Programme
Friday
Vinson Lecture Theatre Programme
10:30-11:30
CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS – THE FESTIVAL NOW BEGINS AT 12.00. TICKET HOLDERS HAVE BEEN INFORMED
What the Tudors and Stuarts Saw
CHRISTINA FARADAY explores the vivid visual and material worlds of the Tudor and Stuart period and explains why they differed from the mainstream of the European Renaissance, and recovers their original power to move, impress and delight.
12:00-13:00
The Turbulent Seventeenth Century
JONATHAN HEALEY offers a vivid account of arguably the most dramatic and consequential period in the history of both Britain and Ireland.
Lunch 13:00-14:00
14:00-15:00
The Restless Republic
ANNA KEAY offers an engaging and often surprising social history of the British Republic and the Cromwellian Protectorate, a political experiment unique in these islands’ history.
15:30-16:30
The Windsors at War
ALEXANDER LARMAN tracks the royal family’s fortunes between 1937 and 1947: the bombing of Buckingham Palace in May 1940, the Duke of Windsor’s ill-advised visit to Germany in October 1937 and the death of the Duke of Kent in a plane crash in August 1942. How did the Windsors unite enough to help Britain win the Second World War?
17:00-18:00
Victory to Defeat: the Rise and Fall of the British Army, 1918-1940
ROBERT LYMAN, the distinguished military historian, traces the decline of the British Army from its victory in 1918 to its defeat in 1940 – and draws worrying parallels with the state of the armed forces today.
18:30-19:30
Appeasement Reassessed: Hitler, Chamberlain, and the Road to the Second World War
DOMINIC SANDBROOK, co-presenter of The Rest is History the world’s most listened-to history podcast and historian of twentieth-century Britain, interviews SIMON HEFFER on the appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the controversial reappraisal of Neville Chamberlain in his new book Sing as We Go: Britain between the Wars, published this month.
Ondaatje Lecture Theatre, Radcliffe Centre, Programme
10:30-11:30
12:00-13:00
The Battle of Stalingrad
IAIN MACGREGOR reveals the horror, drama and courage which marked what may be the most decisive battle of the Second World War, as the Red Army turned the tide in their titanic struggle against Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.
Lunch 13:00-14:00
14:00-15:00
Escaping the Holocaust: the Forgers’ Forgotten Story
ROGER MOORHOUSE tells the story of how, between 1940 and 1943, a small group of Polish diplomats and Jewish activists in Switzerland engaged in a remarkable – and until now, almost completely unknown – humanitarian operation to save thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.
15:30-16:30
Why We Need the Classics
DAVID BUTTERFIELD makes a passionate and convincing case for the study of the Classical world, its history, its literature, its architecture and art, and why the world of the Greeks and Romans still matters in the twenty first century.