All enquiries to Mandy Caller, mandycaller@gmail.com or telephone 07818 063594

Meetings are held at 8pm on the third Thursday of the month September to April (excluding December) at Fellowship House, 136a Willifield Way, London NW11 6YD.

Please email Dr Dudley Miles dudleyramiles@googlemail.com or Mandy Caller mandycaller@googlemail.com for Zoom details.

The cost of Associate branch membership is £15 (£10 if joining after Christmas), and the visitor fee will be £5 per session.

 

Hampstead & North West London Branch Programme 2025-26 

 

Thursday 18th September 2025

The British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1780-1833

Professor Lawrence Goldman

This lecture on the history of the British anti-slavery movement will cover the period from the 1770s until the 1830s and examine both the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the emancipation of slaves in the British empire in 1833. It will consider why, towards the end of the eighteenth century, after millennia in which slavery was an accepted institution in every civilisation, it came to be questioned and ended in Britain. It will draw on some of the latest research in the field. 

Professor Lawrence Goldman was educated at Cambridge and Yale and then taught British and American History for three decades in the Oxford History Faculty where he was a fellow of St. Peter's College. For ten years, 2004-14, he was also the General Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and latterly he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. He has published widely on modern British History. His most recent book is Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in NIneteenth Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2022).

 

 

Thursday 16th October 2025

History of backchannel talks and nascent peace processes in Northern Ireland

Dr Tony Craig

While often shrouded in secrecy, between 1972 and 1992 a series of secret, deniable and often unofficial talks between UK government officials and paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland took place. Although one of these, the contact between MI6 (and later Mi5) and the republican intermediary Brendan Duddy, is now well known, a wider view of who was making contact with whom, when and where, reveals the context of these and other talks as part of efforts to variously understand the Troubles, disrupt the terrorist groups and eventually, to communicate broader intentions between each other. This talk therefore looks at secret backchannels in their wider form as used in Northern Ireland to communicate with both Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries and to evaluate their role in both guiding and as a part of wider government strategy.

Tony Craig is an Associate Professor in Modern History at University of Staffordshire and has published widely on the work of British intelligence and policy during the Troubles. He has a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge and was a former Irish Government postdoctoral scholar at University of Oxford.

 

 

Thursday 20th November 2025

The Armenian Genocide

Paula Kitching

Who remembers the Armenian Genocide?

Paula Kitching is an historian and writer and has spent most of her professional life working in education and for charities. Her historical specialisms include: the cultural impact and history of war and genocide,

minorities histories, including Anglo-Jewish history; and diversity during the World Wars. Through the organisations she has worked for she has recorded the testimony of British ex-service personnel from a variety of conflicts and Holocaust, Bosnian and Rwandan genocide survivors.

She currently works for the Historical Association and lectures in adult education, having previously worked as a freelancer, during which time she was an advisor to a government department for five years, the education consultant to the Royal British Legion for six years and an advisor to various charities. She is the historian on the HLF funded projects 'We Were There Too - Britain's Jews and for the 2019 project the First World War' and 'Indian Soldiers -Letters Home' an exhibition on the First World War.

As a writer she has contributed to a number of historical journals and publications and her book 'British Jews and the First World War' was published in 2019. For over 20 years I have been a guide for battlefield tours and have been fortunate enough to have taken groups right across Europe to many locations including Normandy, Ypres, Berlin, Krakow and the Western Front.

 

 

Thursday 15th January 2026

The Fourth Crusade

Professor Jonathan Harris

Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine empire (now known as Istanbul), survived both the fall of the Roman Empire and the expansion of Islam. By the twelfth century, it was the largest and most prosperous city in the Christian world, a repository of ancient art and literature and famed for its collection of relics connected with Jesus Christ. But in the year 1204, Constantinople was attacked, captured and pillaged not by a Muslim army but by one composed of Christian co-religionists who were supposedly on a crusade to recover Jerusalem. This lecture explores how that strange contradiction came about, what the consequences were and how these events still resonate today.

Jonathan Harris is Professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has written widely on the encounter between the Byzantine Empire and the Crusades, notably in The End of Byzantium (New Haven CT and London, 2010), Byzantium and the Crusades, 3rd ed. (London and New York, 2022) and (trans. with Georgios Chatzelis), Byzantine Sources for the Crusades, 1095-1204 (London and New York, 2025). His other research interests include the city of Constantinople, the Byzantine diaspora after 1453 and the Middle Ages in fiction

 

 

Thursday 19th February 2026

1983 - The World at the Brink of Nuclear Armageddon.  by Taylor Downing

Taylor Downing is a historian, broadcaster and best selling author. Over many years he produced more than 300 historical documentaries for British and American television. For the last decade he has been writing popular history books including Cold War (with Sir Jeremy Isaacs), Spies in the Sky about aerial intelligence in World War Two, Breakdown about shell shock on the Somme, 1983 – The World at the Brink about a Soviet war scare that nearly prompted World War Three, and 1942 – Britain at the Brink about Churchill’s darkest hours in 1942. His latest book is The Army that Never Was about Deception and D-Day. He regularly appears on television and radio documentaries and in podcasts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

 

 

Thursday 19th March 2026

PG Wodehouse and the Decline of the British Empire

Dr. Seán Lang

PG Wodehouse, the creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, was an unlikely but acute reflector and shaper of changing British attitudes towards Britain's worldwide Empire.

Dr Seán Lang is a Senior Lecturer in History at Anglia Ruskin University, where he specialises in modern European history and the history of the British Empire. He has taught widely at school, sixth form and university level and is a regular broadcaster on radio and television, commenting on history, education and current affairs, especially issues relating to the British monarchy. He is a regular lecturer for the University of Cambridge International Summer Programme.

 

 

Thursday 16th April 2026

The East India Company: The corporation that changed the world

Dr John McAleer

The East India Company played a crucial role in creating the British Empire in Asia. From its modest origins as a small Elizabethan trading venture, it grew into a global empire which controlled Britain’s trade with Asia for nearly 250 years. It is a story of wealth, power, and the pursuit of fortune. But it is also one of conflict, conquest, and piracy on the high seas; politics, intrigue, and ruthlessness on land. The Company’s activities are an early example of globalization in action. By introducing a whole host of coveted commodities to British consumers, the scale and impact of its operations changed the lives of millions of people around the world. In Britain, it affected what we eat, what we drink, the clothes we wear, and the language we speak. And in India, the Company laid the foundations of the British Empire in the subcontinent.

John McAleer is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Southampton. He was previously Curator of Imperial and Maritime History at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society, and an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association.

 

We look forward to welcoming you at Fellowship House