All enquiries to Dr Philip Woods philipgwoods@outlook.com tel. 07922046578

All talks (with the exception of November meeting) start at 7.30pm on the second Tuesday of the month, and take place at Ealing Green Church, The Green, Ealing, W5 5QT. For details of transport and parking please see our website.

Talks are live events but, with the speaker’s permission, we aim to make a recording available afterwards to those registering on Eventbrite (the booking link will be available on our website in advance of each talk)

Local membership £20 per year. Talks free to national HA members and students, visitors £5.

Branch website Ealing Historical Association | EalingHistory.org.uk  

 

Ealing Branch Programme 2026-27

 

Tuesday 8 September 2026

Ross King, author, ‘The Bookseller of Florence: Illuminating the Renaissance’

Ross King, an award-winning author of books on Italian and French art and history, tells the story of a remarkable bookseller: Vespasiano da Bisticci, known as ‘the king of the world’s booksellers’. Besides repositories of wisdom by the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, his books were works of art in their own right, copied by talented scribes and illuminated by the finest miniaturists. His clients included popes, kings and princes from all across Europe who wished to burnish their reputations by founding magnificent libraries.

 

Tuesday 13 October 2026

Dr Priya Atwal, Community History Fellow, University of Oxford, ‘The power behind the throne: the women who built Maharajah Ranjit Singh's kingdom'

Dr Priya Atwal shines fresh light on the long-lost kingdom of the Punjab, looking beyond its founding father, Ranjit Singh,  to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire’s spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British.

 

Tuesday 3 November 2026

Dr Lisa Pine, Institute of Historical Research, ‘Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft (’National Community’): Inclusion and Exclusion’, speaking to the sixth-form evening at Twyford CofE High school, W3 9PP, 6.30 pm. N.B. This talk is our annual lecture which is aimed particularly at local sixth-form History students. Please note the different time and venue for this meeting to which all are welcome.

Once Hitler came to power in January 1933, the Nazi Party began a concerted effort to homogenise German society and to bring the population round to an acceptance of National Socialism. The Nazi regime aimed to break down traditional and sectional loyalties (for example, to class, region or confession) and to replace them with a new national consciousness. The most important aspect of Nazi social policy was the attempt to create the Volksgemeinschaft (‘national community’). This talk examines how the Nazi regime did this through propaganda, the creation of the leadership cult, policies aimed at specific groups, especially workers, youth and women. It then discusses excluded groups, especially Jews and ‘Gypsies’ and other sections of society the Nazis considered to be outside the ’national community’.

 

Tuesday 9 December 2026

Annual General Meeting. Christmas social and event

 

Tuesday 12 January 2027

Philip Mansel, author, ‘Louis XIV, Britain and the Battle for Europe, from Ireland to the Ukraine’

Philip Mansel, author of  King of the World: the life of Louis XIV, (2019) recounts Britain's critical role in the battle to prevent  Louis XIV from  dominating Europe. The relations between Louis XIV, William III and Marlborough show Britain’s role at the heart of the diplomatic, dynastic and cultural systems then dominating Europe.  The styles of Versailles conquered Britain as well as the rest of Europe. Europe is behind us as well as in front of us. 

 

Tuesday 9 February 2027

Professor Emma Griffin, Queen Mary University of London, ‘The British Industrial Revolution and the Making of the Modern World’ 

This talk will look at historians' long fascination with the emergence of modernity. It will ask why the West, Britain in particular, underwent a transition to modern economic growth around the end of the eighteenth century.  Using comparative evidence from Britain, France and the US, and with a particular focus on workers, this talk will shed new light on the role of culture in the rise of the modern industrialised world.

 

Tuesday 9 March 2027

Dr Fiona Haarer, King’s College London, ‘Empress Theodora: from courtesan to queen’ 

This lecture will trace the extraordinary life of Theodora, the wife of the Emperor Justinian. Her early life in the theatre was documented in a sensational manner by Procopius in his Secret History. However, as empress she held great influence over Justinian; she played an important role in shaping Church policy and social reforms; and she was commemorated in inscriptions, images and literary works.

 

Tuesday 13 April 2027

Alwyn Turner, Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Literary History-University of Chichester, (to be confirmed) ‘The Lambeth Walk: Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1920s and 30s.’

At a time when most of Europe was acquiring authoritarian governments, Britain did not. It didn't even have a substantial party of the far left (as in France) or the far right (as in Belgium). There are multiple reasons for the unusual lack of extremism, many of them political, but this talk will focus on cultural factors, including the roles of the BBC, the British Legion and the British Board of Film Censors.

 

Tuesday 11 May 2027

Professor Lucy Noakes (University of Essex), ‘Mass Observation, memory and the ends of the Second World War in Britain’ [to be confirmed)

The Second World War can sometimes feel omnipresent in 21st century Britain. Drawn on by leaders and politicians during the Covid-19 pandemic, and by campaigners to leave the EU, it is also present in films, television, novels, fridge magnets and tea towels.  This talk explores the ways that the memory of the conflict have been used, and the reasons for its continuing resonance, before looking back to the  words of Mass Observers at the war's end, to see how it was being remembered in its immediate aftermath.

 

Tuesday 8 June 2027

Professor James Daybell (University of Plymouth) President of the HA, ‘Gender and the Glove in Early Modern England’

We are delighted that Professor Daybell, the new President of the Historical Association, is coming to speak to us. His talk explores the remarkable power of a seemingly ordinary object in early modern England: the glove. Drawing on a wide range of historical, literary, and material sources, it shows how gloves shaped—and were shaped by—gendered relationships of power in everyday life, politics, and culture. Far from simple accessories, gloves were deeply meaningful objects whose materials, craftsmanship, use, exchange, and later preservation all reveal the complex ways gender and authority operated in the past.