Courses in London & Online

This critical studies course for developing artists and makers explores the concept of creativity and what it means to be an artist, drawing on a range of cultural theories and work by creative practitioners to help inspire and enhance creative and critical thinking.

Why have so many British authors set stories in and around an important house? How does the structure, history and atmosphere of a great house affect plot and narrative? And where do authors derive their inspiration to build fictional houses that capture readers’ imaginations so fully? The novels on this course all focus on one finely imagined house and demonstrate the author’s own personal concerns of the time.

Come on a walking tour of Hampstead discovering where refugee artists from the Second World War lived and the people and institutions which made great efforts to save and support them.

Would you like to read a contemporary book in French? Join this class and delve into the world of a French author while simultaneously expanding your knowledge of vocabulary and appreciating a writing style.

The oldest profession as practised among the Romans - not for the squeamish.

Venez découvrir Maupassant, journaliste et auteur. Reconnu de son vivant, il conserve un renom de premier plan, renouvelé encore par les nombreuses adaptations filmées de ses œuvres, composées de romans et nouvelles situés entre réalisme et fantastique. Un auteur du XIX siècle aux intonations modernes !

This is an intermediate to advanced German language course for lovers of German history.

This course explores the Making, the Locating and the Viewing of Renaissance paintings in the collection of the National Gallery. This course takes place at the National Gallery.

This course will introduce and discuss two novels by eminent author, Muriel Spark- Memento Mori (1959) and The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). Her writing wilfully upends notions of conformity and acts as a disrupter to accepted conventions. Instead, ‘Spark beckons us to encounter the stranger’ (Marilyn Reizbaum). Playfully disrupting passive readers and stretching comfort zones, Spark’s work provides a space to access unaccustomed outlooks that make us rethink our relationship with ourselves, others, and the world. Instead of unconsciously going with the flow, she awakens us to life’s stranger things.

Explore the astonishing range of poetic responses to a hundred years of warfare, acts of witnessing, endurance, defiance and condemnation by writers across the globe: Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in Britain, Brecht, Milosz, Celan, Akhmatova and Stepanova in Europe and Russia, Darwish and Zhadan in the Middle East and Ukraine, and many others. How do they describe the indescribable? High art or doggerel, what does it matter once the bombs start to fall?