Europe
Neal Ascherson
Friday 2 March, 18.30
BP Lecture Theatre, British Museum
Europe is a monster (monstro simile, as they said of the Holy Roman Empire) and a mutant, a creature in its substance unlike the kingdoms and empires and states which preceded it. It's a sponge, indeterminate in outline, soft in texture, absorbing incomers and diffusing wealth and culture. How can it survive?
Neal Ascherson was the Observer’s correspondent in Bonn from 1963 to 1975, where he reported on the events of ’68, the Prague Spring and the Baader-Meinhof gang, among other things, before moving to the Scotsman to cover Scottish politics. He went back to the Observer in the 1980s and reported on the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland and won the Orwell Prize in 1993 for his journalism in the Independent on Sunday. His books include The Polish August, Black Sea and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland; he also wrote scripts for the 1973-74 Thames TV series The World at War. He is a visiting professor at University College London’s Institute of Archaeology.
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Or call +44 (0)20 7323 8181 – Ticket Desk in Great Court Open 10.00 to 16.45 daily.
The ticket prices are £10 (£8 concessions including LRB subscribers and Friends of the British Museum).
Marx at 193
John Lanchester
Friday 9 March, 18.30
BP Lecture Theatre, British Museum
Along with Freud and Darwin, Karl Marx is one of the central figures in the creation of the modern world; he has in common with them the fate that his books are more referred to than they are actually read. This lecture is a look at Karl Marx as a prophet and analyst of the modern world, a study of how well his predictions have turned out, and an attempt to wonder what he would have made of the state we’re in.
John Lanchester has been one of the most important – and most prescient – writers on the global financial crisis. His essay ‘Cityphilia’ in the London Review of Books, published nine months before Lehman Brothers collapsed, became the basis for his book Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. His novels – The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour – have been awarded the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E.M. Forster Award and the Premi Llibreter. A new novel, Capital, will be published in March.
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Or call +44 (0)20 7323 8181 – Ticket Desk in Great Court Open 10.00 to 16.45 daily.
The ticket prices are £10 (£8 concessions including LRB subscribers and Friends of the British Museum).
Marilyn Monroe
Jacqueline Rose
Friday 30 March, 18.30
BP Lecture Theatre, British Museum
It has become a commonplace to talk of Marilyn Monroe as a myth, a pure screen for projected desires. Taking advantage of the recent publication of her poems, notes and letters, as well as the archive of her films, famous and lesser known, Jacqueline Rose will use this lecture to argue that this view is complicit with her victimisation and that Marilyn Monroe knew exactly what was happening to her. Reader, self-diagnostician, she cast herself in the leading role amidst the debris of a post-war American crisis of culture whose effects are still with us to this day.
Jacqueline Rose’s work ranges across feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics. Early in her career, she made groundbreaking contributions to psychoanalytic feminism (Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein) and wrote seminal texts on children’s fiction and Sylvia Plath. Since the 1990s, through her continuing engagement with psychoanalysis and fiction, she has explored the imaginary dimensions of the relationship between nationhood and national identity in some of the most challenging arenas in modern history and politics, South Africa and Israel-Palestine in particular (States of Fantasy, The Question of Zion). Her latest book is Proust among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East. A fellow of the British Academy, she is professor of English at Queen Mary University of London.
To purchase tickets please click here
Or call +44 (0)20 7323 8181 – Ticket Desk in Great Court Open 10.00 to 16.45 daily.
The ticket prices are £10 (£8 concessions including LRB subscribers and Friends of the British Museum).
The London Review of Books Winter Lectures are presented in partnership with the British Museum.
