When:
June 20, 2018 @ 10:45 am – 12:45 pm
2018-06-20T10:45:00+01:00
2018-06-20T12:45:00+01:00
Where:
The Course at The University Women's Club
2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
Cost:
£59
Contact:
Established in 1994, THE COURSE offers innovative and exciting lectures in Art History, Literature, Music and Opera.
How can we know, before we ever go there, that a new place will exhilarate us? Painting, photography, fiction, travel-writing, and poetry can put us on the plane with expectations, and pictures in our minds, and of course we then match what they promise against the realities that await us. Afterwards, art and writing intensify what we found, show us sights we missed, clothing our memories of them in the aura of legend as they had our hopes, so we may wonder if they exist when we are not there. Exhilarating Places visits charismatic cultural centres of our world and others we have dreamed of and invented. They catch our eye and instantly deliver both real and imagined destinations in great art and writing.
Thermopylae and Roncesvalles
Like stage tragedy, ambush stories alert us to the doom of others in places made sacred by their death, here in Thermopylae’s pass with Herodotus, Einhard, Byron, Cavafy, Amy Clampitt, and Golding, David, Daumier, Lear, Kokoschka, d’Azeglio, Rava, Meltzoff, Rainey, Connolly and Snedeker; and with Roland and Charlemagne in the Roncesvalles defile in ‘The Song of Roland’, and David, Redon, Roger, Fouquet, Michallon, Liedet, and glorious medieval illustrations for both dramatic events.