Explore History, Culture & Writing

The Romanesque is the first international style since antiquity, and one of the most inventive and creative periods in the history of art. The course takes a thematic approach to this fascinating period and provides an introduction to the main themes and works of art and architecture from this period; it is based on the tutor's book 'Romanesque Art.'.

Marriage has always been fertile ground for filmmakers, and some directors – Rossellini, Bergman, Godard – have gone deeper than most. This course looks at the ways cinema’s greatest filmmakers have approached the subject. It explores original works by artists who have “mined” their own lives for material, while showing how adaptations of literary works can, in the hands of great film-makers, become a kind of veiled autobiography.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

Sport was a key branch of imperialism providing an opportunity for Britain to take cultural control of her Empire. It was seen to encourage ‘civilisation’ and character development and helped to project a masculine image of the Empire to the wider world.

Come and join us at the Cultureplex Ciné-Club 2, where once a week, for 12 weeks (and throughout the academic year), we will watch and discuss film. Taking its cue from the famous Parisian ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, ‘the single thinker most responsible for bestowing on cinema the prestige both of an artform and of an object of knowledge’, and the man who foresaw the emergence of film studies as a legitimate discipline of academic study, our contemporary incarnation of the film club will offer a curated series of films for detailed study, discussion and debate. Each film will be introduced, placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context. In sharing our viewing in City Lit’s premier screening room, the Cultureplex, we will approximate the experience of watching film in the cinema, one that is intense and fully focussed in a way that other modes of viewing often are not. After the screening we will devote the rest of the class to a collective exploration of the film, led by the tutor, but involving everyone in a participatory discussion that will allow all to express their responses, their views, their thoughts on the film screened.







Please note that this course will screen a new and different set of films to HF211 Cultureplex Ciné-Club, which will run with the same films screened last year. If you took the Cultureplex Ciné-Club course last year (2022-23), please ensure that you take the Cultureplex Ciné-Club 2 courses this year.

London luxuriates in literary references. We follow the footsteps of the authors, poets and playwrights, and some of their creations, as we walk a brand new neighbourhood each week, exploring the literary connections.



London guide: Eleanor Jackson. First meeting point at Green Park tube station, street level, Piccadilly South side.



London guide: Eleanor Jackson.

An opportunity to find about how daily life was for ordinary people in the Roman Empire.



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.

How can we best understand the significance of Oliver Cromwell for English history? We will explore Cromwell’s rise to power, and his brief rule as the so-called ‘Good Constable’ of the Commonwealth during the 1653-1658 Protectorate.

Follow the paths taken by four of the most courageous, life-affirming, uncompromisingly individual poets of the modern era, as they confront the challenges of psychological, sexual and artistic alienation (Baudelaire), religious and political conformity (Dickinson and Mandelstam), and of a world lost to materialism and the march of technology, devoid of all spirituality (Rilke: “You must change your life”).



This course will be delivered online. See the ‘What is the course about?’ section in course details for more information.