We shall take a tour of the Comunidad Valenciana, one of the 17 Autonomous Communities into which Spain is divided; it is made up of three provinces: Valencia, Alicante and Castellón. We’ll visit the three principal cities (the provincial capitals) and we’ll explore a range of other towns and villages across the region, from Orihuela […]

Our planet has been completely ice free for most of its 4.5-billion-year history. So, the fact that we have ice caps in Greenland and in Antarctica today is unusual. In the first part of this talk we will see how it was possible for events to change so that that ice covered most of the […]

Travel back in time to the years of the Second World War – as you’ve almost certainly never known them before. Author David Ebsworth tells the “stranger than fiction” stories behind his 2021 novel, A Betrayal of Heroes. Tales of Casablanca and Brazzaville, of the Spaniards who fought for Free France, of the 1940s celebrities and […]

Most historians agree that Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot of France was the constructor of the first true automobile. Cugnot’s vehicle was a huge, heavy, steam-powered tricycle, and his model of 1769 was said to have run for 20 minutes at 2.25 miles (3.6 km) per hour while carrying four people. He could have had little idea how the Automobile was […]

Friederike Victoria “Joy” Adamson was a passionate, temperamental and controversial woman. Although she married three times and was an infamous seducer, she never experienced happiness with any of her husbands or lovers. She won international renown with her African wildlife books, especially the trilogy describing how, together with her last husband, George Adamson, she raised […]