THE LONDON LIBRARY ANNUAL LECTURE
Launched with a series of seven lectures to commemorate the Library’s 150th anniversary in 1991, the London Library Annual Lecture is now a firm and favourite fixture in London’s literary calendar. Delivered each summer by one of the Library’s distinguished members, the lectures cover a subject range as wide and as stimulating as the Library’s extensive and eclectic collections.
The Library’s 2008 annual lecture, to be held at the Royal Geographical Society on the evening of Thursday, 12 June, will be given by Simon Schama. In Gothic language: Carlyle, Ruskin and the morality of exuberance, Professor Schama will be comparing the work of two of the English language’s great prose-stylists: "The way in which Carlyle and Ruskin wrote was as important, or at any rate, as peculiar as what they wrote. Their style seemed to violate every canon of decent lucidity in the Anglo-Victorian book. Nonetheless they were the literary gods of their age. Was that because of, or in spite of the grand opera of their style?"
Simon Schama is Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, New York. He was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge and taught at Cambridge, Oxford, and Harvard before moving to New York in 1993. His television series ‘A History of Britain’ was broadcast from 2000 to 2002, followed by ‘The Power of Art’ in 2006 and 2007. He served as Vice President of PEN American Center from 1994 to 1996, and from 1995 to 1998 he was art critic of The New Yorker magazine, for which he continues to write. He has been a member of the Library since 2004.
Do submit your order form for Dr Schama’s lecture as early as possible, as tickets for the Library’s lecture tend to sell very quickly.
For further information please contact: sarah.farthing@londonlibrary.co.uk
