To Be Confirmed

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.