Our regular salons bring the Pharos community together to share ideas, to engage great minds in deep discussion, and to enjoy exclusive previews and book launches.

Award-winning director

Join Dr. Edward Howell, Lecturer in Politics at the University of Oxford and a leading expert on Korean Peninsula affairs, for an insightful lecture on South Korea’s turbulent political landscape. In this talk, Dr. Howell delves into the dramatic events surrounding the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol in December 2024, exploring the causes, consequences, and broader implications for South Korea’s democracy. From the short-lived martial law declaration to the nation’s polarised response, gain a deeper understanding of this historic crisis and its impact on East Asian geopolitics.

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.

Montenegro was admitted to the UN as its 192nd member in June 2006, thus recovering the independence it had lost nearly ninety years earlier at the Versailles Peace Conference. Realm of the Black Mountain is the first full-length history of the country in English for a century, tracing the history of the tiny Balkan state from its earliest roots in the medieval empire of Zeta through its consistently ambiguous and frequently problematic relationship with its larger neighbour Serbia, the emergence of a priest/warrior ruler in the shape of the Vladika and its emergence from Ottoman suzerainty state at the Congress of Berlin. More recently, the book focuses on its troubled twentieth century history, its prominent role in the Balkan wars, its unique deletion from world maps as an independent state despite being on the winning side in the Great War, its ignominious role in the wars leading to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and its final reemergence as a member of the international community on the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 2006.

Lady Elizabeth Roberts is a Balkan scholar and former diplomat. She has taught Southeast European History at universities in the United States and Ireland. Roberts is also the co-author, with Kenneth Morrison, of The Sandžak: A History (2013)

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.

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.

‘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.

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).

Peter Berkowitz gives a lecture on the ideas of the Declaration of Independence at (almost) 250, followed by a conversation with John Gray.

A Book Launch and Conversation with Simon Elliott. Held in the Old Library of All Souls College, Oxford on 16th November 2023.