A playboy prince famed for his soirees and liaisons with beautiful women will come under the spotlight at Newcastle University.

The prince, who became King Edward VII, had a notorious private life but was also an instinctive diplomat. Professor Jane Ridley, from the University of Buckingham, will talk about the prince as part of the new series of Insights public lectures on, Tuesday, 30 October.

The new academic year will also see the return of the popular Live in the King’s Hall lunchtime music concerts, which take place every Thursday at 1.10pm.

Both new programmes get underway on Thursday, 4 October. Insights will begin when Professor Rebecca Stott, Professor of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, goes in search of Darwin’s predecessors, including Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci.

The first concert at the Kings Hall will be by NefEsh, who will present a musical journey starting in the land of Jewish music and evolving into styles including Klezmer and Israeli.

Other highlights of the new Insights season includes the Wynne-Jones Memorial Lecture, which this year will be about Molecules that changed the world. KC Nicolaou, Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, will discuss the impact chemistry has had on society, on Tuesday 16 October.

On Thursday, 25 October, Michael Fielding and Peter Moss from the University of London’s Institute of Education will deliver the first Social Renewal lecture. They will contest current educational reforms and propose education from birth to 18 in which democracy is a fundamental value.

Professor Rana Mitter, from the University of Oxford, will give the lecture, Welfare and Warfare: how China’s past is shaping its present – and future, on Thursday, 1 November.

Newcastle University’s very own Professor Sugata Mitra, whose research shows children can learn anything by themselves, will discuss the future of learning on Thursday, 15 November. One of his experiments inspired the Oscar winning film Slumdog Millionaire and he came up with the ‘Granny Cloud’ project, where older men and woman in  the UK Skype youngsters in India to help them learn.

A second social renewal lecture will take place on Tuesday 27 November, when Hilary Graham, Professor and Head of Health Sciences at the University of York, will ask: "Public health: time for social renewal?" Professor Graham will argue that the system needs an urgent overhaul to honour the healthcare claims of future generations.

See the full programme of public lectures on the website. The new season of talks will run until Thursday, 6 December.

All talks take place at 5.30pm, in the Curtis Auditorium, in the Herschel Building. Admission is free and seats are allocated on a first-come first served basis. Audio recordings of the some of the lectures are downloadable from our Public Lectures website and are also available on Newcastle University’s iTunes U site.

For more information about Live at the Kings Hall, click here.

Photo Caption: Equestrian statue of Edward VII

published on: 25 September 2012