Join Dr Elizabeth Dearnley online for this mysterious tour of London, a city hidden by fog and darkness.

This talk explores some of the strange tales - fact and fiction - that have emerged from the smoky, fog-prone capital, anthologised in Elizabeth's recent book Into the London Fog. 
Leading you on a tour through the city from Mayfair to Crystal Palace, and taking in stories by Edith Nesbit, Sam Selvon, Elizabeth Bowen and others, it invites you to take another look at the hidden side of seemingly familiar streets.

Join us for this special online event to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day 2021. We are thrilled to invite you to a live event with Heather Morris, bestselling author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey.

Heather Morris grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand. On her way back across the paddocks from school, Heather would visit her great-grandfather and listen to his experiences of war - stories he told only Heather. From a young age Heather discovered that people would tell her their stories if she stopped and listened.

Then she met Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov, the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with whom she formed a profound friendship. The result was The Tattooist of Auschwitz - a novel that has now sold more than 6,000, 000 copies around the world. The sequel, Cilka's Journey, is another incredible story of survival against the odds.

Secret passages, ship timbers and spiral staircases - join award-winning buildings archaeologist, James Wright for this online talk to find out the truth behind the legends.

Historic buildings specialists often meet others who are eager to talk about their properties and their enthusiasm is genuinely infectious. We can learn so much of value about a society by what it builds. However, romanticised and elaborated stories often grow up around certain mysterious features in mediaeval buildings – secret passages, ship timbers and swordsmen fighting on spiral staircases.

It is surprising how often these get repeated all across the country and at so many different structures. In this talk, James will outline the legends, look at the origins of the stories and reveal the underlying truths behind the tales.

In an age in which we are all citizen journalists and political commentators on social media and the political blog has found a place in the mainstream media in a way undreamed of thirty years ago what place does political fiction have?

The power struggles, jealousies and rivalries, or alliances and betrayals of politicians, from Parliament, to White House to the town hall have always been fodder for the novelist and have often been adapted for the screen. Although elections - the ultimate nail-biting scenario of 'who will win?' - haven't formed the basis of fiction as often as you might think.

Our guest, the author Julie Anderson, discusses the future of the 'political novel' and the 'novel about politics', which are not, of course, necessarily the same thing, in the 21st century.