The explosion that rocked Kabul on 1st June, inside the secure diplomatic area of the city, was the deadliest since the American-led invasion in 2001. Its purpose: to sow a sense of living on the brink of disaster. The security situation following the departure of most western troops in 2014 has deteriorated: a resurgent Taliban currently controls swathes of the country and the threat from Daesh (Islamic State) fighters is constant. 13,000 NATO troops – including 8,000 U.S. soldiers – remain. The Western presence has proved incapable of supporting peace, yet withdrawing more troops may be disastrous in both strategic and humanitarian terms. Angela Merkel stresses that terrorism in one place targets us all. ‘We can’t afford to see Afghanistan lost’ is a mantra but also a conundrum. President Ashraf Ghani worries that there are too many international initiatives, not too few – that they lack clarity, that the integrity of an Afghan-led consolidated process has to be respected. Can one fight and reform at the same time? Can Afghanistan’s mineral wealth provide the basis for sovereignty and a functioning state? Days later the streets and restaurants of Kabul are again full with families, demonstrating the resilience that we take for granted. But for how long? Join our A-team on Afghanistan, on October 2nd, for individual presentations followed by a general discussion: Hamid Karzai served as President of Afghanistan for almost ten years, from 2004 to 2014. Zalmay Khalilzad is the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations. Christina Lamb is Britain’s most distinguished foreign reporter, currently Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Sunday Times. Yalda Hakim, whose family fled Afghanistan when she was an infant, is an Australian broadcast journalist with BBC World News. Read more.

We are often told that psychoanalysis is dead. Outdated scientifically, in that the Freudian model of the mind has been superseded by neurobiology; outdated clinically, where the talking cure has lost ground to drug treatment or behavioural therapy; outdated socially, where the idea that we are repressed by the norms of others is no longer stocked in today’s supermarket of free choices. But perhaps the moment of psychoanalysis has only just arrived. At a time when we are bombarded on all sides by the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’, it is a unique space in which we are released from such pressures. The psychoanalytic encounter allows one person to feel alive in the mind of another, whatever the consequences. Neither a cure nor a cure-all, it changes those who experience it, sometimes by helping them to understand why they cannot change. Slavoj Žižek and Stephen Grosz – a dazzling theorist and a renowned practitioner – have urgent stories to tell us about ourselves and the present state of our wishes: the wish for a trouble-free existence, and for therapies which can instantly return us to everyday reality, or unreality; the wish for science to explain our minds, or explain them away… Discovering the unconscious at work in psychic life, Freud showed that the ego is not master in its own house, that we do not know our own minds. This is a truth with no sell-by date, and Freud’s insights are alive today more than ever. Read more.

Join one of our greatest historians to mark the publication of the second volume of his history of the Jewish people, and hear scenes from its epic narrative. Schama’s story ranges across continents and centuries, as persecution created a Jewish identity more circumscribed – a people set apart, defined by blood as well as by obedience to the book – and a widening canvas, from the expulsions of 1492 to the epochal search for a home, navigating massacres and wanderings, assimilation and intolerance. It is above all a cultural tapestry, alive with detail. We will hear of rabbis and philosophers, but also of a poetess in the ghetto of Venice; a boxer in Georgian England; a general in Ming China; an opera composer in nineteenth-century Germany. The scene will shift from Kerala to Mantua, the hills of Galilee, the rivers of Colombia, the kitchens of Istanbul, the taverns of Ukraine and the mining camps of California. It will sail in caravels, ride the stage coaches and the railways; trudge the dawn streets of London, hobble along with the remnant of Napoleon’s ruined army. In Simon Schama’s passionate telling, a story emerges as encompassing as humanity itself. Read more.

Sir Chris Bonington is our premier mountain man. The first Briton to climb the North Wall of the Eiger in 1962, he led the ascent of the South Face of Annapurna in 1970 – for its time the most difficult technical climb to the summit of a major peak – and in 1975 faced the ultimate challenge, leading the first ascent of Everest by the south-west ridge. He became a household name. When Bonington started climbing none of the 14 peaks that rise into the ‘death zone’ above 8000 metres had been conquered. In a career spanning six decades he has learnt what it takes to conquer fear, develop the skills to attempt the world’s most difficult peaks and adapt to its most uninhabitable places. He has survived eight near-death experiences, has mourned and in some cases witnessed the deaths of other luminaries of the mountain fraternity. He has climbed with the mercurial Dougal Haston, the philosophical Stephen Venables, the enigmatic Doug Scott and the hard man Don Whillans, in the course of nineteen Himalayan expeditions and many first ascents from Chile to China. The 1975 Everest expedition was the apotheosis of the military-style assault involving national teams, dozens of porters, tons of supplies and thousands of feet of fixed ropes. Bonington will describe these experiences, the change to ‘Alpine style’ lightweight expeditions with small teams of climbers making fast ascents, and the different challenges faced by modern climbers who live in a world where almost every peak has been conquered. Join us to mark the publication of Ascent: A Life Spent Climbing on the Edge, the complex life story of Britain’s greatest climber. Read more.