Humans have colonized most of the planet, and we don't live only in the places that reali are not fit for us. But meantime, during the history of Homo sapiens leaving Africa and the many thousand of years since our ancestors have left the continent on which the human species appeared the world has changes many times.

The ancient Druids have long represented some of the most striking and controversial figures in ancient and medieval literature and they are still represented in books or movies. In this lecture recorded by Ronald Hutton for Gresham College on 2nd of April 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London, he and people watching will look at the many different ways in which the modern imagination has been inspired by them, both as heroic ancestors and as demonic villains against whom civilisation can be defined.

Legally they are not bankrupt but many cities in the world have technical and economic problems, and they are not robbed by pirates. In this lecture done yesterday for Gresham College by Professor Martin Daunton, Visiting Professor of Economic History, he speaks about the problems those cities have. Incompetence, bad or worse administrator, the condiiton in country and world are just a few reasons for those problems.

Pirates of the high seas still enjoy a romantic image, today, and there still are some pirates successful movies around the world. Humans have the tendency to enjoy a romantic image of past actions, we are doing at least with samurais and pirates and many of us probably are doing with many other things from the past. Deutsche Welle is spreaking about it - many legends surround the most famous buccaneers, but who were these men? Simple sailors or brutal thieves? How did they live? This Deutsche Welle film journeys back in time for answers.

A piece of history is getting digged out near Cardiff and BBC is talking about it. A medieval cemetery unearthed near an airport in the UK has continued to raise questions for archaeologists, as the mystery surrounding it has multiplied. The discovery of the site at Cardiff Airport dates to the 6th or 7th century Christian era and was announced last year.

Some people may think that their god or gods, whoever he/she is or whoever they are, are speaking to them or through them. I am not saying that is not true, but those persons should check their head first for the mental health before I believe them. When a person is saying something, whatever it is, he / she should have some evidence for that. If one or more gods are speaking to you or through you then show us that in a way nobody could say it's a lie or just another dream.

Long time ago, sometime during last century, I played piano in childhood. I chand the piano keys witht the computer keyboard but the interest, at least in listening the piano, reading and watching things about it its history and the piano in history, remained. This lecture is such interesting parts of the subjects. It was recorded by Marina Frolova-Walker, Gresham Emerita Professor of Music, on 10th December 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.

Humans are a very social species, and to live together on the same we need rules.  Those rules take many forms, they can be moral rules, divine rules, laws, and whatever other words you find for them. They say things like don't kill, don't steal, don't do bad things (and you can think about many bad things too fill in and entire list), do one thing or another when the circumstances are met. One can avoid them or at least try to avoid them, and if the other people find about that that person is punished in onw way or another. These Gresham college lectures are speaking us about unwritten laws as legacies from Antigone and Lycurgus, about divine law and the human Prophet: Moses in Hebrew and Greek.

Forget the yesterday fight in Oval Office, Donald duck Trump does not count anymore nor as person or president, remember the Greek mythology because we can learn from the Ancient wars to prepare for the next one. They are telling you old stories and you can become a story if you live your life right.

Let's change the subject for a moment, or for even an almost one hour if you watch the lecture, I am pretty annoyed about the stupid things some people like Donald duck Trump and Vladimir Putin are doing all around us. You may be also interested to watch the lecture recorded by Charles O'Brien on 5th December 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London, a lecture which traces the history of this famous series by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, starting from its conception in 1947. Improving your general culture is almost every time good for you.

And I am not complaining about that, the old time Britain had a lot of reasons to be complained about and the American colonist were complaining while gaining their independence. Some of them, people like Donald duck Trump, are still companing about Britain more than two centuries later, but for the moment watch the lecture recorded by the Gresham College on 7th of November 2024 about the history subject.

Frank Herbert's Litany against Fear from Dune can help you if you love science fiction and you still remember it, but you can also listen an opionion from a real life person. Martin Luther King Jr is known as the face of the mid-20th Century fight for US civil rights, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and the only non-president whose birthday is a US holiday.

People are still writing laws as rules of behaviour in our society, and they started long time ago, so you should know more about them and their history (what we know so far), so you watch or listen the lecture done yesterday by Professor Melissa Lane, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric.

The arsenic has been used for centuries to kill other humans, and no substance has been as constant an ally to insidious scheming as arsenic, the so-called “king of poisons.” In its chemically pure form, it isn’t much of a threat because our bodies don’t absorb it well; it’s when arsenic combines with other elements that things get dangerous.

We just finished with a round of Christian celebrations, and it's time to watch a lecture by Professor Ronald Hutton, Gresham Professor of Divinity, that was recorded yesterday. This lecture looks at how and why a particular form of the non-Christian divine feminine took over the Western European imagination from the beginning of the nineteenth century – a great goddess representing the natural world, or the moon and stars, or both.

These last days of the year 2024 is a little easier, with not such many things to do, so I have to a little more time to watch lectures like this one that was recorderd by Debórah Dwork on 20th November 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London. Debórah Dwork is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center – City University of New York and this Lecture unveils the hidden history of Americans who risked their lives to save others during WWII.

Life need communication because the living beings need to change information with each other, they need to talk and to reproduce, we need to hunt or to grow stuff, and so on. We, as part of life, communicate when we have information to share. The development of signals from signs visible over short distances to wireless transfer of billions of data-heavy messages worldwide over the evolution of humans and our technology is full of surprising characters, none more so than the Hollywood starlet who made Wi-Fi and GPS possible and received public recognition only in the final few years of her life.

My first instinct is to answer with a big YES, we are, but tne full answer is longer and the video is an excerpt taken from a lecture by Professor Ronald Hutton called 'Dragons: A History' - you should watch them both before continue searching your dragon.

A catastrophe that able to end the ancient civilisation could be many things, from a flood to solar eruptions or a volcano, and being coralted with thei things discovered across the area or the globe can help better identify it. So, what can ancient Irish trees and sulphuric acid in Greenland tell us about the catastrophic volcanic eruption at Thera (the modern-day Santorini) 3.500 years ago?

A little piece of Romanian history: the death of the communist Romanian President, reported by Jill Dando and John Simpson. Some of us remember that period and that days, and the country changed a lot after that. The lack of education is still present and people are still electing the communist descendants in the Romanian Parlament and other public jobs like mayors and so on.