The novel brilliantly exploits first-person narrative to craft a narrative which is both personal and yet also holds a mirror up to Long Island society in the jazz age. The Great Gatsby is celebrated as one of the greatest American novels and there are three major filmed versions which provide contrasting perspectives

Join Ruskin Club for a tour of Birmingham Council House, led by Jayne Francis. Meet at 11am on the front steps to the Council House, Victoria Square. Free for BMI members, £5 for non-members.

Please meet at the Council House steps just before 1pm.

What if the movements that promised freedom and equality—civil rights, feminism, decolonization—ended up creating new forms of isolation? In this lecture, we will explore how collective struggles for justice were gradually transformed into personal identity projects, and how this shift has fragmented our sense of community. We will examine the roles of culture, consumerism, and technology in amplifying this fragmentation. Philosophy offers a companionable space to think together about these challenges: to understand both what is true and what truly matters. During the lecture, I will also share what philosophy means to me and why it continues to matter in our shared journey.

A claim that Sondheim’s achievements may one day sit alongside Shakespeare’s may be a little hyperbolic but the National Theatre’s production of his last piece, Here We Are reminds us of his originality and theatricality. Reference will be made to Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1963), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987) and Passion (1994).

You are invited to hear Dr Pamela Mason share her enthusiasm about Shakespeare whilst also learning about the work of Arden Riding for the Disabled Group from the group’s Senior Instructor Elizabeth Hill. Payment on the day by a suggested donation of £10. Arden RDA is  registered charity 1153299.

In this lunchtime reading and talk, Naush Sabah will give a reading from a new sequence of poems she has been working on as Institute Poet-in-Residence. Her new work continues to engage with the landscapes and histories of Birmingham and its migrant communities as well as responding to the political and social realities of the current moment and how intimately they shape life in the city. Naush will also discuss her editorial work as Publishing Director of Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and the journal's place in contemporary poetry publishing in the UK.

Both plays challenge assumptions about relationships and how men and women negotiate the marital contract. The RSC has commissioned Laura Wade to adapt The Constant Wife (for summer performances in the Swan theatre) and a production of Who’s Afraid… is being staged at Leicester’s Curve theatre this October.

Join Artist in Residence Peter Tinkler as he draws a portrait in pencil, and you can follow along as he takes you through each step of the process. We'll look at basic shapes, structuring the head, using some classic measuring techniques like comparative and alignment for greater accuracy, and finally placing/adding the features. It will be a head in profile, and Peter will supply the reference for it. 

The relationship between mothers and daughters provides the starting point for the exploration of a novel that richly demonstrates a complexity far beyond any simple opposition between head and heart. Mrs Dashwood’s preference for her younger daughter shapes the future for Marianne and the elder, Elinor.

Before ever becoming Britain’s most notorious Fascist politician, Oswald Mosley was a charismatic force in Birmingham, leading the Labour Party’s struggle to break the iron grip of the Chamberlains and their Conservative adherents. That it succeeded by 1929 was largely due to Mosley’s commitment, his money, his energy and his charm. Within years he had fallen out of love with the Labour leadership, blaming their stolid, unimaginative approach to unemployment; deserting his Smethwick supporters he set out to create a New Party and by 1931 Birmingham Labour voters reviled him and he was violently driven from the city.

Shakespearean comedy promises ultimate reconciliation but this is never achieved without pain and suffering and never includes everyone. Measure for Measure explores the conflict between public role and private feelings that can arise in someone appointed to enforce the law. While the romantic comedy elements of Much Ado About Nothing are often prioritised, the play exposes an instinctive endorsement of stereotypical attitudes.

Join artist Stephen Nicol as he discusses Van Gogh's work,

Part One: The Netherlands

From his early years with his supportive family to his education and employment selling Art in Galleries in the Netherlands, Belgium and London. Embracing religion and becoming a failed missionary. Living among and drawing the rural peasants. His romances and infatuations. Moves to Paris. Montmartre and his decadent, bohemian lifestyle.

Part Two: Arles & the South of France

The yellow House and this innovative and productive period. Gaugin’s anticipated visit and their falling out. His voluntary admittance into asylums and breakdowns.. His alleged suicide which is now being contested with new evidence. and Van Gogh’s legacy.

Jeremy Brooker, one of the leading magic lantern performers working today, creates unique magic lantern entertainments using original glass slides and equipment from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries alongside modern slides of his own creation.

Whether in the grand auditorium of the Centro Cultural de Belem in Lisbon, a circus tent overlooking Lake Geneva or the cabin of an historic Thames barge putting to sea with just 20 people onboard, audiences have marvelled at his mastery of this demanding art form.

In his hands, the beauty and visual spectacle which has kept the magic lantern at the forefront of popular entertainment for centuries retains the power to fully engage a modern audience.

In Birmingham for only one evening, this is a unique opportunity to enjoy a show of magic and spectacle.

This event is £4 for BMI members and £8 for non-members. Please call reception on 0121 2363591 to book.

This talk opens up new perspectives on rural Britain during the Victorian era. Corinne Fowler will discuss her book of country walks, which explores how the influx of colonial wealth impacted on landownership, agriculture and rural society. Her talk includes the return of the Tolpuddle Martyrs from penal colonies in modern day Australia and Tasmania, the 1860s Lancashire cotton famine and its origins in the American Civil War, the loss of common land in Norfolk and Rider Haggard's day job as an agriculturalist.

As the Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences claims to have resurrected the dire wolf, and the Jurassic World franchise returns to cinemas once again, it bears remembering that the idea of encountering extinct animals in the present day was chiefly an invention of nineteenth-century popular fiction. This paper will show how the anachronistic encounter between modern human and dinosaur, mammoth, or pterodactyl first became a staple of imaginative media, fuelling the tradition of fiction that inspires Colossal’s sensational and controversial biotechnology today.

Early in the century, humans crossed paths with revivified monsters like Megalosaurus only in comic sketches, or forms veiled in the oneiric and supernatural. Inspired by the innovations of popular science writers, Jules Verne and George Sand in the 1860s were among the first to bring extinct animals into prose fiction. In subsequent decades, amid the ‘romance revival’ and emergence of illustrated magazines like The Strand, living fossils became literary conventions. In stories like Reginald Bacchus and C. Ranger Gull’s ‘The Dragon of St Pauls’ (1899), depictions of these animals typically functioned to complicate but ultimately to reaffirm the self-conscious hierarchies of late Victorian society: human over nonhuman, present over past, masculinity over femininity, white Briton over colonised subject.

In the late 1890s, the US scientist Alexander Agassiz set sail for a second voyage aboard the research vessel Albatross to investigate coral reef formations in the South Pacific. The Washington Post relayed that Agassiz’s team had discovered ‘a vast hollow in the sea-floor extend[ing] over nearly thirty degrees of latitude’ with a ‘depth of nearly four miles’. Quite what lay within these abyssal regions was unclear, but, the Post noted, ‘[u]nquestionably there are many kinds of monsters and chimeras dire in the depths of the ocean which no mortal eyes has ever seen, or imagination pictured … If any snarks exist in the ocean one would naturally expect to find them at great depths, for … the bottom has its own peculiar fauna, certainly rich and assuredly strange to the point of weirdness’.

Join Ruskin Club as they partake in Thread craft with Samina.

Free for BMI members, £5 for any non-member. No booking necessary.

In this lecture Sir Paul considers the question “What is Life?” by discussing five great ideas of biology, ranging from the ‘Cell’ to ‘the Logic of Life’. By considering these concepts a direction of travel is set towards a definition of life.

Lench’s Trust is a remarkable and positive symbol of continuity in a city of seemingly perpetual transformation. In 1525 in Tudor Birmingham, the wealthy and childless William Lenche decided that the income from his estates should be distributed in “warke of charyte”. Since then, generations of Trustees and officials have carried out his wishes diligently, faithfully, and thoughtfully.

Anne Amison’s lifelong passion for the works of Burne-Jones and Morris was fed by many teenage visits to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Today she continues to share her interest by volunteering as a guide at St Philip’s Cathedral. Her talk will look at how Ned Jones from Bennett’s Hill became Sir Edward Burne-Jones, artist, his lifelong friendship with William Morris, and the great contribution they and their circle made to the artistic and cultural life of Birmingham.

Join Ruskin Club as they visit the Birmingham Magistrate’s Court with Samina to view the stained glass windows.

Free for BMI members, £5 for any non-member. No booking necessary.

Neuroscientists like Lisa Feldman Barrett are challenging established ideas about the brain and how emotions work. What are the implications of these developments in neuroscience and psychology for creative work? What does regulating the nervous system have to do with writing? How might the science of stress management help us dissolve "writer's block"?

Films, novels and poetry provide stimulus for a wide-ranging day in which we share works that have proved to be exciting, pleasurable and thought-provoking. The programme for the day is kept open to allow space not only for recently created works, but also to provide an opportunity to share insights that have risen from revisiting drama, rewatching films, listening again to poetry or returning to books read in the past.