Monday 4th October

NONE OPERATIC MUSIC IN ITALY DURING LATE 19th and EARLY 20th CENTURIES.
Geoffrey Duggan : Since retiring from the CBSO Geoffrey Duggan has taught at the Birmingham Conservatoire and lectured regularly in many aspects of music. He currently runs the regular music course at the Institute. This lecture is given in memory of Janet Waterhouse.

Monday 11th October

W B YEATS and MAUDE GONNE.
Dr Kathleen Dixon Donnelly writes : Of all the women in the life of poet and playright William Butler Yeats, none affected him and his work more that the towering Irish revolutionary, Maud Gonne. She was actually English and had two children by her French lover before marrying an Irishman – not Yeats. We will look at some clips from the National Library of Ireland documentary, Yeats: the Life and Work of William Butler Yeats as we explore the tumultuous relationship of these two creative people.

Monday 18th October

FLORENCE CAMM : NEGOTIATING SUCCESS.
Elaine Williams’s MA thesis, University of Birmingham, centred on the work of Florence Camm who was born in Smethwick in 1874; intermittently attending the Birmingham Municipal School of Art until her death in 1960. This lecture will present Florence Camm’s Dante and Beatrice Six Light Window 1911, three panels of which are currently on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Monday 25th October
(at 7.30pm)

COMETS, ASTEROIDS AND THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT.
In this lecture which is jointly hosted by the Birmingham and Midland Institute and the Lunar Society, Sir Arnold Wolfendale FRS will discuss the evidence and provide his views and conclusions on the nature of comets and asteroids and their origin. The lecture will be chaired by Peter Willmore formerly Professor of astro-physics at the University of Birmingham.

Monday 1st November

GEORGE SHAW: BIRMINGHAM’S FIRST PHOTOGRAPHER.
Peter James Head of Photographs, Birmingham Library and Archives will give an illustrated lecture discussing the reputation, work and life of Shaw.

Monday 8th November

JEAN RHYS : GOOD MORNING MIDNIGHT.
The novelist William Palmer examines the writer Jean Rhys through her first four autobiographical novels, which give a vivid picture of her early life in Paris and London in the 1920s.

Monday 15th November

THE ABOMINATION OF THE ILL-BRED: THE 1834 DIARY OF SIR GEORGE ARNEY.
R M Healey, whose fascination for diaries and journals goes back many years, was intrigued by a small, closely written anonymous diary he found, quite by chance, in a south London bookshop. It covered a long tour through Europe from January to October 1834 while it bore no name, the long daily entries and lively style suggested that the writer was no ordinary traveller.

Hoping to discover the diarist’s identity somewhere in the manuscript, Healey began transcribing it. As he progressed, it soon became clear that this scholar of Shakespeare and German literature, lover of music, and student of politics and history was a well travelled, highly cultured individual. Later a reference to the diarist’s wife led to the unveiling of the writer George Arney, a lawyer from Salisbury, who as Sir George, later became New Zealand’s second Chief Justice.

Arney was an extraordinary mature and outspoken twenty-four year old barrister when he began his cultural tour. He had recently married and his journey was, in essence, an extended honeymoon. The diary is a testament to Arney’s devotion to his new wife, but more significantly it is a record of a rather conservative, somewhat chauvinistic, and always candid Englishman’s impressions of Europe at a particularly intriguing period in its history.

Monday 22nd November

JOHN GWYNN: ‘A FINE, LIVELY RATTLING FELLOW’.
This lecture is a celebration of the eighteenth century architect and designer John Gwynn who was born in Shrewsbury in 1713 and died in Worcester 1786. Initially a carpenter and then a largely self taught architect Gwynn’s achievements also include becoming a civil engineer and a founder member of the Royal Academy (1768).

He was the builder of the English bridge in Shrewsbury (1767) Atcham Bridge (1769) Worcester Bridge (1771) and Magdalen Bridge in Oxford (1772).

Stefka Richie who is in the final year of her PhD on Dr Johnson and social improvement, takes the view that all of Gwynn’s work was imbued with the spirit of improvement of human life and aimed at alleviating eighteenth century town poverty.

Monday 29th November

ENGLISH DECADENCE : John Mac Dermott.
We tend to think of decadence as a mainly French phenomenon. However, in the 1890’s a number of English writers attracted the name ‘decadents’. Can there be an English decadence or is it a cultural contraction in terms? What do we make of these writers’ perhaps surprising association with Victorian Roman Catholicism?

Friday 17th September

W H Auden and Benjamin Britten.
Before Alan Bennett’s play The Habit of Art visits Birmingham Rep. we shall consider some of the literary and artistic achievements of its principal characters.

Friday 1st October

Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782).
Now perhaps better known for the success of its stage and screen adaptations, the original novel offers a heady mix of scandal, intrigue and sexual manoeuvrings.

Friday 15th October

William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675) & Noel Coward, Private Lives (1930).
We shall contrast two sparkling plays which complicate and challenge easy assumptions about sexual sparring.

Friday 29th October

Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859) and the The Moonstone (1868).
Author of thirty novels and fourteen plays, Collins has been over-shadowed by his friend Charles Dickens. No less a critic than T S Elliot thought TheMoonstone ‘the first … and the best of modern detective novels’.

Friday 12th November

Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra (1608) & G B Shaw, Ceasar and Cleopatra (1898).
Acclaimed for her Cleopatra in 1972, Janet Suzman will be directing Kim Cattrall at Liverpool Playhouse. The occasion prompts us to contrast Shakespeare’s ‘lass unparalleled’ with Shaw’s kitten-queen.

Friday 26th November

The Ariadne Story.
Shortly after Welsh National Opera has presented Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos (1916) at Birmingham Hippodrome, we shall explore the allure of a multi-faceted myth which has been reinterpreted in art, music, poetry, drama – and even musical theatre!

Friday 10th December

John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga (1922).
Three novels (with different priorities) were packaged as a trilogy which was arguably given greater coherence by a remarkable television adaptation 45 years later.