Explore History, Culture & Writing

Wedged between the two wars, the poets of the 1930s were drawn to forces larger than themselves. For poets such as W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, war, revolution and the allure of communism dwarfed mere personal anxieties. Others – such as William Empson, Kathleen Raine and Dylan Thomas – found a seam of spiritualism in other, more mystical, even Romantic antecedents. Our course traces these discrepant paths through the decade.

Want to keep full creative control of your writing project? Learn more about self-publishing and how to give your book (poetry, fiction or non-fiction) the best chance of achieving high sales.



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

Flash fiction is the art of telling small stories that make a big impact. Learn how to harness the power of economy in this practical course. Suitable for those with some experience of creative writing.



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

There is still a time and place for film noir in David Lynch’s dark films. No filmmaker is more unique. He gets his own adjective, ‘Lynchian’: films of an eerie, surrealist, dreamlike quality. He looks every inch the auteur, working and painting in a studio just above Mulholland Drive, a recluse whose boyhood was in 1950s America, who came of age with James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and its co-star, Dennis Hopper, who continued to live as a recluse on the wrong side of town 30 years later in Blue Velvet (1986), a virtual remake. “A film or painting has its own sort of language. It’s not right to try to say the same thing in words. The language of film is the language it was put into, and it doesn’t translate. It’s not a word thing. It would reduce it, make it smaller. Film is a magic act, and magicians don’t tell how they did it.” He hates behind-the-scenes footage or making-of films. “People do it for sales, for money, but the film is the thing and should be protected. I never was a movie buff. I like to make movies. I like to work. I don’t really like to go out.” (See separate but related courses on Once Upon a Time in New Hollywood, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and the Coen brothers).

André Bazin famously asserted that, ‘the cinema more than any other art is particularly bound up with love’. Join us for this one-day course and explore the extent to which Bazin’s remark may be seen to be true. We will look at how love is represented across the history of film and explore the ubiquity of love at first sight in classical Hollywood cinema. We will consider the extent to which romance, primarily heterosexual, has been a structuring narrative device in popular cinema, while also considering films that explore same sex romance. We will look at a range of genres, including, of course, the rom-com, or romantic comedy. We will also think about love of the cinema itself – cinephilia – as a possible reason for our regular and continued return to this frequently most powerful of experiences. We will consider work by directors such as Jean Genet, Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Pedro Almodovar, and others, as well as looking at specific films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Groundhog Day (1993).

How might poets write about the natural world today, and what is an eco-poem?



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

This short online literature course looks at experiences of solitude in the twenty-first century. Reading fiction and non-fiction, we’ll study different representations of solitude and consider its history of creative and spiritual significance. We’ll consider how solitude can be a source of anxiety or challenge, as well as its potential to be productive and restorative. Includes 'The Fell (2021) by Sarah Moss and extracts from Sara Maitland's 'A Book of Silence' (2008) and Dave Egger's 'The Circle' (2013).



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

What is anime? What are the artistic and narrative features that make these films so instantly recognizable? This one-day film course will provide an overview of the history of Japanese animation cinema, its inextricable links with manga and its multi-faceted and varied productions that range from children’s films to genres such as cyberpunk and yaoi. During the course, we will watch and discuss clips from a variety of production companies and directors, such as Haya Miyazaki, the Studio Ghibli and Katsuhiro Otomo.

The Coens’ Blood Simple (1984) was a new kind of film noir set in Texas. A career later they returned to post-Civil War Texas to re-make True Grit (2010). This map of their USA trips through Raising Arizona (1987), then mainstreams to Fargo (1996), but somehow never far from Hollywood and its genres: Barton Fink (1991), O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), or Hail, Caesar (2016). If their America was No Country For Old Men (2007), then where art they now? (See separate but related courses on Once Upon a Time in New Hollywood, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and David Lynch).