Featuring ‘lessons’ selected and read by speakers including James Butler, CAConrad, Geoff Dyer, Jem Finer, Xiaolu Guo, Andrew O’Hagan, Lola Olufemi, Tom Rasmussen, Denise Riley, Olivia Sudjic, Ruby Tandoh and Marina Warner. And ‘carols’ arranged by composer Kieran Brunt and performed by the experimental vocal ensemble, Shards – with guest appearances from Jem Finer and Tom Rasmussen.

There will be two shows on consecutive nights with different line-ups: book for Thursday 5 December here, and Friday 6 December here.

MUBI and the London Review of Books are delighted to present a special preview screening of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, preceded by a conversation about the film’s transformation of its source material: the novella of the same title by William S. Burroughs written in the early 1950s (but not published until 1985). Guadagnino will be joined by Daniel Craig, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, and the Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris. Their discussion will be chaired by the writer and broadcaster, Ellen E. Jones.

1950. William Lee (Daniel Craig), an American expat in Mexico City, spends his days almost entirely alone, except for a few contacts with other members of the community. His encounter with Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), an expat former soldier, shows him that it might be finally possible to establish an intimate connection.

The film reframes Burroughs’s work in blaze of saturated colour, sexual obsession and psychedelic consummation – soundtracked not by jazz but by Nirvana and Prince. As Jessica Kiang wrote in Sight and Sound, ‘Queer takes an often self-consciously repellent text and turns it into a tragic fantasy about the loneliness of unreciprocated gay love.’ Literary-cinematic adaptation is rarely so revelatory.

The second concert collaboration between the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books, A Form of Exile presents dazzling works of music and literature created at the end of great careers. Join us to discover the connections between them, as traced by Edward Said in his final piece for the LRB, which became his last book.

The programme includes Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – ‘a musicological Holy Grail, a vortex of ideas and implications’ (Alex Ross) – as well as Richard Strauss’ last orchestral work, and Britten’s String Quartet No.3, which references his final opera, Death in Venice. Readings from texts read by, written by, and written about Said (and some of his subjects), will provide an eloquent counterpoint throughout.