Four talks starting at 10am

10am: Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland: an innovative adventure gamebook with a dangerous twist from Jon Green
11am: Alice in Guinness-time: a 1960s’ advertising campaign using Lewis Carroll’s characters from Brian Sibley
1pm: Alice in Fashion-land: over a century of changing trends and designs inspired by Wonderland by Kiera Vaclavik
2pm: Timeless Alice: adventures in modernity: from the fourth dimension to climate change by Franziska Kohlt

Quickly approaching 50, Daphna Baram believes she is having a midlife crisis, though her GP thinks that’s highly optimistic. She looks back with no regrets but some remorse, and cracks up some insightful ideas about mass and time, AKA weight and age, tossed up with some political wisdom.

Is an Israeli comedian/journalist/human rights lawyer, and spent a year in Oxford writing her book Disenchantment: The Guardian and Israel. See: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2007/jun/04/daphna.baram

* * * * * “Masterful” (Bunbury Magazine)
* * * * “Wonderful and Hilarious” (Broadway Baby)
“Poignant and illuminating” (The List)

Doors at 8:30/Show at 9pm

For this event, 12 artists from all over the country will be presenting work that they have been making as part of the Sound Diaries open call.

The presenting artists are:

Richard Bentley, Hannah Dargavel-Leafe, Aisling Davis, Atilio Doreste, Marlo De Lara, Beth Shearsby, Kathryn Tovey, Jacek Smolicki, James Green, Lucia Hinojosa, Sena Karahan, Fi.Ona

Sound Diaries expands awareness of the roles of sound and listening in daily life. The project explores the cultural and communal significance of sounds and forms a research base for projects executed both locally and Internationally, in Beijing, Brussels, Tallinn, Cumbria and rural Oxfordshire.

We are delighted to be joined by writer and musician, Catrina Davies, who will be in conversation with George Monbiot on her new book, Homesick and the current housing crisis.

Aged thirty-one, Catrina Davies was renting a box-room in a house in Bristol, which she shared with four other adults and a child. Working several jobs and never knowing if she could make the rent, she felt like she was breaking apart.

Homesick for the landscape of her childhood, in the far west of Cornwall, Catrina decides to give up the box-room and face her demons. As a child, she saw her family and their security torn apart; now, she resolves to make a tiny, dilapidated shed a home of her own.

With the freedom to write, surf and make music, Catrina rebuilds the shed and, piece by piece, her own sense of self. On the border of civilisation and wilderness, between the woods and the sea, she discovers the true value of home, while trying to find her place in a fragile natural world.

This is the story of a personal housing crisis and a country-wide one, grappling with class, economics, mental health and nature. It shows how housing can trap us or set us free, and what it means to feel at home.

Catrina Davies is a writer, singer-songwriter and DJ based in Cornwall, where she lives and works in a tin shed. Her first book The Ribbons Are For Fearlessness is a memoir about busking from Norway to Portugal with her cello. Her story has been featured in Vogue, Red, Daily Express, Surfer’s Path, and numerous other publications and her songs have been played on NTS and the BBC.

This event will be chaired by author and activist, George Monbiot. Along with writing books such as How Did We Get into this Mess, and Out of the Wreckage, George is the editor of the recent independent report to the Labour Party, Land for the Many: Changing the way our fundamental asset is used, owned and governed, which aims to put land at the very heart of politcal debate and discussion.

This is a free event, but please do register if you plan on attending. This event will be held in our Philosophy Department which is only accessible by a small flight of stairs. Seating will be allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. For more information please contact out Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

We are pleased to announce a very special Philosophy in the Bookshop to celebrate the release of a new comprehensive look at the history of Philosophy in one volume. Nigel Warburton will be in conversation with A C Grayling to discuss the release of his new book.

AC Grayling’s aim in THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY is to give a clear and comprehensive account of the great adventure of philosophy, mainly in the Western tradition but with overviews of the rich Indian, Chinese and Arabic-Persian traditions also. Philosophy is the fountainhead of ideas that drive history and shape our world; it is the progenitor of the natural and social sciences, it is the tradition of questioning and scepticism which has challenged dogma and resisted the desire of all forms of absolutism to stop enquiry and stifle thought. The story of philosophy is the story of most of the greatest minds in the world from classical antiquity to the present, and of the unending quest for an understanding of reality, truth and value.

This event takes place on the last Saturday of August (Bank Holiday Weekend) in a change from our usual regular date. The talk is free to attend but likely to be extremely popular. We recommend that registration be made to ensure that your place is secure and that you arrive early if you’d like a seat (as registration alone doesn’t guarantee this) The talk will take place in the Philosophy department of the Norrington Room which has limited access for wheelchair users. Please contact the store for further clarification.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a very special event at the Sheldonian Theatre with Alain de Botton on The School of Life: An Emotional Education.

We spend years in school learning facts and figures but the one thing we’re never taught is how to live a fulfilled life. That’s why we need The School of Life – a real organisation founded ten years ago by writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, an organisation which has one simple aim: to equip people with the tools to survive and thrive in the modern world. And the most important of these tools is emotional intelligence.

The School of Life is nothing short of a crash course in emotional maturity. With all the trademark wit and elegance of Alain de Botton’s other writings, and rooted in practical, achievable advice, it shows us a path to the better lives we all want and deserve.

Architectural historian Professor James Stevens Curl is best known as the Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture. He also has uncompromising views on modern architecture which he sets out in his latest book, Making dystopia. Tonight’s talk for Oxford Civic Society marks his return to Oxford where he was the Society’s first Chairman in 1969. His talk is part of the Society’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

St Peter’s College welcomes you to a talk about Lord Nuffield, a leading figure in St Peter’s early history.

William Morris, Lord Nuffield, probably did more than any other individual to transform Oxford in the twentieth century, physically, economically and socially. His success as an industrialist allowed him to become one of Britain’s most generous benefactors; he gave away the equivalent of £1.5 billion in today’s money, to causes including health, education and academic research. This talk looks specifically at Lord Nuffield’s vital support to various Oxford colleges, including the saving of St Peter’s from closure, andhttps://interestingtalks.in/Oxford/# the founding of the college which bears his name, Nuffield College. It also explores his complex and sometimes difficult relationship with the university.

St Peter’s College Chapel
Free to attend
All welcome

Blackwell’s are delighted to present our monthly series of talks, Philosophy in the Bookshop. In a very special event, our programme moves across the street to the Sheldonian Theatre for one night only.

Do we need God in order to explain the existence of the universe? Do we need God in order to be good?

Join Richard Dawkins for a special evening at the Sheldonian Theatre where he will be introducing his book ‘Outgrowing God’, addressing some of the most profound questions human beings confront. Professor Dawkins will be interviewed by author Nigel Warburton.

Should we believe in God? In this new book written for a new generation, the brilliant science writer and author of the international bestseller, ‘The God Delusion’, explains why we shouldn’t.

Richard Dawkins was fifteen when he stopped believing in God. Deeply impressed by the beauty and complexity of living things, he’d felt certain they must have had a designer. Learning about evolution changed his mind. Now one of the world’s best and bestselling science communicators, Richard Dawkins has given readers, young and old, the same opportunity to rethink the big questions.

In ‘Outgrowing God’, Richard Dawkins marshals science, philosophy and comparative religion to interrogate the hypocrisies of all the religious systems and explains to readers of all ages how life emerged without a Creator, how evolution works and how our world came into being.

Richard Dawkins is author of ‘The Selfish Gene’, voted The Royal Society’s Most Inspiring Science Book of All Time, and also the bestsellers ‘The Blind Watchmaker’, ‘Climbing Mount Improbable’, ‘The Ancestor’s Tale’, ‘The God Delusion’, and two volumes of autobiography, ‘An Appetite for Wonder’ and ‘Brief Candle in the Dark’. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford and both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.

Nigel Warburton is a public philosopher and author. As well as being the host of the podcast ‘Philosophy Bites’ with David Edmonds, he is also the author of the bestselling ‘A Little History of Philosophy’, ‘Philosophy : The Classics’, ‘Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction’ and many others.

Tickets cost £10. Seating in the Sheldonian is unreserved and allocated on a first come, first served basis. Doors for entry will open at 6:15pm. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call 01865 333623.

An amusing talk and exploration of AI and the future of technology. Is the future more absurd than comedians can imagine? Will a driver-less BMW still cut you up? What do we do when a human doesn’t pass the Turing test? Computers have beaten chess masters but can they beat comedians?

‘Philosophy in the Bookshop’ is our free monthly series of Philosophy events, hosted by Nigel Warburton and featuring a different thinker each month discussing their work. This month, Nigel discusses ‘Becoming Beauvoir’ with Kate Kirkpatrick.

‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’, wrote Simone de Beauvoir. This is a woman who was also to become a philosopher, a novelist, an existentialist, and a feminist icon. Her novels won prestigious literary prizes and The Second Sextransformed the way we think about sex and gender. She was also the long-term lover of Jean-Paul Sartre, but it was to film-maker Claude Lanzmann that she wrote ‘You are my destiny, my eternity, my life .’ in letters which only came to light in 2018. Kate Kirkpatrick draws on previously unavailable diaries and letters, including those written to Lanzmann. The new personal details about her life revealed for the first time by the book can only deepen the mystery and our fascination with her. Why did this ‘feminist icon’ edit her image so much? Why did she lie about her relationship with Sartre so often, or claim not to be a philosopher? Perhaps with so much that’s new here we’ll get a little closer to understanding who Beauvoir really was.

This talk takes place within the Philosophy department of the Norrington Room. (Please note that there is limited access to the department with no ramp available)

Blackwell’s is delighted to be hosting an event with Philip Pullman at the Sheldonian Theatre to celebrate the launch of The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two. The event will be recorded live for the Penguin Podcast.

The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two is a timely exploration of what it is to be human, to grow up and make sense of the world around us, from one of the UK’s greatest writers. It opens seven years after readers left Lyra Silvertongue and Will Parry on a park bench in Oxford’s Botanic Gardens in The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the His Dark Materials sequence. Lyra Silvertongue is now a 20-year-old Oxford student, about to embark on an epic journey across Europe and into Asia as she seeks out an elusive town said to be haunted by dæmons. Commenting on the plot earlier this year, Pullman said: “Things have been biding their time, waiting for the right moment to reveal their consequences for Lyra Silvertongue. The Secret Commonwealth tells the continuing story of the impact on Lyra’s life of the search for, and the fear of, Dust.”

This is one of only two author events this autumn to mark publication of this highly-anticipated book, and the only one to take place in Philip Pullman – and Lyra’s – hometown. There will be signed copies of The Secret Commonwealth available to purchase at the event, or as part of a book and ticket bundle, as well as a special independents’ edition of the book, priced £20 and featuring a frontispiece illustration by Chris Wormell and bespoke endpapers.

Philip Pullman is one of the most highly respected children’s authors writing today. Winner of many prestigious awards, including the Carnegie of Carnegies and the Whitbread Award, Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials has been acclaimed as a modern classic. It has sold 17.5 million copies worldwide and been translated into 40 languages. In 2005 he was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. He lives in Oxford.

Tickets for this event are £10, or £25 for the book and ticket bundle. For more information please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

The poppy as a recurring image in poetry and art, and as a symbol of wartime loss, is powerfully resonant in our culture. Dr Andrew Lack, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Biology at Oxford Brookes University, will talk about the poppy plant and its ancient and more recent historical associations.

Tenor Mark Padmore is preparing to take on the role of Aschenbach in David McVicar’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice at the Royal Opera House. Join Mark and a panel of experts, including Colin Matthews, Ray Ockenden, John Hopkins, Henry Bacon, and Philip Bullock to explore this many-faceted character through literature, film, and opera.

Marking 70 years of Nineteen Eighty-Four. An interdisciplinary symposium involving Joshua Dienstag, political scientist from UCLA; political historian Greg Claeys (RHUL); literary scholars Anna Vaninskaya (Edinburgh) and Nathan Waddell (Birmingham); novelist Joanna Kavenna; Dorian Lynskey, journalist and author of the recently published Ministry of Fear; Jean Seaton, media historian who runs the Orwell Prize among other things; and Victoria Bateman (the so-called ‘Naked Economist’) who will be talking about the politics of clothes and the uses of the naked body in political activism.

We are delighted to announce a very special Philosophy in the Bookshop event to mark our fifth anniversary in the series.

Host Nigel Warburton will be joined by philosopher Philip Goff and author Sir Philip Pullman to discuss the influence that Philosophy (Consciousness and Panpsychism in particular) has had on their respective works. Philip Goff’s new book ‘Galileo’s Error’ and Sir Philip Pullman’s ‘The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth’ are both released in 2019 and will be available to purchase on the day.

This event is FREE to attend and will take place in the Philosophy department in the Norrington Room. Registration MUST be made and proof brought with you on the day to gain access to the seating/viewing area. Seating is very limited and will be available on a first come, first served basis. Please note, this area is only accessible via a small set of stairs. Please note neither of the authors will be signing after the talk.

Please call 01865 333623 if you have any enquiries.

In a talk for Oxford Civic Society, Liz Woolley, and a representative of the company, talk about the history of one of the city’s great family firms. Kingerlee has constructed many of the best known buildings in and around Oxford such as the Jam Factory.

Data-driven micro-targeted campaigns have become a main stable of political strategy. As personal and societal data becomes more accessible, we need to understand how it can be used and mis-used in political campaigns and whether it is relevant to regulate political candidates’ access to data.

This book talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book sale, all welcome

Join Oxford Hospitals Charity in celebrating ten years since the Oxford Heart Centre was first opened.

You will hear from our brilliant clinicians about the difference the new Oxford Heart Centre has made, as well as future developments that will benefit heart and lung patients across Oxfordshire, only possible thanks to your generous donations.

Author Mark Haddon also joins us to tell us about his experience as patient in the John Radcliffe.

The event is free to attend and all are welcome.

This month at Short Stories Aloud you can listen to stories by Sophie Hardach (Confession With Blue Horses) and Fanny Blake (A Summer Reunion) read aloud by trained actors. The authors will then be interviewed by Sarah Franklin (Shelter) before taking questions from the audience.

Confession with Blue Horses

Tobi and Ella’s childhood in East Berlin is shrouded in mystery. Now adults living in London, their past in full of unanswered questions. Both remember their family’s daring and terrifying attempt to escape, which ended in tragedy; but the fall-out from that single event remains elusive. Where did their parents disappear to, and why? What happened to Heiko, their little brother? And was there ever a painting of three blue horses?

In contemporary Germany, Aaron works for the archive, making his way through old files, piecing together the tragic history of thousands of families. But one file in particular catches his eye; and soon unravelling the secrets at its heart becomes an obsession.

When Ella is left a stash of notebooks by her mother, and she and Tobi embark on a search that will take them back to Berlin, her fate clashes with Aaron’s, and together they piece together the details of Ella’s past… and a family destroyed.

Devastating and beautifully written, funny and life-affirming, Confession with Blue Horses explores intimate family life and its strength in the most difficult of circumstances.

Sophie Hardach worked as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Tokyo, Paris and Milan and has written for a number of publications including the Atlantic, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. She has previously written two critically acclaimed novels, The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, about Kurdish refugees, and Of Love and Other Wars, about pacifists during World War Two.

A Summer Reunion

One perfect villa, four old friends, and a holiday that will change everything…

Amy, Linda, Kate and Jane were best friends at school. Now, years later, they have grown apart. When Amy discovers her husband has been stealing from her successful interiors business, and with a milestone birthday looming, she decides it is the time to reach out to her old friends once again.

So, she decides to invite the other three to her beautiful villa in Mallorca for a reunion weekend. As the four friends gather, secrets are unearthed, old scores settled and new friendships forged. Will this holiday bring them together or tear them apart? And will each of them grasp their second chance for happiness…?

Fanny Blake was a publisher for many years, editing both fiction and non-fiction before becoming a freelance journalist and writer. She has written various non-fiction titles, as well as acting as ghost writer for a number of celebrities. She was Books Editor of Woman & Home magazine has been a judge for the Costa Novel Award, the British Book Awards, the Comedy Women in Print Award among others. She has written eight novels, including An Italian Summer and A Summer Reunion.

Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm and there will be a small bar available at which to purchase drinks. For more information please call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Michaelmas term’s topic of the popular St Hilda’s ‘Brain and Mind – from concrete to abstract’ series of workshops is ‘Creativity and the Brain’.
Professor Jane Mellanby (Oxford), Dr Lambros Malafouris (Oxford), and Dr Matthew Kiernan (Leeds) will address this topic from the points of view of neuroscience, psychology and philosophy respectively.
There will be a break with refreshments.

For twenty years New York Review Books Classics have been devoted to two causes: discovering important, previously untranslated books from all over the world and rediscovering wonderful books in English that have fallen into undeserved obscurity. Fiction and non-fiction and books in a wide variety of genres can be found among the more than 500 NYRB Classics now in print, and it may be that what, as much as anything, unites the books in the series is that they hail from the past, however remote or recent. What does the past have to say to the present is the question that the series as a whole may be said to raise, and nowadays, when the authority of tradition is diminished and indeed suspect, it is a question of peculiar urgency. How do books haunt us? The novelist Rachel Cusk, the philosopher John Gray, the critic and writer Victoria Nelson, together with the founder and editor of NYRB Classics, Edwin Frank, will discuss.

Edwin Frank was born in Boulder, Colorado and educated at Harvard College and Columbia University. He is the founder of the New York Review Books Classics series, the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 (Shearsman Books), and the editor of The Red Thread: 20 Years of NYRB Classics (NYRB).

Victoria Nelson is a writer of fiction, criticism and memoir. Her books include Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, a stude of the supernatural grotesque in Western culture that won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studes in 2001, and Wild California, a collection of stories. She edited NYRB’s collection of Robert Aickman stories Compulsory Games. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA creative writing programme.

Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of eight novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, In the Fold, Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, The Bradshaw Variations and Outline. Her non-fiction books are A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young Novelists.

John Gray is an English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.

Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm, at which time there will be a small bar available from which to purchase drinks. For more information please call our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

Join Oxford University Press for a special science-themed “speed dating” event. Mingle with a range of topics, including reptiles, psychopathy, environmental law, synaesthesia and circadian rhythms with expert authors from the Very Short Introductions series. Make an impression and get your questions in before the bell rings!

IF Oxford is operating a Pay What You Decide (PWYD) ticketing system. This works by enabling you to pre-book events without paying for a ticket beforehand. Afterwards, you have the opportunity to pay what you decide you want to, or can afford. If you prefer, you can make a donation to IF Oxford when you book. All funds raised go towards next year’s Festival.

We are honoured to announce that Elif Shafak will give this year’s Annual Blackwell’s Lecture on Thursday 24th October 2019 at 7.30pm in the Sheldonian Theatre.

Elif Shafak will deliver this year’s Annual Blackwell’s Lecture on the subject of literature, social change and politics.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels, including the bestselling ‘The Bastard of Istanbul’, ”The Forty Rules of Love’, and ‘Three Daughters of Eve’. Her latest book is ’10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.’

Her work has been translated into fifty languages, published by Penguin/Random House and represented by Curtis Brown globally. She was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017 Elif was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better.

Elif Shafak is also a political scientist and an academic. She holds a degree in International Relations, a masters’ degree in Gender and Women’s Studies and a PhD in Political Science and Political Philosophy. She has taught at various universities in Turkey, the UK and the USA, including St Anne’s College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow.

Elif Shafak is a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). An advocate for women’s rights, LGBT rights and freedom of speech, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and twice a TED Global speaker, each time receiving a standing ovation.

Her writing has been longlisted for the Orange Prize, MAN Asian Prize; the Baileys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize. She judged numerous prestigious literary prizes.

Tickets cost just £5 are available from the Blackwell’s Eventbrite website or from Blackwell’s Bookshop, 50 Broad Street, Oxford.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a celebration in honour of the launch of Matthew Rice’s beautiful new book, Oxford.

Oxford is one of the jewels of European architecture, much loved and much visited. The city offers an unparallelled collection of the best of English building through the centuries. Matthew Rice’s Oxford is a feast of delightful watercolour illustrations and an informed and witty text, explaining how the city came into being and what to look out for today.

While the focus is on architectural detail, Rice also describes how the city has been shaped by its history, most of all by generations of patrons who had the education and the resources to commission work from the greatest architects and builders of their day, an astonishing range of which still stands.

More than anywhere else in England, it is possible in Oxford to take in the history of English architecture simply by walking today’s streets, lanes, parks and meadows.

This is a free event, but please register if you would like to attend. The evening will include a short speech from Matthew Rice, followed by a chance to buy the book, get it signed and then enjoy the evening with the refreshments provided. For more information, please call our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

In this lecture, Professor Sir Richard Sorabji considers free speech in the age of social media, and questions whether legal restrictions on certain speech acts or self-restraint would be the most effective and appropriate means to secure freedoms while protecting against harms.

We can be thankful if we live in countries which allow a right to freedom of expression. But before using it, we need to think what is the value of freedom of expression. J.S. Mill’s wonderful survey of its benefits seems to presuppose that free expression leads to discussion, and hence to more understanding. But what, for example, about attacks on rival religions? They can stop discussion dead and replace it with retaliation, which impedes even re-thought about the original attack. The law is a clumsy instrument, and voluntary self-restraint could be better at preserving the benefits of free expression. There have been cross-cultural examples since ancient history of leaders good at encouraging listening to rival views.

But in at least one case, I wonder if new legislation is needed against the funding of some (not all) social media, through the sale of personal profiles to advertisers, including propagandists. Does this encourage extremist content, facilitate the manipulation of voters with targeted propaganda tailored to their profiles, and create wealth sufficient to pay or contest any fines? Should the sale and purchase of personal profiles be made illegal?

Professor Sir Richard Sorabji is a fellow of the British, American and Royal Flemish Academies, author of books on Aristotle; Gandhi; and Moral Conscience through the Ages (in preparation); and editor of 100 volumes of translation from philosophy linking late antiquity to the middle ages.

He founded the King’s College Centre for Philosophical Studies between 1989 and 1991, with the aim of promoting philosophy to the wider public, and was Director of the Institute of Classical Studies from 1991 to 1996.

Professor Sorabji was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1999 for his services to ancient philosophy, and knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to philosophical scholarship.

A Taste of Pompeii, with Sally Grainger
Evening Talk and Tasting
Tue 29 Oct, 6.30–9.30pm

Join author of The Classical Cookbook Sally Grainger as she shares her knowledge of classical Roman recipes adapted for the contemporary cook, painting a vibrant picture of wining and dining in the ancient world. Having whetted your appetite, enjoy a tasting array of dipping sauces in the ‘Taberna Ashmolean’.

Tickets are £35 each.

Entry is via the Front Door. Doors open 6pm, lecture at 6.30 pm.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a special Hallowe’en event exploring black magic, with Thomas Waters and Lucie McKnight Hardy as they discuss their books ‘Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times’ and ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’.

‘Cursed Britain’

Historian Thomas Waters here explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. Waters takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-rich West Country, from the immense territories of the British Empire to metropolitan London. We learn why magic caters to deep-seated human needs but see how it can also be abused, and discover how witchcraft survives by evolving and changing. Along the way, we examine an array of remarkable beliefs and rituals, from traditional folk magic to diverse spiritualities originating in Africa and Asia.

This is a tale of cynical quacks and sincere magical healers, depressed people and furious vigilantes, innocent victims and rogues who claimed to possess evil abilities. Their spellbinding stories raise important questions about the state’s role in regulating radical spiritualities, the fragility of secularism and the true nature of magic.

Thomas Waters is lecturer in history at Imperial College London and a specialist in the modern history of witchcraft and magic.

‘Water Shall Refuse Them’

The heatwave of 1976. Following the accidental drowning of her sister, sixteen-year-old Nif and her family move to a small village on the Welsh borders to escape their grief. But rural seclusion doesn’t bring any relief. As her family unravels, Nif begins to put together her own form of witchcraft – collecting talismans from the sun-starved land. That is, until she meets Mally, a teen boy who takes a keen interest in her, and has his own secret rites to divulge.

Lucie McKnight Hardy is the debut author of ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’, an atmospheric coming-of-age novel, full of magical suspense.

Tickets cost £5. There will be a bar serving an array of magical potions from 6:45pm – 7pm. Fancy dress is welcomed. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Charles Babbage has been called the ‘great-uncle’ of modern computing, a claim that rests simultaneously on his demonstrable understanding of most of the architectural principles underlying the modern computer,band the almost universal ignorance of Babbage’s work before 1970. There has since been an explosion of interest both in Babbage’s devices and the impact they might have had in some parallel history, and in Babbage himself as a man of great originality who had essentially no influence at all on subsequent technological development.

In all this, one fundamental question has been largely ignored: how is it that one individual working alone could have synthesised a workable computer design over a short period, designing an object whose complexity of behaviour so far exceeded that of contemporary machines that it would not be matched for over one hundred years?

Our Leverhulme funded project Notions and notations: Charles Babbage’s language of thought investigated the design methods that Babbage used, and their impact on subsequent design practice. As part of that work we constructed a steam-driven difference engine to Babbage’s outline design.

In this general interest talk, we shall describe some aspects of Babbage’s designs and design methods, and demonstrate the difference engine.

Join prize-winning author Olivia Laing in conversation with Professor Dame Hermione Lee.

Olivia Laing is the author of To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her latest book, Crudo, is a real-time novel about the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and a New York Times notable book of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize. In 2019 it won the 100th James Tait Black Memorial Prize.