The George Hotel

Former Chief Whip and MP Simon Hart had a front-row seat to the most turbulent times in Britain’s recent political history.

Andrew Ziminski has spent decades as a stonemason and church conservator, acting as an informal guide to curious visitors.

Sir John Vanbrugh was one of Britain’s greatest architects and the designer of some of the most important and best beloved English country houses.

The Great War left Britain shattered and the years that followed were wracked by crises. In these confused times, people looked for meaning in the oddest places.

The battle of ideas, events and personalities that first took the country into the Common Market in 1973... only to take it out of the EU in an explosive referendum a little over 40 years later.

From the Wars of the Roses to the dawn of the Tudor age, this is a story of mothers and sons; of maternal ferocity and female ambition - of all they can build and all they can destroy.

The Savage Remains: Women, Treason, Fire is a history of women burnt at the stake for treason in Britain between the 15th and 18th centuries. Mary Wellesley’s Festival talk will focus on a midwife and healer named Agnes Sampson, burnt at the stake during the North Berwick Witch Trials - the first of the major witchcraft trials to grip Scotland in this period, where a young James VI/I personally interrogated suspected witches, convinced that witchcraft was being used to harm him and his bride.

James Stuart, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland did not always love wisely, but he never failed to do so boldly. He fell in love three times – once with George Villiers, ‘the handsomest man in the whole world’ – and he was infatuated three more times. We have so much on the six wives of Henry VIII, why not the six loves of James I?  

PLEASE NOTE THAT TIME/VENUE FOR THIS EVENT DIFFERS FROM OUR PRINTED MATERIAL

Featuring more than a hundred diarists, some famous, others less familiar, Secret Voices is a rich treasury of women’s experience through the years and across the world, from Lady Anne Clifford dealing with an unreasonable 17th century husband, to a teenage Ma Yan yearning for education in the 21st.

Exploring death, religion and science, the acclaimed author of Midnight In Cairo presents a startling history of the occult between the wars, when Spiritualism was an international obsession. This was a golden age of the uncanny, when clairvoyants, fakirs and mind-readers assured the masses that, just like the newly discovered invisible forces of electricity, radiation and magnetism, unseen spiritual powers commanded a realm of hidden human potential.

Despite Catherine of Braganza's crucial place in British history, and that of its Empire, she has since been overshadowed by stories of Charles II's many mistresses and forgotten as his ‘boring, powerless wife’. This could not be further from the truth. 

For those living near the coast, the sea is a dominant presence: no more so than in Wales where the Wales Coast Path runs for 870 miles. In his new book, Seascape, Matthew Yeomans explores this iconic walking trail and how our deep relationship with Y Môr (the sea) is being redefined by climate change.