Reading Branch Programme 2009/10

Reading Town Hall

Meetings are held in the John Kendrick Building Reading School Erleigh Road Reading RG1 5LW at 7.30 pm unless otherwise stated. Enquiries may be made via John Dillon 16 The Woodlands Wokingham. RG414UY 01189784715 iohn@the-dillons.or@:.uk

The entrance to the school site is on Erleigh Road. Parking is available on the Terrace or in the car park opposite the Chapel. The meals before each talk will be held in the Library in the John Kendrick building; talks will take place on the ground floor of the John Kendrick building.

Friday 16 October 2009 Dr Catherine Holmes GM (7.30 pm) and Lecture (8.00 pm) The Byzantine Empire between Iconoclasm and the Crusades (c.850-1100). An Empire Expanding?  Fellow of University College, Oxford.

The history of the Byzantine Empire between the mid-9th and the mid-11th centuries was characterised by military victory, missionary activity and considerable artistic achievement. Yet by the end of the 11th" century the empire was struggling to survive amid internal collapse and external attack. This lecture will consider how and why the considerable successes of Byzantine expansion came under such pressure on the eve of the Crusades.

Friday 13 November 2009 Professor Alan Cromartie Thomas Hobbes and Stuart Culture Reading University

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a philosopher, best-known for his insistence that life without a powerful state would be 'nasty, brutish and short'. He was also a deeply eccentric human being. His personality and attitudes cast unexpected light on Stuart culture.

Friday 4 December 2009 Dr Georgina Sinclair From Anguilla to Afghanistan; Observing British Police Interventions, 1968-2008

The Open University. British Police have since the nineteenth century been deployed overseas in a variety of roles of a civil and/or semi-military nature. Today British policing practices contribute widely to democratic police reform programmes within states in transition, most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The National Archives. Ashmole's visitation of his adopted county was particularly thorough. This lecture examines how Ashmole meticulously organised his visitation, how successful he was in registering the arms and pedigrees of the gentry, and finally, what the surviving record tells us.

Friday 5th February 2010 Professor Mark Edele University of Western Australia. "Has the comrade read the statutes?" The Strange History of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans, 1956.

Since World War I most countries have had strong and often influential organisations of old soldiers and victims of war. The Soviet Union was an exception, until 1956, when the regime suddenly allowed the formation of the Soviet Committee of War Veterans. Initially conceived as a front organization for international propaganda, it quickly veered off course and became a genuine veterans' organisation within Soviet society.

Friday 5th March 2010 Professor Lindy Grant  University of Reading Power, Heresy and the End of Time: French Gothic Last Judgment Portals in the early Thirteenth Century.

This paper will explore the imagery of these magnificent portals against the background of developing ideas about power and bodily resurrection at the end of time among the Paris masters in late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries, and in the particular context of the Amaurician heresy - a heresy considered all the more dangerous by the church because it was to an extent protected by the Capetian royal family.

May 2010 - Branch Outing (TBC)