2024 - 2025 Talks

From country houses to churches and towns, Michael Hill has been researching Dorset historic buildings, the results published in three books.

Putin’s influences and experience in his formative years and how they have shaped his attitudes today.

This talk will present the Santiago group of churches on the pilgrimage roads and the twelfth-century ‘Pilgrim’s Guide’.

How James I’s ecclesiastical policy helped shape the early history of Britain and its American colonies.

A journey through two centuries of art, poetry, statues, national rivalries and competing narratives of ‘England’s’ greatest feat of arms.

Artistic responses to Stonehenge are many and varied. This talk explores their purposes and meaning.

Henry VI, how his priorities as king led to the collapse of political society and the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses.

The story of housing the needy in buildings of beauty and presence over the last 1,000 years.

The talk will examine the history of resistance and collaboration in Occupied France through the prism of the trial of Marshal Petain in 1945.

An examination of FDR’s role in master-minding the royal visit to the US in June 1939 and the visit’s significance for the origins of the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.

Diarmaid MacCulloch tells a three-thousand-year-long story of Christians encountering sex, gender and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts.

The lecture will look at the architecture of the castles in Sherborne and their connection.