Adult Courses

If you enjoy visiting churches and want to know more about their architecture and art, then this is the course for you. During the week, you will explore the art and architecture that marks the divisions of time and space. You will cover the elaborate portals of the 12th century Renaissance, medieval ideas about Earth, the edge of space and the cosmos,...

For centuries, China was the hegemon of the East. In the 19th century, she suffered a dramatic collapse leading to a slow, painful recovery. Today, she challenges America's global supremacy. China's new Silk Road project claims Eurasia as her proper sphere of influence, threatens to exclude America and to leave Europe isolated in the continent's north western corner. During this course, you...

Over a period of nearly six centuries, Anglo-Saxon England grew to become one of the richest, best administered and culturally dynamic kingdoms of Western Europe. This course will explore a fascinating period of English history to try to understand how it developed, its achievements and the challenges it faced. With reference to contemporary sources and archaeology, you will follow this development by...

The period either side of 1800, so crucial in political and economic history, was also exceptionally important culturally. The Romantic Movement has done an enormous amount to influence and shape all manner of behaviour from wars of national liberation to cottage holidays in the Lake District. This course seeks to explain the varied and radical priorities of the marvellous and often, more...

During this period, the challenges faced by Britain in 1945 and subsequent post-war austerity gradually gave way to growing affluence. This course explores major political, economic and imperial and foreign policy issues, together with aspects of daily life, leisure, popular culture, education and belief. Topics covered include key social and industrial policies, notably the expansion of the welfare state and mixed economy, decolonisation...

Have you ever wondered what philosophy is and how to do it? This course offers you the chance to explore fi ve subjects from a philosophical angle and fi nd out how to look at other subjects in the same way. The subjects will be art, religion, morality, history and identity. The tutor will ask you questions, such as what makes a...

This course examines five leadership case studies and seeks to answer the age-old question of what makes a great leader? Humans have obsessed over this question for millennia and yet the debate rages on. Based in more modern history, each day of the course will examine a different leader. It then draws upon these examples to seek to answer the bigger questions....

Mention the Arts and Crafts Movement and most people automatically think of William Morris, wallpaper and fabric. However, it encompassed so much more. From architecture to metalwork, furniture to embroidery and stained glass to jewellery, this course will take a wide-ranging look at a movement that sought to establish a society in which creative freedom was the right of all. Alongside a...

This popular course returns with fresh cases for your consideration. Each day, you will be looking at a real life murder or suspected murder that occurred in England between 1900 and 1975, and you the jury will consider the evidence, reach your own verdict and then decide whether justice was well served by the historical outcome. The cases have all been selected...

Enjoy a journey through the history of food and dining, focussing on five separate periods, Roman, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian and Victorian. This course will provide an opportunity to consider the food and drink eaten by rich and poor, sources of food available and the recipes and cooking methods used. Additionally, there will be opportunities to create items of food or beverages relevant...

The huge social, cultural, intellectual, political and economic changes that swept Europe from around 1101 to 1200 are often labelled the 12th Century Renaissance. However, by most measures, the resulting society hardly represented a 'rebirth' so much as a dynamic new world, which has done as much as any period to create the civilisation we know today. Many of our countries, cities, languages,...

This course will start with the search for the North-West Passage, which has captivated the imagination of explorers, merchants and adventurers as far back as the journeys of Frobisher and Davis in Elizabeth I's reign. You will then move on to look at the discoveries of both the North and South Poles with particular reference to the Norwegians, Nansen and Amundsen, and...