Lectures

‘In La Trahison des Clercs, Julien Benda accused the intellectuals of his time of dabbling in “the racial passions, class passions, and national passions… owing to which men rise up against other men.” Today’s academic leaders would never recognize themselves as the heirs of those Benda condemned, insisting that they are on the left, whereas Benda’s targets were on the right. And yet, as Victor Klemperer came to understand after 1945, totalitarianism comes in two flavors, though the ingredients are the same.’

In this Pharos Summer Lecture, Prof Niall Ferguson delves into the changes he has observed during his thirty-year career as an academic, especially during the past decade. He will reflect on the state of academia in the throes of ‘culture wars’, the crisis of leadership in US universities after the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, and why the situation in the UK – and in Oxford especially – is different.

Niall Ferguson is a distinguished historian, whose career has taken him to Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, NYU, LSE, and the Hoover Institution. He is now a Founding Fellow of the Pharos Foundation. The author of sixteen books, his most recent work is Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, which wasa published by Allen Lane in 2021. He is also the authorised biographer of Henry Kissinger, the first volume of which was published in 2015.

The Pharos Spring Lecturer for 2025, Sir Paul Marshall, is one of the UK's leading investors, a major philanthropist, and now one of the country's most influential media owners. After spending the early part of his career at S.G. Warburg, he co-founded Marshall Wace LLP, one of London's first hedge funds, in 1997. He continues to serve as chairman and chief investment officer, and Marshall Wace is today one of Europe's largest hedge fund groups.

Marshall became heavily involved in educational philanthropy during the 2000s: as the author of several books on British schools, as founding trustee of the children's charity ARK and chairman of ARK Schools, and as lead Non-Executive Director at the Department for Education from 2013-16. His first venture into media was through the news website UnHerd in 2017. He later became a major investor in GBNews, briefly serving as chairman, before purchasing The Spectator in September 2024.

Formerly a major donor to the Liberal Democrats and a contributor to the Orange Book, Marshall left the party over its opposition to Brexit and his commitment to classical liberalism. He has since supported the Conservative Party and was one of the founders of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in 2023 with Jordan Peterson. He is one of Britain's premier philanthropists, often near the top of the Sunday Times Giving List. He was knighted in 2016.

We can no longer take for granted international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation, the validity of international law and agreements, or even international norms.