Two of our most distinguished historians explore one of the darkest episodes of the twentieth century. In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of collectivization, forcing millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was the most devastating famine in European history, in which 5 million people died. More than 3 million of these were Ukrainians, who perished not because they were accidental victims but because the state set out to kill them – seizing all supplies, sealing the borders, exploiting a catastrophe to subdue a rebellious province. Driven mad by hunger, people ate anything – grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses – and killed one another for food. In her forthcoming Red Famine, Anne Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: that Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry and Ukrainian identity, that the famine of 1931-33 was engineered, that the evidence was thereafter falsified and suppressed. In a remarkable series of books, written from the perspective of witnesses and survivors caught in the grip of vast and terrifying forces, Anne Applebaum and Antony Beevor have redescribed modern barbarism in Europe, combining fearless scholarship and archivism with narrative verve and human sympathy. Join us on 13th September for their discussion of Stalin’s crimes, the recovery of historical memory, and how the present is shaped inescapably by the past… Read more.

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.