Contributor(s): Michael Palin | The story of the making of Michael Palin’s BBC1 Brazil series, made up of Michael’s own reminiscences, with a slide show of Basil Pao’s accompanying photos. Michael Palin is a comedian, actor, writer and television presenter, one of the creators of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A self-confessed dromomaniac (travel addict), he has travelled the globe making award-winning television series, books and audios including Around the World in 80 Days and Brazil. Between 2009 and 2012 Michael was President of the Royal Geographical Society.

Contributor(s): Dr Katie Steele | Who should accept responsibility for, and bear the costs of, climate change? Can climate change be sectioned off as an isolated issue of justice, or is it inextricably entangled with broader concerns of global justice? Katie Steele is senior lecturer in philosophy at LSE.

Contributor(s): Professor Craig Calhoun | Humanitarian emergencies are not simply brute facts, appealing directly to our emotions or our moral sensibilities. They are one of the important ways in which perceptions of human life, sympathy for suffering, and responses to social upheaval have come to be organized in recent decades. Like nations and business corporations, they are creatures of social imaginaries, but no less materially influential for that. They are shaped by a history of changing ideas about the human; moral responsibility for strangers; structures of chance and causality; and the imperative and capacity for effective action, even at a distance. They reflect the context of the modern era generally and more specific features of the era since the 1970s. And they are embedded in a complex institutionalization of responses. First, grasping human suffering as humanitarian emergencies is made possible by a long history of changes in how we – Westerners especially – construct the categories of the human, the emergency, and moral obligation. Second, though they are influenced by both state politics and economic activity, humanitarian emergencies appear as anomalies outside the putatively normal stable functioning of political and economic systems. Third, emergencies and humanitarian sympathies are produced importantly through large-scale media systems, including especially visual media. Fourth, they have commanded attention especially since the 1970s as responses to an era of market-driven globalization and declining faith in political action. Fifth, they have occasioned a new institutional field of response in which NGOs and voluntary action are pivotal (even though states remain crucial funders), and they are shaped by the way such response organizes both what we see and what happens materially on the ground. Sixth, they reflect a view from relatively ‘core’ locations in the modern world-system on seeming chaos in its periphery, a view often linked at once to a managerial orientation, an idea of charity, and the reassurance of grasping suffering and chaos precisely as distant. The specific historical circumstances that gave rise to humanitarian response are changing, and with them this specific project of cosmopolitan care for distant strangers may be undergoing a deep transformation. Professor Calhoun is a world-renowned social scientist whose work connects sociology to culture, communication, politics, philosophy and economics. He took up his post as LSE Director on 1 September 2012, having left the United States where he was University Professor at New York University and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge and President of the Social Science Research Council. Professor Calhoun is an American citizen but has deep connections with the United Kingdom. He took a D Phil in History and Sociology at Oxford University and a Master's in Social Anthropology at Manchester. He co-founded, with Richard Sennett, Professor of Sociology at LSE, the NYLON programme which brings together graduate students from New York and London for co-operative research programmes. He is the author of several books including Nations Matter, Critical Social Theory, Neither Gods Nor Emperors and most recently The Roots of Radicalism (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Contributor(s): James Astill | James Astill speaks about his new book and his encounters with cricketers, fans, businessmen, bookies, Bollywood stars and slum kids. James Astill is the political editor of The Economist.

Contributor(s): Professor Timothy Snyder | Marx and Engels tended to be romantics about East European liberation from imperial rule in the nineteenth century, but the period of nominally Marxist rule in the twentieth is one of oppression. The theorists imagined a revolution that would spread from Germany to the East, yet history brought a revolution that arose in Russia and then spread to the West. What can we say, today, about the theory and the practice? Was Marxism in any sense native to Eastern Europe? Timothy Snyder will discuss. Professor Timothy Snyder is Philippe Roman Chair in History and International Affairs at LSE IDEAS for 2013-2014.

Contributor(s): David Mahoney | David Mahoney, Director of Policy Development at Ofcom discusses the role of the regulator and the principles behind its decisions.

Contributor(s): Professor Paul Collier | Mass international migration is a response to extreme global inequality, and immigration has a profound impact on the way we live. Yet our views - and those of our politicians - remain caught between two extremes: popular hostility to migrants and ‘open doors’ insistence by liberal and business elites. Collier takes a balanced look at the possibilities and challenges of migration for societies of origin and host countries, to enable us all, including policy-makers, understand how much migration is best. Paul Collier is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University and a former director of Development Research at the World Bank. He is the author of, among others, the award-winning The Bottom Billion and The Plundered Planet. This event marks the launch of his new book, Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World.

Contributor(s): Professor Richard Dyer | Serial killing is an extremely rare crime which nonetheless may be considered a cultural dominant of our times. Although there are female and non-white serial killers, in cultural representation they are (with one exception which shall be discussed in the talk) highly unusual in the cinemas of Europe. The idea of serial killing sits readily with ideas of masculinity and whiteness. What does this suggest about all three? Richard Dyer is Professor of Film Studies at King's College London. He was an active and influential figure in the English Gay Liberation Front and has authored numerous books on entertainment and representation and the relations between them as well as music and film (including melodrama), Italian cinema (especially in its popular forms) and gay/lesbian/queer cultures. He is a major contributor on the world-stage to contemporary gender, media, culture and film theory.

Contributor(s): Fabrizio Saccomanni | Fabrizio Saccomanni is Italian minister of economy and finance, a position he has held since April 2013. Prior to this he served as a member of the directorate (Governing Board) and director general of the Bank of Italy (from 2 October 2006 to 27 April 2013). He served as vice president for risk management at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from February 2003 to September 2006. He has a degree in economics from the Bocconi University in Milan and studying postgraduate courses in monetary and international economics at Princeton University (USA).

Contributor(s): Matthew d'Ancona | The revelatory inside story of Britain's coalition government, that cuts right to the heart of the Lib Dem/Tory struggle, from a renowned political journalist. With exclusive, unprecedented access to all the major senior figures, including David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson and Nick Clegg, D’Ancona tells the truth behind key relationships, the U-turns, the shifts in policies, the dramatic fights and arguments and the warring within the party. Matthew d'Ancona is the award-winning political columnist for The Sunday Telegraph, a position he has held since 1996. He was deputy editor of that paper before becoming editor of The Spectator in 2006. During his editorship, the magazine enjoyed record circulation and he was named Editor of the Year (Current Affairs) in the 2007 BSME awards. This event marks the launch of his new book, In It Together: the inside story of the coalition government.