New Courses 

Experience the enjoyment of writing about music. Share your musical opinions in several formats and be inspired to develop your own longer-term writing project. Break week: 30 Oct 2025.

This advanced German language course for lovers of Germany is part of the series “Wanderlust” which will explore a variety of interesting destinations in Germany.

This course is specifically aimed at the mobile therapist wishing to offer clients a hot and cold stone massage, without the need to carry a massive traditional hot stone heater around with you!

What is a short story? Come and discuss its characteristics, its length, design, mood and style. What distinguishes it from other kinds of short narrative? We’ll compare short stories to other forms, such as myths, legends, anecdotes, fabliaux, parables, fables, and ‘tales’. We’ll look at some of the greatest practitioners including Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, and O’ Henry.

We will explore the history and evolution of the big band and large ensemble in jazz throughout the 20th century.

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

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?

Join us to explore two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, his tragedy King Lear, and his late ‘romance’, The Tempest. We’ll consider the connections – and differences - between these works, thinking about Shakespeare’s use of genre and language, the historical contexts, changing critical perspectives, and aspects of the plays in performance.

Study the history and form of this famous work in a short, enjoyable music history class.

Composer Luciano Berio and singer-composer Cathy Berberian were the power couple of contemporary music in the 1950s and 1960s, collaborating to discover new sounds and musical techniques and structures in works from Tema: Omaggio a Joyce and Sequenza III to Stripsody.