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 dudleyramiles@googlemail.com or mandycaller@googlemail.com for Zoom details.

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

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

 

 

Hampstead & North West London Branch Programme 2026 -27

 

 

Thursday 17^th September 2026

D Day

Paula Kitching

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

She currently works for the Historical Association and lectures in adult education. Previous freelance work includes advising a government department, being the education consultant to the Royal British Legion and advising 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 she has been a guide for battlefield tours and has taken groups right across Europe to many locations including Normandy, Ypres, Berlin, Krakow and the Western Front.  

This talk is available in person and on Zoom.

 

Thursday 15^th October 2026

The Great Colonial War. Britain and South Africa 1899-1902

Professor Jeremy Krikler

Professor Krikler took his Honours degree at the University of Cape Town and his doctorate at Oxford. Research into the South African rural world led to Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below, a book on agrarian struggle and transformation in that country. Publications after that focused on racial fears and violence, and the history of the white working class in South Africa. These studies culminated in the publication of White Rising (published in paperback as The Rand Revolt).. Professor Krikler then turned to work on the British slave trade with a special focus on the notorious slave ship Zong. The research and articles on this fed into a wholly new dimension to his work: the translation of historical research into dramatic and creative form. This led to the  production and publication of his play, 'A Peril of the Sea'.  His present project is a book, commissioned by Penguin/Random House, reinterpreting  that key colonial conflict, the South African (or 'Boer') War of 1899-1902.

This talk is available in person and on Zoom.

 

Thursday 19^th November 2026

The Identities of Benjamin Disraeli, Victorian Statesman

Professor Lawrence Goldman

Benjamin Disraeli was a Conservative prime minister twice, for seven years in total, in the 1860s and 1870s. Yet he began as an outsider. He didn't attend a famous public school, he never went to university, his family owned no great estate, and he was Jewish by birth though Christian by conversion. In this lecture we shall examine the role of his complex religious background on Disraeli himself and on his remarkable career. 

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).

This talk is available in person and on Zoom.

 

Thursday 21^st January 2027

Spies and the Royal Family

Professor Richard Aldrich

The British Royal Family and the intelligence community are two of the most mysterious and mythologized actors of the British State. This talk offers a new history of how the two have been inextricably linked from the reign of Queen Victoria to the present. It seeks to change our understanding of the role of the monarch in politics, intelligence, and international relations. Successive queens and kings have all played an active role in steering British intelligence, sometimes against the wishes of prime ministers.  Attempted assassinations and kidnappings, the abdication crisis, world wars and the Cold War, and the death of Princess Diana are just some of the topics covered.

Richard J. Aldrich is an award-winning spy writer, historian and presenter of TV documentaries. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick, and the author of many books including GCHQ: Centenary Edition (2019) The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers (2016) with Rory Cormac. His writings have appeared in International Affairs, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.

This talk is available in person only.

 

Thursday 18^th February 2027

The East German Revolution of 1989

Dr Gareth Dale

Dr Gareth Dale works in Department of Politics and History, Brunel University

This talk is available in person and on Zoom.

 

Thursday 18^th March 2027

How Gettysburg has shaped American History, and vice versa

Professor Adam Smith

Why and how did Gettysburg come to hold such a distinctive place in American memory? It is a battlefield that has been visited by presidents and foreign leaders, and by more American visitors—often thinking of themselves as conducting a ‘pilgrimage’— than any other historical site, by far. It is also an idea — a place made famous by Abraham Lincoln’s “address” — which has come to stand for the American “project”. In this lecture, Adam Smith discusses Gettysburg and in doing so talks about how America has seen itself over the last century and a half. 

Adam Smith is Edward Orsborn Professor of US Political History at Oxford. He is an expert in the nineteenth century and its legacy. His latest book is “Gettysburg” (Oxford University Press). He is the host of The Last Best Hope? podcast.

This talk is available in person and on Zoom.

 

Thursday 15th April 2027

The Fall of Constantinople (1453)

Professor Jonathan Harris

The Byzantine empire (also known as Byzantium and the Eastern Roman Empire) had once been a Christian superpower, extending from southern Italy to Armenia. By 1450, however, it had declined to a position of terminal weakness. Most of its territories had been parcelled out among its eastern and western enemies and little remained of it apart from its capital city of Constantinople. It was at this point that the young Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, took the decision to launch an attack on the city with a view to incorporating it into his own empire. His viziers advised caution for Constantinople had formidable defences. Its towering Land Walls had stood for a thousand years and had never been breached. Mehmed II went ahead anyway and mounted one of the most famous sieges in history. This lecture follows the events leading to the Ottoman victory on 29 May 1453.

Jonathan Harris is Professor of the History of Byzantium at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include: Byzantium and the Crusades (3rd edition, 2022), (as translator with Georgios Chatzelis), Byzantine Sources for the Crusades, 1095-1204 (2025) and (as editor), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades (2026). He published his first historical novel, Theosis, about Byzantine Emperor Basil II, in 2023.

This talk is available in person and on Zoom

 

We look forward to welcoming you at Fellowship House