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The London History Festival 2021

Monday 15 November to Tuesday 30 November

We are happy to welcome you to The London History Festival again this year - this time we are inviting you to join us both in person, in our lovely lecture hall in Kensington Central Library, and virtually, from the comfort of your own home.

This literary festival was established in 2009 and is hosted by Kensington Central Library each November. The Festival aims to bring the work of the finest historians to the widest possible audience and enables you to engage with some of today's most popular historians.

This year we are putting on a series of evening talks in a programme of events we hope will both entertain and enlighten you. All but one will be presented as 'blended events'- meaning they will take place in our lecture hall in front of a live audience, while at the same time being streamed to those joining us online.

For those living locally, here is an opportunity to have a night out, to join us for some refreshments and for a riveting history talk. There will be opportunity to get a signed copy of the book at reduced prices after each talk.

Those further afield can join in virtually.

So why not come along, this promises to be a real treat for all history buffs!

The King's Painter with Franny Moyle

About the speaker: Franny Moyle studied Art History at St John's College, Cambridge. She is the former BBC Commissioner for Arts and Culture and is now a freelance executive producer and writer. Franny is the author of Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs Oscar Wilde, Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites and The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner.

Checkmate in Berlin with Giles Milton

Tuesday 16 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

Join us for this fascinating interview with the best-selling author Giles Milton.

In his latest work, with his consummate storyteller’s flair, the bestselling author of D-Day and Fascinating Footnotes from History zooms in on the political, military and cultural aftermath of the Second World War in the freshly divided Berlin.

Berlin was in ruins when Soviet forces fought their way towards the Reichstag in the spring of 1945. Streets were choked with rubble, power supplies severed and the population close to starvation. The arrival of the Soviet army heralded yet greater terrors: the city's civilians were to suffer rape, looting and horrific violence. Worse still, they faced a future with neither certainty nor hope.

For the next four years, a handful of charismatic but flawed individuals - British, American and Soviet - fought an intensely personal battle over the future of Germany, Europe and the entire free world.

Checkmate in Berlin tells this exhilarating, high-stakes tale of grit, skullduggery, and raw power. From the high politics of Yalta to the desperate scramble to break the Soviet stranglehold of Berlin with the greatest aerial operation in history, this is the epic story of the first battle of the Cold War and how it shaped the modern world.

About the speaker: Giles Milton is the internationally best-selling author of twelve works of narrative history, including Nathaniel’s Nutmeg and Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages and have been serialised on both the BBC and in British newspapers. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Milton's works of narrative history rely on personal testimonies, diaries, journals and letters to make sense of key moments in history, recounted through the eyes of those who were there. Giles Milton will be interviewed by Richard Foreman.

Piccadilly: London's West End and the Pursuit of Pleasure with Stephen Hoare

About the speaker: Stephen Hoare is an established writer and journalist who has recently turned his attention to the history of the West End. His first book, Palaces of Power, is now out in paperback after a successful hardback run. This book examined the growth and development of London’s clubland.  His latest book, Piccadilly: The Pursuit of Pleasure, looks in detail at the different aspects of Piccadilly and how a complex world devoted to providing pursuit of pleasure has come into being. He lives in London.

100 Great Black Britons with Patrick Vernon & Angelina Osborne

Thursday 18 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

Frustrated by the widespread and continuing exclusion of the Black British community from the mainstream popular conception of 'Britishness', despite Black people having lived in Britain for over a thousand years, in 2003 Patrick Vernon set up a public poll in which anyone could vote for the Black Briton they most admired. 

The response was incredible, resulting in a number of Black historical figures being included on the national school curriculum and having statues and memorials erected and blue plaques put up in their honour. Children and young people were finally being encouraged to feel pride in their history and a sense of belonging in Britain.

With the publication of their 100 Great Black Britons, Mr Vernon and his co-author, Dr Angelina Osborne, have relaunched the campaign with an updated list of names and accompanying portraits - including new role models and previously little-known historical figures.

Each entry explores in depth the individual's contribution to British history - a contribution that too often has been either overlooked or dismissed. This is a unique chance to hear from the authors themselves about the making of this amazing book.

About the speakers: Patrick Vernon is a Fellow of Goodenough College, Fellow at Imperial War Museum, Fellow of Royal Historical Society, and former associate fellow for the department of history of medicine at Warwick University. He received an honorary PhD from Wolverhampton University and was named by British Vogue as one of Britain’s top 20 campaigners and was included in the 2020 Power list of 100 influential Black People in Britain. He was awarded an OBE in 2012 for his work on tackling health inequalities and ethnic minority communities.  Dr Angelina Osborne is an independent researcher and heritage consultant. She received her PhD in History from the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull in 2014. Her interests focus on Caribbean enslavement and proslavery discourses, and the history of community and education activism. ***Please note this talk is offered ONLINE only.

Walking Pepys's London with Jacky Colliss Harvey

Friday 19 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

Samuel Pepys walked round London for miles. The 2 1/2 miles to Whitehall from his house near the Tower of London was accomplished on an almost daily basis, and so many of his professional conversations took place whilst walking that the streets became for him an alternative to his office.

In this talk, we invite you to take a stroll with the author, Jacky Colliss Harvey, around Pepys's London - you will come to know life in London from the pavement up and see its streets from the perspective of this renowned diarist.

The city was almost as much a character in Pepys's life as his family or friends, and the book draws many parallels between his experience of 17th-century London and the lives of Londoners today.

Walking Pepys's London, reconstructs the sensory and emotional experience of the past, bringing geography, biography and history into one. Full of fascinating details and written with extraordinary sensitivity, Pepys's London is an unmissable exploration into the places that made the greatest English diarist of all time.

About the speaker: Jacky Colliss Harvey is a writer and editor. She studied English at Cambridge University and art history at the Courtauld Institute. She has worked in museum publishing for the past 20 years and is a commentator and reviewer who speaks in both the U.K. and abroad on the arts and their relation to popular culture. Her red hair has also found her an alternative career as a life model and a film extra playing everything from a society lady in Atonement to a Parisian whore in Bel-Ami. She is the author of My Life As A Redhead: A Journal and the forthcoming book The Animal’s Companion. She splits her time between New York and London. ***Please note this event is offered ONLINE only.

The Tudors in Love with Sarah Gristwood

Monday 22 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

In her latest book, Sarah Gristwood reveals how the Tudor dynasty indulged in the codes of courtly love and medieval chivalry in this engrossing and highly entertaining tome.

Why did Henry VIII marry six times? Why did Anne Boleyn have to die? Why did Elizabeth I's courtiers hail her as a goddess come to earth?

The dramas of courtly love have captivated centuries of readers and dreamers. Yet too often they're dismissed as something existing only in books and song - those old legends of King Arthur and chivalric fantasy.

Not so. In this ground-breaking history, Sarah Gristwood reveals the way courtly love made and marred the Tudor dynasty. From Henry VIII declaring himself as the 'loyal and most assured servant' of Anne Boleyn to the poems lavished on Elizabeth I by her suitors, the Tudors re-enacted the roles of the devoted lovers and capricious mistresses first laid out in the romances of medieval literature.

The Tudors in Love dissects the codes of love, desire and power, unveiling romantic obsessions that have shaped the history of this nation.

About the speaker:  Sarah Gristwood is a best-selling author, historian and broadcaster. Sarah has written four previous books of 15th and 16th-century history: Arbella, Elizabeth and Leicester, Blood Sisters and, most recently, Game of Queens. She also co-authored The Ring and the Crown, a book on the history of royal weddings, and wrote two historical novels, The Girl in the Mirror and The Queen’s Mary. A regular media commentator on royal and historical affairs, Sarah’s broadcasting career began a decade ago, as one of the team providing Radio 4’s live coverage of the royal wedding. She now speaks regularly on royal and historical stories – such as the death of Prince Philip – for outlets including CNN, Sky News, Woman’s Hour, BBC World, LBC, Radio 5 Live, NBC, CBC and other channels from Scandinavia to South America.

X Y and Z – The Real Story of How Enigma was Broken with Dermot Turing

Wednesday 24 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

Join us for this fascinating talk about one of the most secret, and most important breakthroughs which alone might have decided the outcome of WW2, with author Dermot Turing.

It’s common knowledge that the Enigma cipher was broken at Bletchley Park, but less is known of the background: an exhilarating spy story of secret documents smuggled across borders, hair-raising escapes, Gestapo interrogations and betrayals.

At the heart of it is the decisive role of Polish mathematicians and French spymasters who helped Britain’s codebreakers change the course of the Second World War.

X, Y & Z - The Real Story of How Enigma was Broken describes how French, British and Polish secret services came together to unravel the Enigma machine. It tells of how, under the very noses of the Germans, Enigma code-breaking continued in Vichy France and how code-breakers from Poland continued their work for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, watching the USSR’s first steps of the Cold War.

About the speaker: Dermot Turing is the acclaimed author of Prof, a biography of his famous uncle, The Story of Computing, and most recently X, Y and Z – the real story of how Enigma was broken. He is also a regular speaker at historical and other events. He began writing in 2014 after a career in law. Like his celebrated uncle, Alan Turing, Dermot was educated at Sherborne School and King’s College, Cambridge. After a doing a D.Phil in Genetics at Oxford, he concluded that scientific research was not for him, and moved into the legal profession. As well as writing and speaking, Dermot is a trustee of The Turing Trust and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. He lives in St Albans in Hertfordshire.

The Lost Homestead with Marina Wheeler & Victoria Schofield

Thursday 25 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

Join us for this fascinating event with Marina Wheeler in interview with Victoria Schofield.

In her gripping and eye-opening memoir, The Lost Homestead: My Mother, Partition and the Punjab, Marina Wheeler tells the story of her mother’s early years shaped by the Partition and her subsequent search for personal and political freedom.

On 3 June 1947, as British India descended into chaos, its division into two states was announced. For months the violence and civil unrest escalated. With millions of others, Marina Wheeler's mother Dip Singh and her Sikh family were forced to flee their home in the Punjab, never to return.

As an Anglo-Indian with roots in what is now Pakistan, Marina Wheeler weaves her mother's story of loss and new beginnings, personal and political freedom into the broader, still highly contested, history of the region.

The Lost Homestead touches on global themes that strongly resonate today: political change, religious extremism, migration, minorities, nationhood, identity and belonging. But above all it is about coming to terms with the past, and about the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.

About the speaker: Marina Claire Wheeler QC is a British lawyer, author and columnist. As a barrister, she specialises in public law, including human rights, and is a member of the Bar Disciplinary Tribunal. She was appointed Queen's Counsel in 2016. Her writing debut, The Lost Homestead, was short-listed for the 2021 Christopher Bland Prize.  She lives in London. About the interviewer:

Victoria Schofield is a historian and commentator on international affairs, with special expertise on South Asia. She has authored several books including Bhutto: Trial and Execution and Afghan Frontier: at the Crossroads of Conflict and Kashmir in Conflict. Victoria presented her poignant The Fragrance of Tears at the Festival last year. She is a regular contributor to numerous media outlets and has written for the Sunday Telegraph, The Times, the Independent and the Spectator.

Palaces of Revolution - Life, Death & Art at the Stuart Court with Simon Thurley

Monday 29 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

Join us for this fascinating talk by author Simon Thurley, whose lively and accessible chronicle of the Stuarts explores the colourful history of the dynasty from James I to Queen Anne through the buildings and spaces they inhabited.

The story of the Stuart dynasty is a breathless soap opera played out in just a hundred years in an array of buildings that span Europe from Scotland, via Denmark, Holland and Spain to England.

Palaces of Revolution: Life, Death & Art at the Stuart Court is a sequel to his Houses of Power: The places that shaped the Tudor World, and it presents a new history of the Stuart monarchy told through the palaces that they constructed and the art that they commissioned and acquired.

Simon shows us these places in graphic detail. The book is thus about the everyday life of the monarchy, presented chronologically, through the buildings in which they lived. It presents new stories and information about the period not only in the text but through maps and plans that bring life to the Stuart age.

About the speaker: Simon Thurley is a leading architectural historian, a regular broadcaster, Visiting Gresham Professor of the Built Environment since 2009 and was appointed Provost of Gresham College in 2020. He spent thirteen years in the role of Chief Executive of English Heritage and served as the Director of the Museum of London, the world's largest city museum. Between 1990 to 1997 he was the Curator of Historic Royal Palaces. Throughout his career, Simon has been passionate about communicating English history. He is the author of more than ten books including The Building of England, his history of English architecture, and The Royal Palaces of Tudor England, the subject of his PhD taken at the Courtauld Institute.

Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages with Dan Jones

Tuesday 30 November, 6.30pm to 7.30pm

Join us for this fascinating interview with the Sunday Times best-selling author of The Templars and The Crusaders, Dan Jones.

Dan's epic new history, Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages, tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built.

It is a thousand-year adventure that moves from the ruins of the once-mighty city of Rome, sacked by barbarians in AD 410, to the first contacts between the old and new worlds in the sixteenth century. It shows how, from a state of crisis and collapse, the West was rebuilt and came to dominate the entire globe.

The book identifies three key themes that underpinned the success of the West: commerce, conquest and Christianity. Across 16 chapters, blending his trademark gripping narrative style with authoritative analysis, Powers and Thrones shows how, at each stage in this story, successive western powers thrived by attracting - or stealing - the most valuable resources, ideas and people from the rest of the world.

It casts new light on iconic locations - Rome, Paris, Venice, Constantinople - and it features some of history's most famous and notorious men and women.

This is a book written about - and for - an age of profound change, and it asks the biggest questions about the West both then and now. Where did we come from? What made us? Where do we go from here?

About the speaker: Dan Jones is a master of popular narrative history, with the priceless ability to write page-turning narrative history underpinned by authoritative scholarship. Dan Jones is a bestselling historian, TV presenter and award-winning journalist. His books, which have sold more than a million copies worldwide, include The Plantagenets, The Hollow Crown, Magna Carta and The Templars. The Plantagenets was adapted into a four-part Channel 5 television series and The Templars has sold more than 150,000 copies in Head of Zeus’ English language editions, and rights in twelve languages. In 2018, Dan co-authored the best-selling book The Colour of Time with Marina Amaral. Dan is a broadcaster, award-winning journalist and pioneer of the resurgence of interest in medieval history. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was tutored by David Starkey. He lives in London. Dan Jones will be interviewed by Richard Foreman.

We look forward to welcoming you at The London History Festival!

TICKETS:

IN PERSON tickets include a glass of wine/juice and are priced at £5. 

Please note that the concessionary rate of £3 per ticket is offered to pensioners, students and those in receipt of benefits.

*IN PERSON Tickets will also be on sale in Kensington Central Library starting 1st November.

ONLINE tickets are FREE. The talks will be streamed via Zoom webinar and all those who book to join  us online will receive the LINK TO JOIN 24hrs before and on the day of the event.

There will be a book-signing session following each talk.

DIRECTIONS: If you are joining us in person, please note that the lecture hall is at the back of Kensington Central Library building (see map).  All events start at 6.30pm Doors will open at 6pm for refreshments before the start.