Spring 2010 | Public lectures and events | Video

Contributor(s): Professor David Goldblatt | Globalisation has seen sport achieve a hitherto unequalled global cultural significance, but it has also left it in thrall to capitalism. Will economic forces continue to shape sport? David Goldblatt is a writer, broadcaster and teacher. He is author of The Ball is Round: a global history of football.

Contributor(s): Steve Pyke, Dr Alex Voorhoeve | Alex Voorhoeve builds on Plato's arguments for philosophising about ethics in dialogue form. Steve Pyke will describe how he photographs philosophers, including how he approaches his subjects and what his portraits reveal about them.

Contributor(s): Professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff | Let's call a spade a spade. Today's financial system, with its limited liability, insider rating, political kickbacks, director sweetheart deals, non disclosure, and internal corporate raiders, was built for hucksters -- hucksters who systematically manufactured and sold trillions in fraudulent securities, grabbed hoards of loot, and left the public to pick up the pieces.

Contributor(s): Professor Lord Anthony Giddens, Professor David Held, Professor Mary Kaldor, Professor Danny Quah | The world now confronts crises unique in their global character. Distinguished LSE experts argue these crises provide an opportunity to transform the world and to build capacity for responding to extreme global challenges.

Contributor(s): David Willetts MP | David Willetts will analyse the distribution of income and wealth between different generations in Britain. He will investigate why the baby boomer generation have done particularly well for both income and wealth. He will then look at why the younger generation face much less favourable economic circumstances. Drawing on his new book The Pinch he will firmly place the issue of fairness between the generations on the political agenda.

Contributor(s): James Purnell MP | The credit crunch was followed by a consensus on the centre-Left that the world was entering a "progressive moment", and that the financial crisis represented a failure of the ideas of the New Right. Yet, in Europe at least, social democracy has struggled to articulate what the progressive response to the crisis, and has struggled electorally as a consequence. To resolve this paradox, the Left needs to recognise that the financial crisis challenges its received ideology too, and that if it wants to survive electorally, it will need to renew itself intellectually. The lecture will argue that such a renewal can come from re-examining Labour's traditions, and from having the courage to be bolder about goals and methods.

Contributor(s): AS Byatt, Ben Okri, Helen Simpson, Colin Thubron | Four very different writers consider four very different aspects of love: love as enchantment, and love as madness; passion in youth, and compassion in age. They read their favourite passages on love both from their own work, and from the work of others, and, on Valentine's eve, discuss Shakespeare's notion that 'The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact'.

Contributor(s): Zeina Frangie-Eyres, Dr Simon Glendinning, Professor Marina Warner, Dr Mark Wright | An event that combines a story-telling of the 1000-year-old eco-fable The Animals' Lawsuit against Humanity with a panel discussion on the story's historical and literary origins; current biodiversity in the midst of species extinction; the philosophical relationship between humans; and animals and the need for a myth for our times.

Contributor(s): Matt Charman, John Caird | Theatre has a rich tradition of raising political issues, as evidenced in LSE founder George Bernard Shaw's work. A discussion between a playwright and director on whether contemporary drama still aims to challenge audiences.

Contributor(s): Lionel Shriver | Lionel Shriver will be discussing and reading from her new novel So Much for That on the cusp of release in March. Described in HarperCollins's spring catalogue as "about illness, death, and money", Shriver's latest explores four different scenarios with a medical aspect, in a kind of literary "ER". The book examines the catastrophic personal fall-out of America's dysfunctional health-care system, while also raising tough questions that all Western countries are having to wrestle with--the most signal among them: how much money is one life worth?