Conway Hall: Where Ethics Matter

Nathalie Olah discusses how this bright generation came to be, and what effective means are still at their disposal to challenge the establishment and ultimately win. By rejecting the established routines of achieving prosperity, and by stealing what you can from them on the way, this book offers hope to anyone who feels increasingly frustrated by our increasingly unequal society. Drawing on her fascinating new polemical work, Steal As Much As You Can: How to Win the Culture Wars in an Age of Austerity, Olah will explore the impact of a decade's worth of austerity on the development of new cultural output, whilst questioning the artistic sensibility of mainstream media's contemporary gatekeepers.

Why flawed logic puts us all at Risk, and How Critical Thinking can save the World. David Robert Grimes shows how we can be lured into making critical mistakes or drawing false conclusions, and how to avoid such errors. Given the power of modern science and the way that movements can unite to protest a cause via social media, we are in dangerous times. But fortunately, we can learn from our mistakes, and by critical thinking and scientific method we can discover how to apply these techniques to everything from deciding what insurance to buy to averting global disaster.

One thing we know for certain is that sex is personal: perhaps the most intimate thing of all. But sex is also shaped by a complicated web of cultural, social and political forces outside of ourselves. Fear-mongering, moral panic and outdated attitudes prevail, but if #MeToo has taught us anything, it's how dangerous it is to keep conversations about sex hidden from view. In her book Behind Closed Doors Natalie Fiennes invests in a radical, inclusive and honest sex education, taking us beyond learning about the ‘birds and the bees', to identifying inequality that stands in the way of sexual freedom. From contraceptives to virginity, consent to pornography, transphobia to sexual abuse, the book shows how our desires are influenced by powerful political processes that can be transformed.

The New Science of how we Walk and why it's Good for us. Walking enabled us to walk out of Africa and to spread as far as Alaska and Australia. It freed our hands and freed our minds. We put one foot in front of the other without thinking – yet how many of us know how we do that, or appreciate the advantages it gives us? In this tribute to walking, neuroscientist Shane O'Mara invites us to marvel at the benefits it confers on our bodies and minds and to start a walking revolution.

Mudlark (/'mAdla;k/) noun A person who scavenges for usable debris in the mud of a river or harbour Lara Maiklem has scoured the banks of the Thames for over fifteen years, in pursuit of the objects that the river unearths: from Neolithic flints to Roman hair pins, medieval buckles to Tudor buttons, Georgian clay pipes to Victorian toys. These objects tell her about London and its lost ways of life. Moving from the river's tidal origins in the west of the city to the point where it meets the sea in the east, Mudlarking is a search for urban solitude and history on the River Thames, what Lara calls ‘the longest archaeological site in the world'.

What is masculinity? Dominating the world around us, from Trump's twitter outbursts to deadly gun violence, from male suicide rates to incels on Reddit and 4chan, masculinity is perceived to be ‘toxic', ‘fragile' and ‘in crisis'. JJ Bola exposes masculinity as a performance that men are socially conditioned into. Using examples of non-Western cultural traditions, music and sport, he shines light on historical narratives around manhood, debunking popular myths along the way. He explores how LGBTQ men, men of colour, and male refugees experience masculinity in diverse ways, revealing its fluidity, how it's strengthened and weakened by different political contexts, such as the patriarchy or the far-right, and perceived differently by those around them.

Will Brexit boost jobs? Or wreck the NHS? Or cause food shortages? From strawberries to passports, the broadcaster and journalist Gavin Esler sets out how the most momentous change in Britain for decades will change everyday life. From the food markets of Kent to NHS operating theatres to the boardrooms of big employers, Brexit throws up many surprises.

Pixie Turner will unpack why diet and nutrition misinformation is so problematic, on social media, in mass media, and on a public health level, and why we could all benefit from taking a moment to assess our personal relationship with food. Expect some mythbusting, diet rants, and lots of fully-referenced evidence-based science. — Pixie Turner is a nutritionist (ANutr), food blogger, and science communicator. She graduated with a First Class degree in Biochemistry, and went on to complete a Masters in Nutrition with Distinction. She has been featured as a nutrition expert on BBC and Channel 5, and in publications such as Red magazine, Evening Standard, Grazia, the Telegraph and more. Her second book, ‘The No Need to Diet Book' was March 2019 and will be available at the talk.

What if you aren't who you think you are? What if you don't really know the people closest to you? And what if your most deeply-held beliefs turn out to be … wrong? In her book Stop Being Reasonable, philosopher and journalist Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells six lucid, gripping stories that show the limits of human reason. She discusses some of these stories with Little Atoms podcaster Neil Denny.

Jonathan H. Marks argues that public-private partnerships create “webs of influence” that undermine the integrity of public health agencies and distort health policy and research. These collaborations also frame public health problems and their solutions in ways that protect and promote the commercial interests of corporate “partners.” We should expect multinational corporations to develop strategies of influence as far as the law allows. But public bodies can and should develop counter-strategies to insulate themselves from influence.

Kerry Hudson discusses her book Lowborn with James Bloodworth. Lowborn is a powerful, personal, agenda-changing work of non-fiction on poverty in Britain – a book like nothing that's been written before, and a book that we all need to pay attention to. Kerry Hudson grew up in all-encompassing, grinding poverty. Always on the move with her single mother, Kerry attended 9 primary schools and 5 secondary schools, living in B&Bs and council flats. Kerry scores 8 out of 10 on the Adverse Childhood Experiences measure of childhood trauma. Whilst many people would like to think that Kerry was an exception – that she was unlucky, or a one-in-a-million case. Sadly, this just isn't true. All of the people Kerry grew up with were experiencing exactly the same as she was. Some a little less, and some far worse. The difference is that Kerry saw an opportunity for a different existence and ran for it.

What do we see when we watch a magician pull a rabbit out of a hat or read a person's mind? We are captivated by an illusion; we applaud the fact that we have been fooled. Why do we enjoy experiencing what seems clearly impossible, or at least beyond our powers of explanation? In this talk Dr Gustav Kuhn examines the psychological processes that underpin our experience of magic.

How we lost our green and pleasant land, and how to take it back. For centuries, England's elite have covered up how they got their hands on millions of acres of our land, by constructing walls, burying surveys and more recently, sheltering behind offshore shell companies. But with the dawn of digital mapping and the Freedom of Information Act, it's becoming increasingly difficult for them to hide. Trespassing through tightly-guarded country estates, ecologically ravaged grouse moors and empty Mayfair mansions, writer and activist Guy Shrubsole has uncovered a wealth of never-before-seen information about the people who own our land, to create the most comprehensive map of ownership in England that has ever been made public.

The new neuroscience that shatters the myth of the female brain. This is not feminist science – it's just science. - Prof Gina Rippon.

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Pause for Thought was a humanist alternative to the BBC Radio 4 programme Thought for the Day, broadcast on BBC World Service from 1997-99. Produced by Christopher Templeton. Donated to Conway Hall Library & Archives Aug 2018. © Christopher Templeton, Tempting Films Ltd & Pemberton Publishing Limited

Traditional songs are full of folklore about ghosts. They tell you why people become ghosts, what ghosts look like, what the living must do to allow the dead to rest in peace. Paul Cowdell, folklore expert on ghosts and a fine singer, will be talking about ghostlore in and around traditional songs, and singing some. Songs may include ‘The Yarmouth Tragedy', ‘The Unquiet Grave' and ‘Polly Vaughn'. Paul completed his PhD at the University of Hertfordshire, where he was looking at contemporary belief in ghosts.

Camille Ralphs will recite the entirety of acclaimed poetry pamphlet Malkin, ‘an ellegy in 14 spels' in the voices of those accused in the 1612 Pendle Witch Trials. Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet, and featured on BBC Radio 6 Music's Sunday show with Cerys Matthews. Ralphs served as 2016-17 President of Oxford University Poetry Society, won the University of Oxford's Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize, and reviews for the TLS.

The four confessions given by Isobel Gowdie to a Scottish court, in May 1662, are seminal witchcraft texts; bringing folk belief in the faerie, the world of familiar spirits, night flight and the coven to stark prominence. This talk shows how a marginal figure, in her own day, moved towards the cultural mainstream, through the works of modern composers, rock musicians and novelist, and was comprehensively recast in the process. Dr John Callow is an author, screenwriter and historian, specialising in Seventeenth Century politics, witchcraft, and popular culture including Embracing the Darkness: A Cultural History of Witchcraft (IB Tarsus 2017).

Whether one believes in ghosts or not, it is an easy assumption that sightings of ghosts must have been common on the First World War battlefields considering the sheer number of traumatic deaths and the intensity of individual and collective emotions. There is certainly a long tradition of the appearance of ghostly armies. So what sort of ghostly expressions of conflict might have been expected during and after the First World War? Owen Davies is a reader in Social History at the University of Hertfordshire. His main field of research is on the history of modern and contemporary witchcraft and magic.

The dead don't always stay peacefully in their graves. British folklore and chronicle relates from very early times instances of vampire-like and undead behaviour, spelling disaster for communities. Radical social upheaval – such as the Norman Conquest – spawns narratives about the undead; later chroniclers remark that there are so many tales of the undead it would be tedious to list them all. Recent archaeological finds seem to confirm the survival of these beliefs right up to the end of the medieval period; time-honoured ways of preventing the dead from walking again offer the best explanation for the unusual post-mortem treatment of some bodies. Nor is it just the British Isles that suffer from the plague of the walking dead; Icelandic sagas have many such tales, and some useful tips about how to settle such revenants once and for all. Carolyne Larrington is a Tutorial Fellow in English Literature at St John's Oxford and the author of The Land of the Green Man, Winter is Coming: the Medieval World of Game of Thrones and An Introduction to Norse Myths.

The idea that the dead can return to haunt the living is deeply rooted in the British imagination, and ghosts are central to countless plays and paintings, stories and ballads, photographs and films. But why has the appearance and behaviour of ghosts in art and literature altered over time? When did they stop wearing shrouds and put on white sheets or become see-through? And what do these changes reveal about them – and us? Dr. Susan Owens, former Curator of Paintings at the V&A, is the author of The Ghost: A Cultural History (Tate Publishing, 2017).

Emily Cleaver recounts a recent ‘scouring' of the Uffington White Horse, the traditional cleaning event that has kept the chalk figure from becoming overgrown since its construction in the Iron Age. Exploring the archeological evidence for the origins of the figure, plus local folklore from fertility rituals to furniture arrangement. Emily is a writer with an interest in folklore, local traditions and history.

A discussion as to an alternative vision for education systems, institutions and people in the United Kingdom. Speakers: David Scott, University College London, Institute of Education Robin Street, Co-Principal of UCL Academy Organised and Chaired by Francis Sealey (GlodbalNet21)and Prof Evan Parker (Conway Hall Ethical Society).

Michael Rosen has a new memoir, So They Call You Pisher! In this conversation with Daniel Hahn, Rosen recalls the first twenty-three years of his life. In partnership with Newham Books. Recorded: Thursday 16th November 2017 at Conway Hall.

Will Ashon, author of Strange Labyrinth: Outlaws, Poets, Mystics, Murderers and a Coward in London's Great Forest, discusses his journey out in to the edges of London. Hosted by Scott Wood from New Lands/London Fortean Society.

Long ago a path was created by the passage of feet tramping through endless forests. Gradually that path became a track, and the track became a road. It connected the White Cliffs of Dover to the Druid groves of the Welsh island of Anglesey, across a land that was first called Albion then Britain, Mercia and eventually England and Wales. Armies from Rome arrived and straightened this 444 kilometres of meandering track, which in the Dark Ages gained the name Watling Street. Today, this ancient road goes by many different names: the A2, the A5 and the M6 Toll. It is a palimpsest that is always being rewritten. The myriad people who use this road every day might think it unremarkable, but, as John Higgs shows, it hides its secrets in plain sight. Watling Street is not just the story of a route across our island, but an acutely observed, unexpected exploration of Britain and who we are today, told with wit and flair, and an unerring eye for the curious and surprising. Watling Street is a road of witches and ghosts, of queens and highwaymen, of history and myth, of Chaucer, Dickens and James Bond. Along this route Boudicca met her end, the Battle of Bosworth changed royal history, Bletchley Park code breakers cracked Nazi transmissions and Capability Brown remodelled the English landscape. The event was hosted by Scott Wood & Conway Hall

In this talk, Professor Joseph Uscinski will show that conspiracy theories follow a strategic logic: they are tools used by the powerless to attack and defend against the powerful. Conspiracy theories must conform to this logic, or they will not be successful. In this way, conspiracy theories are for losers. Joseph Uscinski is associate professor of political science at University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL and co-author of American Conspiracy Theories (Oxford, 2014). This talk was recorded at Conway Hall on the 18th July 2017 with The London Fortean Society. Hosted by Scott Wood.

London Fortean Society, in partnership with Conway Hall, present a night marking the centenary of the Cottingley Fairies case. Michael Terwey of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford discusses how the photographs were taken and how they fitted in to the Spiritualist culture of the time and Professor Diane Purkis asks why Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, along with many others, so wanted to believe in fairies. Image credit: Kristian Nordestgaard - Frances and the Fairies

John Grindrod tells of the vision behind green-belts, their creation, and discusses the fiery emotions they stir up and tells a story of growing up there, recounted in his poignant social history Outskirts. Hosted by Scott Wood of New Lands http://dirtymodernscoundrel.blogspot.co.uk/

WARNING: Contains some strong language. Will Storr comes to Conway Hall to take us on a journey of self-obsession; from the shores of Ancient Greece, through the Christian Middle Ages, to the self-esteem evangelists of 1980s California, the rise of narcissism and the selfie generation, and right up to the era of hyper-individualistic neoliberalism in which we live now.

Paul Robeson was a modern renaissance man: lawyer, linguist, actor, professional athlete, civil rights activist and one of the greatest singers of the twentieth century, famous for "Ol Man River" on Broadway and The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London. The son of an escaped slave, Robeson became an international superstar before his socialist political convictions brought him to be white-washed from public view by the US government in the McCarthy era. Author Jeff Sparrow tells Robeson's story and explores his relevance to contemporary political movements in a new book: No Way But This. He will be in conversation with journalist Ellie Mae O'Hagan.

Jacqueline Wilson talks about her new book, Wave Me Goodbye, which is set at the beginning of WWII. Jacqueline will also talk about her life, how she has become one of the best-selling authors of recent years and about a host of her well known characters such as Hetty Feather and Tracy Beaker. In aid of Refugee Week, Battersea Cats & Dogs Home and Conway Hall Ethical Society

A. C. Grayling explores the long, tragic history of war and how warfare has changed in response to technological advances.

Radicals is an exploration of the individuals, groups and movements rejecting the way we live now, and are attempting to find alternatives. In it, Jamie Bartlett, one of the world's leading thinkers on radical politics and technology, takes us inside the strange and exciting worlds of the innovators, disruptors, idealists and extremists who think society is broken, and believe they know how.

The Conway Memorial Lecture 2016. Lawrence Krauss. Chaired by A. C. Grayling. Recorded on 16th December 2016.

Francis Sealey chairs a panel of Matt Scott, Charlie Blowers, Professor Evan Parker discussing the importance of how we can all be involved in cultural change is very empowering as it shows us that the path to making a better world can rest with us all and not just Parliamentarians.

Celebrated theoretical physicist Sir Prof Roger Penrose speaks with Ideas Roadshow host Howard Burton on the current and future state of theoretical physics in keeping with his latest book, Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe.