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All meetings are scheduled to start at 7.30pm sharp. The Hall is only open from 6.45pm when refreshments will be served until 7.15pm. Please be seated in advance of the lecture as a courtesy to our speakers. If you know in advance that you will be unable to attend a particular meeting we will be able to offer your seat to a guest or visitor if you let Martin Kent or a committee member know a few days in advance. Programme To mark the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, Michael Wheeler introduces us in February to Dickens’ life and career before focussing upon the famous illustrations which contributed so much to his novels originally published in serial form in the magazines of the time. Elizabeth Rumbelow celebrates the Seasons in Art, Poetry and Music in March. Her lecture illustrates the seasons throughout the world, using paintings from Europe, America, Asia and Australia, poetry ranging from the sixth to the twentieth century and music as diverse as Prokofiev’s joyous Sleigh Ride and Spring in Buenos Aires by the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. In April John Iddon presents Horace Walpole, the son of the first prime minister, author of the first Gothic novel “The Castle of Otranto”, art connoisseur, collector of art, great letter writer, gossip and wit. Walpole had a distinguished and colourful life, but is perhaps best remembered as the creator of Strawberry Hill by the Thames at Twickenham, which we shall be visiting later in the year. In contrast Anthea Streeter brings us right up to date in May with a lecture on the Architecture at the London Olympics. Several of the structures have been designed by Britain’s leading architects, and the lecture sets these buildings in the context of both their other work and the prevailing trends in architecture today. 28 February In the bi-centenary of Dickens’s birth Michael gives us a chance to reconsider our most brilliant and visual novelist. He introduces us to his life and career before focusing upon the famous illustrations which contributed so much to the original serial novels. He considers the spectacle of his public readings in Britain and America, the theatre world that he loved, his creation in words of London, which he knew inside out, and the portraits and cartoons which capture ‘the Inimitable Boz’ in life and after his premature death in 1870 at the age of 58. As a follow-up to this lecture there will be a visit to the Dickens Museum at Broadstairs in April. 27 March 24 April 22 May 26 June 24 July No meeting in August 25 September 23 October 27 November
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