Adrian Goldsworthy – Greece & Rome at War
2024-11-20 17:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London) | Robert Beddard Room, Oriel College, Oxford, OX1 4EW, United Kingdom
There are traces of violence and warfare from the earliest periods of human history, and by the Classical era wars were common events and, along with politics, became the major concern of historians. Greeks defeated Persian invasions, then fought each other. Alexander swept through the Persian empire. Rome and Carthage waged war on an immense scale, and at the end of it the Carthaginian Republic was eradicated. Rome created and maintained through military force an empire embracing much of the known world.
Wars were important and shaped the development of the ancient world, but how should we understand them? Battles were major events, sometimes deciding wars, and were clearly important and need to be understood. Yet there was a lot more to ancient warfare than pitched battles, and it is vital to look at the attack and defence of fortified settlements and strongholds, and at lower level raids and skirmishes. The story of warfare in the Greek and Roman worlds is not simple, but remains of fundamental importance for understanding the era.
Adrian Goldsworthy is an historian and novelist who specialises in ancient Roman history. His most recent work is The Eagle and the Lion: Rome, Persia and an Unwinnable Conflict, which was published in 2023

Samuel Zeitlin – Geopolitics & Political Thought in the Twentieth Century
2024-11-19 17:00 - 18:00 | Hinton Seminar Room, Worcester College, Oxford, Oxfordshire, OX1 2HB, United Kingdom
In the second Pharos Tuesday Seminar, Samuel Garrett Zeitlin shifts the focus to the liberal conservative political theorist Raymond Aron, examining his relationship with the German jurist Carl Schmitt to draw out two vastly contrasting perspectives on the international politics of the last century. The first lectures will examine Schmitt’s analysis of the First World War, his critique of the League of Nations, and his characteristic approach to the history of political thought. The final lecture will consider Raymond Aron’s response to Schmitt’s political thought, particularly on matters of foreign policy international affairs, in Aron’s studies of Clausewitz and of international relations. The lectures will also consider the Schmitt-Aron correspondence.
Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is a distinguished historian of political ideas at University College London. He has worked extensively on the thought of Sir Francis Bacon, alongside Continental theorists of the twentieth century.
In the second Pharos Tuesday Seminar, Samuel Garrett Zeitlin shifts the focus to the liberal conservative political theorist Raymond Aron, examining his relationship with the German jurist Carl Schmitt to draw out two vastly contrasting perspectives on the international politics of the last century. The first lectures will examine Schmitt’s analysis of the First World War, his critique of the League of Nations, and his characteristic approach to the history of political thought. The final lecture will consider Raymond Aron’s response to Schmitt’s political thought, particularly on matters of foreign policy international affairs, in Aron’s studies of Clausewitz and of international relations. The lectures will also consider the Schmitt-Aron correspondence.
Samuel Garrett Zeitlin is a distinguished historian of political ideas at University College London. He has worked extensively on the thought of Sir Francis Bacon, alongside Continental theorists of the twentieth century.

Alexander Marr - Art & Wit in the Renaissance
2024-11-18 17:00 - 18:00 | Noel Salter Room, New College, Holywell Street, Oxford, OX1 3BN, United Kingdom
From the satirical barbs of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly (1511) to the urbane games of Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano (1528), wit was a serious subject in the Renaissance, addressed in natural philosophy and medicine as the intellective part of the human soul, in artistic theory as the wellspring of creativity, and in criticism as one of the most important markers of authorial voice. Yet wit’s visual fortunes in the period have barely been explored.
Visual wit was a kind of pictorial ingenuity, through which artists sought to rebut the humanist claim that by imitating nature they were merely replicators, not inventors. Hans Holbein the Younger, in particular, engaged in a kind of guerilla warfare with the humanists he knew and portrayed, including Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, appropriating their ingenious techniques of ambiguity, self-contradiction, and disguise in a playful contest between painting and poetry.
This series of lectures will trace visual wit in Holbein’s hands, as he evoked breath, voice, and brain through cunning conceits such as More’s ambivalent half-smile and Erasmus’s keen nose. In so doing, we will touch on some major themes in sixteenth-century culture: the complex nature of ‘character’; disputes over biological and artistic parentage; the paradox of lively death; and the vexed relationship between the thinking mind and skilled hand.
Dr Alexander Marr FSA is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity Hall, and President of Leonardo da Vinci Society. His most recent book is Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius, (2021).

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Nicholas Rodger – Book Launch: A Naval History of Britain
2024-11-14 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
The final instalment of N.A.M. Rodger’s definitive, authoritative trilogy on Britain’s naval history. At the end of the French and Napoleonic wars, British sea-power was at its apogee. But by 1840, as one contemporary commentator put it, the Admiralty was full of ‘intellects becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar’. How the Royal Navy reformed and reinvigorated itself in the course of the nineteenth century is just one thread in this magnificent book, which refuses to accept standard assumptions and analyses. Rodger sets all this in the essential context of politics and geo-strategy. The character and importance of leading admirals – Beatty, Fisher, Cunningham – is assessed, together with the roles of other less famous but no less consequential figures. Based on a lifetime’s learning, it is the culmination of one of the most significant British historical works in recent decades.

Naval specialists will find much that is new here, and will be invigorated by the originality of Rodger’s judgements; but everyone who is interested in the one of the central threads in British history will find it rewarding.

Laurence Brockliss & Justin Hardy – History and Film
2024-11-06 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Professional historians have always been dismissive of audio-visual accounts of the past. Feature films are regarded as little better than romantic fantasies. Documentaries, however well intentioned, are panned for their simple-mindedness. These two presentations on the American and French Revolutions set out to make the case for taking audio-visual accounts of the past seriously. The first is built around two six-hour feature films: the TV biopic John Adams (2008); and the made-for-cinema epic, La Révolution française (1989). The second is built around two documentaries: Washington (2020) and Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution (2009). All four films are honest attempts to reconstruct the past on the screen. But because they are filmed, not written, histories they use techniques and conventions to present their narrative which are either unavailable or unacceptable to the professional historian. The two presenters will introduce a cross-section of these techniques and conventions. They will show their economy as well as their power in informing the poorly informed about past events and firing their interest to learn more. They will also emphasise that of the two filmic genres – the feature and the documentary – the latter has the greater potential as a form of history making.
Laurence Brockliss is a historian of eighteenth-century France; Justin Hardy is a prizewinning filmmaker who has made a large number of documentaries about eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain. They are the authors of the forthcoming The Filmmaker as Historian.

Simon Elliott – The African Emperor: Septimius Severus
2024-10-15 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
In this exclusive lecture, Dr Simon Elliott will give a preview of his new biography: The African Emperor: The Life of Septimius Severus (Penguin, 2025). The talk will focus on the northern campaigns of the early 3rd Century, when the ageing Severus launched a shock and awe assault on northern Britain so savage that it achieved eighty years of peace on Rome’s most troublesome border. He will narrate how, in these bloody campaigns, a force of 50,000 troops, supported by the fleet, cut a swathe through the Maeatae tribe around the former Antonine Wall and invaded Caledonian territory up to the Moray Firth. Over the course of the lecture, Simon will demonstrate how Severus was the first of the great reforming emperors of the Roman military, and that his reforms are explained in the context of how he concentrated power around the imperial throne.
Dr Simon Elliott is an award-winning archaeologist, historian, and broadcaster. He is Honorary Researh Fellow at the University of Kent.

Niall Ferguson – The Constitution of Academic Liberty
2024-05-30 19:00 - 20:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
‘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.

Shaun Maguire – Refounding Democracy: Free Speech and Information Warfare
2024-05-03 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
‘We invested $800M into X. This has given me a front row seat in the battle playing out for freedom of speech: some of the modern tactics being used to a) silence people and b) manipulate the narrative.’
In this special Pharos event, Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire will speak about investing in democratic renewal in the face of information warfare, censorship and institutional cowardice.
Dr Shaun Maguire is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. At Sequoia, Shaun led their investments into SpaceX, X, The Boring Company, Foundry and many others. Prior to Sequoia, Shaun co-founded a cybersecurity company called Expanse, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks. He was a partner at Google Ventures, and he worked at DARPA. He deployed to Afghanistan in support of DARPA’s mission there. He has a PhD in physics from Caltech, a Masters degree in Statistics from Caltech, and he has been to about 100 countries.

Jonathan Sumption & Catharine Titi – Pharos Conversations: The Elgin Marbles
2024-05-02 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
In the first ever Pharos Conversation, a range of distinguished scholars, intellectuals, and commentators will debate the future of the Elgin Marbles.
Jonathan Sumption KC is a distinguished historian and one of Britain’s leading jurists, serving on the UK Supreme Court (2012-2018) after a prodigious career as a barrister. He is also the author of a five volume history of the Hundred Years’ War, and a prominent commentator on legal issues. His inaugural Pharos Lecture is available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiM1EYlQgzg .
Catharine Titi is a professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Her specialisms include public international law, the settlement of international disputes, international investment law, international arbitration, and cultural heritage law. Her latest book is The Parthenon Marbles and International Law, which was published by Springer in 2023.
Tiffany Jenkins is a British sociologist and writer, who currently serves as the culture editor for the journal Sociology Compass. She has written extensively on the controversies surrounding the Elgin Marbles and wider issues around the restitution of cultural heritage. Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums – and Why they Should Stay There was published by Oxford University Press in 2016.
Alexander Herman is the Director of the Institute of Art and Law. He has written, taught and presented on an array of topics in relation to art, law, and cultural property, often appearing in the national press and international journals. His most recent book is The Parthenon Marbles Dispute: Heritage, Law, Politics, published by Hart in 2023.
Mario Trabucco della Torretta is a classical archaeoloist trained in Sicily and in Athens. His expertise covers classical Greek architecture and sculpture, Ancient Athens, and the Elgin Marbles. He is a prominent commentator and contributor to many journals, and tweets at @Marrio_Trabucco.
Nigel Spivey is Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Classics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a leading authority on Greco-Roman art – particularly of the Etruscans. He is the author many works, including Etruscan Art (1997), Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude (2001), and Greek Sculpture (2013).

David Starkey – Renaissances: Past, Present, & Future
2024-04-29 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Historian & Broadcaster

“The Renaissance” (or “Rebirth”) is conventionally defined as the two centuries, from about 1350 to 1550, which saw a comprehensive re-engagement with the culture of the Graeco-Roman world: with its philosophy, literature, art, architecture, history, science and politics. The movement started in Italy. But it was a much-travelled Englishman, Geoffrey Chaucer, who first captured its essence.

For out of old fields, as men saith,
Cometh all this new corn from year to year;
And out of old books, in good faith,
Cometh all this new science that men learn.
This idea, of the old fructifying the new, is also the definition of a Classic. In these lectures, I want to argue that the Classic, in both its senses of an age and of specific works, is the key to Western Civilisation. And that its Twentieth Century rejection in the form of Modernism is the cause of our present discontents.
Born in Kendal, David Starkey read history at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD on Henry VIII’s household under the supervision of Geoffrey Elton, before teaching at Cambridge and LSE. His many publications include seven major studies of the Tudor period, most recently Henry: Model of a Tyrant, which was published by Harper Collins in 2020. Dr Starkey redefined public history in the 1990s and 2000s, including the landmark series Monarchy, commissioned by Channel 4 in 2002, and has been a frequent commentator in the media. He was awarded a CBE in 2007.

Ali Ansari - Interpreting Iran
2024-04-29 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies, University of St Andrews & Associate Fellow, Chatham House

In this series of Pharos Monday Lectures, Prof Ali Ansari looks at the way the West reads and interprets Iran. Western perspectives, he will argue, have been misshaped by an over-reliance on abstract theories drawn from international relations and political science, a corresponding failure to pay attention to culture and historical experience, and a willingness to sacrifice a deep understanding for foreign policy imperatives and comparative modelling. Discarding the red-herrings of social science, Prof Ansari will develop a new interpretation of modern Iran and its future relations with the West.
The first lecture will look at the tools of scholarship, the impact of historiography, the dangers of ideology, and the consequences of social scientific methodology, not least the development of a culture of ‘metrics’ and its consequences for our understanding of sources. Lecture Two will look at particular case studies with particular reference to the ideas that underpinned the nuclear negotiations and the ‘theory’ of authoritarian resilience. The final two lectures will seek to construct an alternative narrative from the ground up through the application of historical methods and analysing the state from within, drawing on Iran’s historical experience and political culture.
Ali Ansari is one of the pre-eminent historians of modern Iran, its relationship with the West, and the nexus of myth, ideology, and nation-building. He has also written extensively on the history of the Anglo-Scottish union.

David Butterfield – The Rebirth of Classicism
2024-03-12 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge

What made the Greek and Roman Classics “classic”? Who decided? Was a decision even made? Are the surviving Classics “good”? Have we lost the best books ever written? Who decide what’s worth knowing? What makes something worth reading? And how can we avoid forgetting everything?
In the inaugural Pharos @ the Lamb & Flag event, classicist David Butterfield presents the a series of talks on how the classics of European literature became classic.
Filmed in February-March 2024, recordings will be released in May
The four lectures span these topics:
The birth of writing and the dawn of ‘literature’
The birth of the library and the idea of the ‘canon’
The birth of the monastery and the advent of ‘universities’
The re-birth of Classicism and the crisis of ‘modernity’
Dr David Butterfield is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University Cambridge, editor of the Classics journal Antigone, and literary editor of The Critic.

Lord Tony Sewell – The End of ‘Race’: Agency & Self-Affirmation
2024-02-21 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
In the Pharos Spring 2024 Lecture, Tony Sewell explores the drivers of black success in Britain today, rejecting victimhood and low expectations while embracing a visionary view of black life, in which achievement has little to do with ‘race’ and everything to do with agency and self-affirmation. Disrupting the very idea of ‘Blackness’ itself, Lord Sewell presses for the collective humanity that is now so unpopular in the age of ‘identity politics’ and provides an antidote to the idea that the lives of black people should be a decolonising project. Freedom from mental slavery is knowing how to be free, not struggling to be. After his lecture, Lord Sewell was joined for a discussion on stage by Deroy Murdock.
Born in Brixton, Lord Tony Sewell CBE is an internationally-respected author, educator, and statesman. His path-breaking charity ‘Generating Genius’ has helped hundreds of young black Britons to forge careers in STEM. In July 2020, he was appointed Chair of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities: the Sewell Report made him the target of a cancellation effort by his critics, but his recommendations now form the basis for the government’s policy on tackling racial inequalities. Sewell was elevated to the House of Lords in 2022. He was honoured by the government of Jamaica in 2023. His new book, Black Success: The Surprising Truth will be published by Forum in March.
Deroy Murdock is a prominent political commentator, currently contributing editor at the National Review and formerly Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Noel Malcolm – Emergence of Homosexuality in the Early Modern Period
2024-02-12 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
In a famous statement, published before almost any serious scholarly work had been done on the history of same-sex relations in pre-modern Europe, Michel Foucault said that the homosexual, as a distinct type of person, was a purely modern phenomenon: in the past, people thought only in terms of sexual acts, not sexual identities. This lecture series tests the truth of that assertion, which has exerted such a strong influence on the whole historiography of the subject, and lays the ground work for a revisionary understanding of the history of sexuality in Europe.
The first lecture discusses the rich evidence which emerged, in the decades after Foucault wrote, from the archives of Italy and Spain. In many ways this seemed to prove him right. It revealed a world of activity by men who were happy to have sex with boys as well as women; generally, their behaviour carried no ‘identity’ implications, and it was unlike modern homosexuality in other ways too, not least the lack of sexual interest in other adult males. The second lecture investigates how such same-sex acts were conceptualised and dealt with by the religious and legal norms of the period; it does so not only for these Christian Mediterranean countries, but also for the Islamic societies of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. The third lecture turns to northern Europe, including England, and finds some significant divergences from the Mediterranean pattern. It also looks at European colonial societies, especially in the Americas, where some contrasts can be found between the colonies of the northern and southern European powers. The final lecture puts the evidence together, considers what it tells us about identities and subcultures, and offers a new account of what has been called the ‘emergence of modern homosexuality.
Recorded at Magdalen College in February-March 2024, this inaugural series of Pharos Monday Lectures will be published in May.
Sir Noel Malcolm FRSL FBA is Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, a Founding Fellow of the Pharos Foundation, and one of the country’s pre-eminent intellectual historians. He was foreign editor for The Spectator and a columnist for The Daily Telegraph before returning to academia. He is the author of twelve books, and the editor of the Clarendon edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, for which he was awarded a British Academy medal. His latest work, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Desire, 1400-1750 was published by Oxford University Press in November 2023.

Robert Tombs – A Shameful Conquest? Britain Before and After Brexit
2024-02-09 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Professor Emeritus of French History, University of Cambridge

When Robert Tombs was invited to speak to Pharos, it was suggested he could speak on Brexit, Franco-British relations, or the culture wars. He decided to try all three. In this series, Prof Tombs analyses Brexit, why it happened, and what it means; how different policies towards European integration taken in Britain and France tell us much about the direction Europe has taken; and how Brexit’s diplomatic and economic impact may be small next to the cultural, social, and political consequences.

Filmed in St Edmund Hall’s Old Library in November 2023, this series of lectures will be published online in May 2024.
Prof Robert Tombs is a distinguished historian, specialising in the history of Britain and France. He is Professor Emeritus of French History at Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. His published works include The War Against Paris, 1871 (1981), That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (2006, with Isabelle Tombs); The English and Their History (2014), and This Sovereign Isle (2020). His writing appears regularly in The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, and The Times, and he is the editor of Briefings for Britain and History Reclaimed. In 2007, the French Government awarded Tombs the prestigious Ordre des Palmes Académiques ‘for services rendered to French culture’. He was appointed to the Franco-British Council the following year.

Peter Berkowitz & John Gray – Independence and the State: America at 250
2024-02-08 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Peter Berkowitz gives a lecture on the ideas of the Declaration of Independence at (almost) 250, followed by a conversation with John Gray.

Adrian Goldsworthy - Superpower Conflict between Ancient Rome and Persia (The Eagle and The Lion)
2023-11-16 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
A Book Launch and Conversation with Simon Elliott. Held in the Old Library of All Souls College, Oxford on 16th November 2023.

Marie Kawthar Daouda – Romance and Reality in French Culture
2023-11-13 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
From the French Revolution to the aftermath of the Second World War, French literature appears as a field of tension between Romance and Reality. Marie Kawthar Daouda discusses the continuity and rifts between the main aesthetic currents of French contemporary literature, their connection with French and European politics, and how authors from Chateaubriand to Camus have endeavoured to distinguish permanent truth behind ever-changing circumstances.

How did the Romantic movement echo the philosophical issues raised by the French Revolution? Can literature describe the world as it is? How do symbols and language work together in poetry? Does the evil of the war make beauty irrelevant? Marie Kawthar Daouda discusses these questions by engaging with relevant passages of the novels, poems, and essays that shaped French literature from 1789 to the 1940s.
Filmed in the Old Library at St Edmund Hall and in the Ursell Room at Pusey House in November 2023, this series of lectures will be released online in May.
Lecturer in French Literature, University of Oxford

John Gray – What is Living and What is Dead in Liberalism?
2023-11-08 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
John Gray is a world-renowned philosopher, political theorist and intellectual historian. He has an asteroid named after him and until 2008 he was School Professor of European Thought at the LSE. He now writes principally for the New Statesman and has authored over twenty books including the bestselling Seven Types of Atheism, Straw Dogs, Black Mass, The Soul of the Marionette, The Silence of Animals and Feline Philosophy. His latest book, published by Penguin in September 2023, is The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.
After his lecture, John Gray was joined on stage for a discussion by the world-leading ethicist Prof Nigel Biggar CBE.

Reidar Due – Freedom of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Freedom
2023-08-14 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
In this inaugural Pharos Tuesday Seminar, philosopher Reidar Due explores the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Icons of the so-called ‘culture war’, this series of discourses takes the two thinkers out of the fire of contemporary debate, seeking to understand their place in a longer tradition of French philosophy as a precursor to a better understanding of their contemporary relevance.
Professor of Film Aesthetics, University of Oxford

Richard Dawkins - Science, the Poetry of Reality, Jewel in Humanity's Crown
2023-06-12 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL is a world-renowned evolutionary biologist, author and atheist. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. He has written many acclaimed books including The Selfish Gene (OUP, 1976), The God Delusion (Bantam, 2006), and Flights of Fancy (Head of Zeus, 2021).
After his lecture, Richard Dawkins was joined on stage by Dame Angela McLean, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government, for a discussion moderated by legendary journalist John Simpson.

Jonathan Sumption – The New Roundheads: Politics and the Misuse of History
2023-02-27 17:00 - 19:00 | To Be Confirmed, Oxford, United Kingdom
Jonathan Sumption is a renowned historian and former Justice of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. Four instalments of his critically acclaimed history of the Hundred Years’ War have been published between 1990 and 2015, all by Faber & Faber. The fifth and final volume, Triumph and Illusion, was published in late 2023.
After his lecture, Lord Sumption was interviewed on stage by the eminent journalist and broadcaster John Simpson.
