2025 Special Events

Gavin Francis
The Bridge Between Worlds

The Maltings, Henry Travers Studio
Thursday 30 January at 7.30 pm

In a world increasingly preoccupied by borders, bridges celebrate the possibility of connection, allowing the flow of goods, people and ideas.

Bridges are among our grandest physical structures with the power of transforming lives and economies, but we also stand (or fall) upon the simple arch of bones in our feet. Text is a bridge between writer and reader, and conversation builds bridges of understanding between minds.

Dr Gavin Francis has spent his life fascinated by the power of bridges to improve human connection. In this illustrated talk he will take the audience on a journey through more than twenty countries, across four decades of travel, and over thirty bridges – including the Union Chain and Royal Border Bridges over the Tweed. His book The Bridge Between Worlds explores bridges both actual and metaphorical.

From Rome’s Ponte Sant’Angelo to Brooklyn, Victoria Falls to London, Singapore to Siberia, this thought-provoking book reflects on connections between nations and between individuals. Francis demonstrates what the building of bridges has meant to our civilisation, how crossings can enrich our lives, and the price we pay when we tear them down.

 

Sir Hew Strachan
The War to End All Wars: Why the Rules of War have Failed to Prevent War since 1945

The Maltings, Main House Theatre
Thursday 8 May at 7.30 pm

The 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War is a very significant moment for reflecting on the extent to which the epithet The War to end all Wars can legitimately be attached to the year 1945, as the world began again to try to rebuild global peace out of devastating conflict.

No one is better placed than Hew Strachan, one of our most distinguished military historians, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, Professor of International Relations at St Andrew’s and, until 2024, Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire, to help us to understand the challenges we face to the post-war consensus around creating a rules-based international order.