New Courses 

Facial gua sha is a traditional Chinese skincare technique that involves gently gliding a smooth, flat tool (often made of jade or rose quartz) over the face in specific patterns to promote circulation, reduce puffiness, and encourage



lymphatic drainage.

Do you want to become a certified NADA ear practitioner?



The NADA Protocol is a five-point ear acupuncture treatment that effectively reduces stress and anxiety, chronic pain, symptoms of addiction, supports smoking cessation, weight management and boost overall wellbeing.

Interested in anti-ageing facials but don’t know where to begin? Why not try this general introduction? Learn about your skin type, the benefits of facial massage as well as basic facial techniques to use on yourself and your friends and family!

Learn facial reflexology on this course and unlock the power of healing and balance through the face. This modern technique will lead you to a new dimension of well-being and holistic health.

This course explores how dramatists use their position as commentators to reflect the societal and political issues affecting the nation. Drawing on texts by Laura Wade, Jez Butterworth, Roy Williams and others, we’ll discuss how issues such as class, national identity, queer and black lives, and activism have been interrogated by Britain’s finest contemporary playwrights.

This course will introduce and discuss the fiction of renowned author, Angela Carter, specifically focusing upon one novel and one short story. Carter wanted her writing to ‘demythologise the fictions that regulate our lives’, to explore how society narrates us into being and holds us there. In doing so, she offers us a chance to read and, ultimately, release ourselves through her work, as we come to understand the relationship between fiction and reality. For Carter, both of these – fiction and reality – are two sides of the same coin.

From Roman society to the present day, from the memoirs of Equiano to the experimental poetics of Kwesi Johnson, Black British writers have significantly impacted British literature, despite limited recognition.



Through an exploration of social, political and historical contexts, this course examines how diasporic writers decolonised genres and mapped their own metaphors onto the literary landscape.

What makes a poet modern? What is the different between modern poetry and modernist poetry? How has modern poetry informed the work of poets writing today? Come and explore the exciting range of poetry written in the twentieth century in a supportive and energising group context.

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.

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.

Are you curious about reading contemporary global literature? Would you like to understand what we mean by the ‘global novel’, reading across cultures and national borders? This in-college course will introduce you to the study of global literature through reading three brilliant 21st century global novels: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled and Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic.