To kick off our seasonal celebrations, musician and broadcaster Sandy Burnett is on hand to share his selection of much-loved Christmas tunes. Expect an hour of the finest festive music from across the globe – his selections include sparking moments from Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, a heartwarming ballad from Mel Tormé, something from Soweto, a heavenly chorus from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Leipzig, an illustration of the English carol tradition at its finest - and something more cynical from Eartha Kitt…

About the Lecturer

Sandy is one of the UK’s most versatile music commentators, enjoying a career that combines broadcasting, performing and lecturing. After studying at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and working as music director for the RSC, National Theatre and in London’s West End, Sandy Burnett spent a decade as one of the core team of presenters on BBC Radio 3. Combining engaging scholarship with hands-on expertise, for ACE Cultural Tours he devises and leads cultural holidays at home in the UK and all over the world, is the author of the Idler Guide to Classical Music, is a highly sought after double bassist on the London jazz scene, and was appointed the Academy of Ancient Music’s Hogwood Fellow for the 2018-19 season. During lockdown he established an online Listening Club which meets weekly to listen to and discuss great works of classical music.

This lecture will explore the relationship between paint and photography, but from the unique perspective of how painting responds to photography. Exploring how the two worlds and the rather unexpected response of paint to photography. 

About the Lecturer

Dr. Emma Watts is an Art Historian with specialist interest in the economics of art, British art and material culture. Her career began in the fine art auction world and she has since had a successful academic career in the UK, Australia and Hong Kong. 
Emma,  is passionate about access to the fine arts and its education. She has developed National, tertiary and adult education curricula and been active in policy, planning, education and advisory boards for Heritage, Arts and Museums and curatorial and collection management in Australia and the UK. 
She is currently enjoying the diversity of consultancy, with Watson Strand fine art valuation specialists, lecturing with the Open University and writing.

Most people can name a painter, sculptor or furniture maker but few can name a bookbinder and yet bindings may have the same level of craftsmanship as any painting, ceramic, textile, or piece of furniture. This lecture provides an overview of Western bookbinding: the development of book structure, the materials used and their manufacture and the decoration of bindings. It explores the sometimes-exciting role of waste materials and recycling in the book trade, e.g. a piece of paper used as waste material in the C18 may now be worth more, or be of greater interest, than the book itself; a piece of cardboard may provide insight into trade routes in and around England; the way in which the craftsman put the book together may indicate European binders working in England and vice versa. Bookbinding is a craft that has developed over many centuries and has held the world's learning until recently and this lecture provides some fascinating insights into this craft.

Caroline Bendix is a library conservator, accredited through the Institute of Conservation, who has worked on over 500 collections in the UK and abroad, including St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, advising on all aspects of books’ care in situ. In 2019 she was awarded the Plowden Medal, the most prestigious award for conservators in the UK, for her “outstanding work in developing in-situ library conservation”. From 1992 until 2025 she was the National Trust’s Adviser on Libraries Conservation and also the adviser and trainer for Arts Society Heritage Volunteers projects. She has also written three of the British Library’s guides on preservation.

The Echoing Scream: the Birth of Expressionism

When Edvard Munch created The Scream in 1893, he was responding to an intense emotional experience. Today, we would call it a panic attack. Crippling and anxious making, this primal cry was also a rallying call: for Munch and for the wider world of art. It gave birth to a movement known as expressionism, showing life not at it is (realism) or as it might be perceived in a fleeting moment (impressionism), but as it is experienced within the unembellished core of our being. Explosive and emotive, the aftershocks of Munch’s vision were felt across the world: in art and music, literature, dance and film. Charting the origins of expressionism and its historical context, this multifaceted talk embraces artists and thinkers such as Kandinsky, Klee and Schiele, Nietzsche, Freud and Schoenberg, pondering the radical ways in which they both reflected and ignited our inner feelings.  

Ancient Egyptian Artistry in Glass

 The ancient Egyptians began making glass c1450 BC following the arrival of the technique from Syria - a result of the great warrior pharaoh Thutmose III’s military campaigns in that part of the ancient world. The Egyptians were soon accomplished glassmakers. In this lecture Lucia will explore how these ancient artisans produced coloured glass objects and their wonderful variety including vessels, inlay, beads, amulets, figures and even headrests. She will examine the developments in glass manufacture in Egypt from the New Kingdom (15thcentury BC) through to the Roman Period (1st century AD) and will show images of many of the vibrantly coloured glass objects surviving from this great civilisation.

Lucia Gahlin is an Egyptologist and Lecturer. She has taught at a number of UK Universities including London, Bristol and Exeter.  She has worked at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology in London and as an archaeological draughtsman and registrar on excavations, including the site of Tell el-Amarna in Egypt.  She regularly leads tours to Egypt for specialist travel companies such as Andante Travels, and her publications include Egypt: Gods, Myths and Religion.

“...in which it is the very trickery that pleases me. But show me how the trick is done, and I have lost my interest therein.”

Seneca (3BC-65AD)

From the beginning of time the fascination with magic and the impossible has been widespread. Egypt was the cradle of magic. Sorcerer Priests used scientific principles to create illusions for the edification of worship and to hold power over the people. Where there was power there was magic. Then there is the age-old skill of sleight of hand, which proves that ‘the hand is quicker than the eye’. Magicians were known as ‘Jongleurs’ lest they by sentenced to death for ‘witchcraft and conjuration’ under the edicts of Henry V111.

With the emergence of the Music Hall, Magic gained a new respectability and audiences flocked in there thousands to watch the extraordinary feats of The Great Illusionists. This gave birth to legendary tricks such as pulling a rabbit from a hat and sawing a lady in half. And if magicians guarded their secrets with their lives, how was the Magic Circle formed ? – Home to 10,000 secrets.

Even Today in our super technical age of ipods and broadband, the wonder and surprise of magic are as popular as ever, not forgetting the Harry Potter craze.

Bertie Pearce is a Member of The Inner Magic Circle with Gold Star He has performed all over the world in weird and wonderful places including: The Magic Castle in Hollywood; The Kulm Hotel in St Moritz and The Bertie and Boo Cafe in Balham,London. His ‘Soiree Fantastique’ Show at The Magic Circle in 1999 was a sell out and in 2003 he put on “All Aboard  – The Comedy of Cruising” at The Bridewell Theatre in London which sold out for 11 nights. In 2008 he performed with his sister Boo in ‘A Spoonful of Magic’ at The Polka Theatre in Wimbledon and this was followed by Bertie and Boo’s “Wonders of The World’ Show which played at the Brighton Festival Fringe.

He is widely sought after for close up magic and cabarets for private parties and fundraisers. In 2003 he was awarded the Carlton Comedy Award by the Magic Circle and twice won the award for Originality from The International Brotherhood of Magicians which won’t surprise anyone who has seen his act.

He inherited a fascination with conjuring from his maternal Grandfather Charles Derek Hill who was a classic amateur conjourer of his day, building illusions at the family firm, Higgs and Hill. Equipped with a BA(Hons) in drama from Manchester University, Bertie went on to the Ecole Internationale du Theatre Jaques Lecoq in Paris. After a summer season in Jersey and two pantomimes he served time on the Cruise Ships for four years. His eyes were opened to the wonders of world travel and some unbelievable passengers which provided the material for his show All Aboard. In 2009 Bertie became an accredited Nadfas Lecturer and has toured extensively sharing his passion for Magic, Punch and Judy, Victorian Pastimes and Charles Dickens. His love of people and performance ensures that there is always a new and exciting gig around the corner.

The Newlyn School artists are best known for their depictions of fishing, yet their artistic inspiration came from the European tradition of depicting rural toil, from Millet's The Gleaners of 1857 to Bastien-Lepage's oeuvre of the 1870s and 1880s. This talk weaves its way through the stunning Cornish landscape in the company of those who made their living from the soil, examining the crops and livestock they tended, and evoking a pre-industrial rural idyll that these outstanding artists captured so beautifully in paint.

Alison Bevan Biographical info

Author of the recently published book ‘The Art of the Newlyn School: Paintings of Cornish Life and Light’ (Sansom & Co, 2026), Alison Bevan is an art historian specialising in Cornish art from 1880 – 1930. She gained her expertise during her 14-year tenure as Director of Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, which specialises in the work of the Newlyn and Lamorna art colonies, and was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to Cultural Heritage in Cornwall. She subsequently became Director of the Royal West of England Academy of Art (RWA) in Bristol, where many of the Newlyn artists were Academicians. Since 2024, she has been a freelance lecturer and curator, and is an Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Bristol.

Many people now carry a phone with a camera capable of taking very high-quality pictures, and yet the drawing and painting of botanical specimens persists with new Florilegium Societies still being formed.  Why is a drawing or painting still considered to be superior to a digital image?  This talk looks at the history of botanical illustration from the early herbals 1,500 years ago to the present day, taking in the lives of both the artists and the plants immortalised in the artwork.

About the Lecturer 
Timothy Walker was director of the Oxford Botanic Garden for 26 years to 2014. Since then he has been the senior College lecturer in Plant Biology at Somerville College Oxford. 

A ‘how to’ guide to decoding dress, poses and accessories in country house portraits, and the stylistic genius of artists such as Van Dyck, Reynolds and Gainsborough.

Country houses are often full of historic portraits, but for today’s visitor it is not always clear who the sitters are, why they are there, or why they mattered. Visitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, would have been immediately known how to ‘read’ the portraits and understand their visual cues. Focusing on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century portraits, in this lecture we will look closely at clothes, poses and accessories, and learn how to decode them. We will then turn to style, and look at how artists such as Van Dyck, Reynolds and Gainsborough revolutionised portraiture in Britain.

About the Lecturer

Dr Amy Lim is an art historian and curator, specialising in British fine and decorative arts from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. She is curator of the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, and the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, and a Departmental Tutor at Oxford Lifelong Learning. She has curated and contributed to numerous exhibitions, including British Baroque: Power and Illusion (Tate, 2020), Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920 (Tate, 2024) and Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk (Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury and the Stanley Spencer Gallery, 2025-6). Amy has degrees in History, and Literature & Arts from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and has published articles and essays on a variety of art-related topics from gothic garden monuments to female patronage.

Years of working as an artist within the Criminal Justice System in England and Germany have given Angela unique insights into the destructive and costly cycle of crime, prisons and re-offending. In this thought-provoking talk she offers a deeper understanding of the minds, lives and challenges of offenders. With extraordinary slides of art projects and prisoner’s art, she demonstrates how within the process of creating art of any discipline, there are vital opportunities for offenders to confront their crimes and develop the key life skills so essential in leading a positive and productive life. 

About the Lecturer
Angela Findlay is an artist, author and lecturer with a long career of teaching art in prisons both in England and Germany. Her time ‘behind bars’ and later as Arts Coordinator of the London-based Koestler Arts, gave her many insights into the huge impact the arts can have in terms of rehabilitation. Her interest in the redemptive role of art in society led to extensive research into Germany’s complex post-WW2 process of remembrance. Angela’s paintings have been widely nationally and her book – In My Grandfather’s Shadow - was published in July 2022 by Penguin Transworld.

This talk is moving, informative and very original. Interspersed with personal accounts of humorous or slightly horrifying situations, these talks have kept audiences across the country engrossed. 

Have you noticed how many medieval paintings are set in May? The language of plants evolved over the centuries to create a lexicon of creation that paved the way to Paradise, a perennial early summer where all the flowers and all the fruits emerge at the same time- but each tells us something different. We explore paintings, tapestry, manuscripts and sculpture to re-learn a lost symbolic language.

 Through it, we will discover the manifold meanings in one painting that open windows into other art forms, together representing a shared understanding of the late medieval world and the aspirations of patrons, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea.

Not only did the Queen Mother have a fabulous jewellery collection of her own but she also had access to those jewels designated Heirlooms of the Crown.  As it would be impossible to describe everything she wore over the course of her long life, Jeremy concentrates on a selection of items which are of gemmological and historic significance and have an interesting story attached.  He also reveals how she acquired them, when she wore them and where they are now.

About the Lecturer

On graduating from Durham University with a degree in geology, Jeremy was offered a job as a mining geologist in Zambia.  But rather than eke out the remainder of his youth down an African copper mine he thought it would be more fun to join the Army.  And indeed it was.  On leaving Sandhurst he spent five years in the Irish Guards, the last two of which were on secondment to Clarence House as the Queen Mother’s equerry.

Being a geologist he couldn’t help but notice the magnificent gemstones in the jewellery the Queen Mother used to wear.  Indeed, if he admired a piece she would sometimes take it off and give it to him to have a closer look.  This inspired him to study gemmology and when he left the Army he qualified as a Fellow of the Gemmological Association of Great Britain.  He then spent several years as a jewellery and precious stone dealer in London’s Hatton Garden.

Jeremy has also worked as an exploration geologist in South Africa, a gold miner in California and, after the Queen Mother’s death in 2002, he helped develop the Castle of Mey as one of the north of Scotland’s most popular visitor attractions.