revenge […]