A platform for the world’s greatest intellectuals, entrepreneurs, artists, and statesmen to address the greatest issues of our time.

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.

'Why are western regimes in crisis? What can we do in Britain to turn the tide? Why have political and intellectual elites blown up their credibility? What replaces them?'

Dominic Cummings is a British political operative who served as Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister from 2019 to 2020. He previously served as director of Vote Leave during the EU Referendum of 2016, and as Special Adviser at the Ministry of Education from 2010 to 2014.

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.

Enough has been said about the myriad crises our universities face; a much deeper and broader problem afflicts and attenuates our society at large. This is the near-total collapse of a shared culture of the humanities, which – for centuries, and indeed millennia – have been at the very heart of our civilisation. Yet there is, among all the institutions of Britain, a loss of faith in the transcendent power of the arts and humanities, as well as total confusion about what they even are. The result, for the public, is a loss of freedom to explore the accumulated treasures of the humanities; a loss of time to reflect on the deepest questions; and, in turn, a tragic loss of interest in the very things that give life meaning.

We find ourselves blinking at the uncertain dawn of an age of Artificial Intelligence. And whether the utopian or dystopian forecast of this rapidly-evolving technology emerges to be closer to the truth, one thing is certain: it is ipso facto impossible for any technology to be a human being, to experience joy and failure and grief and love. Far from being romantic optional extras to our core biological processes, these emotions are the quintessence of being human. In many sectors, however, and especially in education, the distorting lens of the social sciences, and the more tangible distractions of STEM, obscure this simple truth.

Everything we should desire for our culture – fostering curiosity about how we became who we are, spurring knowledge of foreign languages (and indeed English), nurturing a love of literature (and longer attention spans), forging a share sense of civic responsibility, and inspiring a desire to pursue the life well lived – hangs on the health of the humanities.

So what can we do to rediscover that which has kept our civilisation competent and coherent and content? How, in short, do we recover the humanities?

Dr David Butterfield is a classicist, Senior Fellow at the Pharos Foundation, and the editor of the journal Antigone.

‘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.

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.

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.

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 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.