Doors open at 7.15pm. Tea, coffee and bar are available before the lectures which begin at 8.00pm. We ask you to be seated by 7.55pm. They finish at approximately 9.15-9-30pm Guests are welcome at a cost of £6 and £2 for students.

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Queen Victoria and Guiseppe Verdi died within a week of each other. Victoria loved opera whilst Verdi cared deeply for the politics of Italian unification.

Both achieved early celebrity, later retiring from public gaze before becoming national treasures once again in old age.2013 is also the bicentenary of Verdi's birth.

Both Victoria and Verdi became encrusted in layers of mythology, during their lifetimes and thereafter, as British and Italians alike refashioned their past in the service of an ever-shifting present. Drawing on a rich multiplicity of images, this Lecture examines the changing iconography of the two ‘V’s’ against the background of the wider cultural history of their respective nations.

Lecturer profile:
Daniel Snowman is a social and cultural historian. He was born in London, educated at Cambridge and Cornell, and at 24 was a Lecturer at the University of Sussex. For many years, he worked at the BBC where he was responsible for a wide variety of radio series on cultural and historical topics, and since 2004 has held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London).

A long-time member of the London Philharmonic Choir, he has always had a strong and informed interest in music and musicians, his books on the Amadeus Quartet and Plácido Domingo combining close-up portraiture of the artists concerned with the broader brush of the social historian.

(picture: Tully Potter)