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When you think of England, what do you think of first? Are you familiar with the terrain you're treading with the English language, or have you only seen the tourist attractions along well-trodden paths?
Learn more about England's history, human and cultural makeup and you will realize how intertwined the English language and English culture are. Over the course of ten afternoons, you will have the opportunity to gain new perspectives on England through short lectures and open dialogue with your instructor.
The Culture Talks take place at regular intervals at the Cambridge Institut in Munich and are led by Philip Moore, the founder of the Cambridge Institut. The next thematic series is in preparation and will be published soon. Contact us for more information.
Past thematic series have been devoted to diverse aspects of English culture, a selection of which you find below.
From October 2026 to June 2027, our course leader will be running a series of six 90-minute cultural talks. Each talk looks at a figure from British culture, from film and theatre to literature and exploration, and at their life and work.
The series will open with a talk on the actress Celia Johnson on Tuesday, 13 October, at 3.15 pm. The rest of the talks are spread across the year, and you will find an overview below. If you do not have time on Tuesdays, you are welcome to come to the corresponding Friday session.
The cultural talks invite you on a journey through more than two decades of our Cambridge literature course. In ten 90-minute talks, our course leader revisits some of the finest themes from 1996 to 2018 and introduces the authors behind the works. The journey begins with the Oxford Writers, among them Lewis Carroll, Evelyn Waugh and Iris Murdoch. It continues through the Booker Prize winners and the great names of British crime fiction to the dramatists of the 20th century. Along the way, you will meet the house as a literary setting in Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier, and the English abroad in E.M. Forster and Laurie Lee. The series closes with explorers and travel writers, from Gertrude Bell to Patrick Leigh Fermor.
The cultural talks, led by Philip Moore, founder of the Cambridge Institut, delve into the lives of the authors behind our selected books for the literature course 2023/2024. The novels chosen for this course, explore the two decades after the First World War – the 1920s and 1930s, an era characterised by domesticity, where one's home was one's castle, and one's small garden was superior to any foreign field. All of the novels are published by Persephone Books - unique in that it reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction, mostly by women writers and mostly dating from the mid-twentieth century.
For a few years in the 1960s London was the world capital of cool.
This cultural talk describes London's change from a gloomy, grey post-war capital into a shining centre of style. A transformation that was mainly due to two factors: youth and money. As Michael Caine described it: 'It was rather like being in a dancing school full of Fred Astaires'.
We shall be talking about the lives and times of women who were, in the words of Virginia Woolf's by nature explorers, revolutionists, reformers. But our surroundings were at least fifty years behind the times. They were women living restricted lives in a man's world. Women who had the audacity to defy propriety. And by doing so, they were, as often as not, deemed 'mad'.
If you love London, go, on your next visit, to a district in the East End, near Brick Lane and Liverpool Street, called Spitalfields. Its streets have witnessed waves of immigration, great prosperity and dreadful poverty. The shadow of Jack the Ripper crossed its courts and alleys. Here, in one neighbourhood, are two thousand years of English history. But go there soon - the commercial towers are spreading from the City of London, encroaching upon the historic core of Spitalfields.