23rd–29th June 2025 - Broad Chalke, Salisbury
The lives of most women in the age of Jane Austen were not coloured by balls and chaste courtships. In a brutally unjust age, women of all classes had to make their way by any means available to them. This talk, by the author of The Scandalous Lady W and ITV’s Harlots, examines the lives of Georgian prostitutes and courtesans, from the poorest to the most celebrated.
Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival for Schools 2018 with Professor Daniel Power from University of Swansea.
Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival 2018 – here is Simon Schama in conversation with Tom Clark.
In our own time of anxious arrivals and enforced departures, the Jews’ search for a home is more startlingly resonant than ever. Simon Schama presents a magnificent cultural history that spans centuries and continents, from the Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1492 to the brink of the twentieth century, in an epic tale that feels not only like the story of the Jews, but of all humanity.
Audio from a talk at Chalke Valley History Festival 2018.
Charles Saumarez Smith, Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, speaks about the creation of the Royal Academy in 1768. He reveals the strong personalities involved, the rivalries and intrigues that divided them, the competing ideas about the teaching and exhibition of art, and the problems of governance that forged the Royal Academy, and continue to reverberate within it today, some 250 years later.
Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival 2018.
Recent political and economic upheavals have exposed deep divisions in Western society. In conversation with Roland Rudd, Robert Peston, ITV’s political editor, draws on his years of experience as a political, economics and business journalist to provide his thought-provoking analysis of the long-term forces driving our politics and his unrivalled insight into what the establishment got so badly wrong.
Audio from Chalke Valley History Festival 2018.
Michael Dobbs, Conservative Peer and author, explores Churchill’s passion, fragility and power, and he is no ordinary investigator of power. He was with Margaret Thatcher when she took her first steps into Downing Street, and with John Major when he was kicked out. But he remains most famous for creating the ultimate in Machiavellian politicians, Francis Urquhart, star of the global phenomenon that is House of Cards.
He is in conversation with Sir Michael Pakenham.
Sponsored by The Churchill Society
Audio from a talk at Chalke Valley History Festival 2018 with Andrew Adonis, Tom Clark, Michael Gove, Afua Hirsch and Robert Tombs.
With only four months to go until the United Kingdom officially leaves the European Union, Brexit remains top of the agenda and deeply divisive. In our annual Prospect debate, this distinguished panel hotly debated historical precedents and whether or not Britain is prepared for the severance of ties with the continent.
Recorded at Chalke Valley History Festival, 30 June 2017.
Michael Buerk is one of our best-known foreign correspondents and broadcasters but in this special talk to tie in with his support for the RNLI he tells the extraordinary story of the part played by RNLI lifeboats during the epic evacuation in May 1940. 78 years ago the British Navy attempted an audacious wartime operation: the evacuation of 340,000 troops under fire from the beaches of northern France. The ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ as it became known, would change the course of the Second World War – and challenge the lifeboats of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to tackle a very different kind of rescue. Michael Buerk, long term RNLI supporter, tells how two volunteer lifeboat crews and 19 RNLI lifeboats joined an armada of little ships for one of the Second World War’s greatest rescues.
This is a recording of Ryan Lavelle’s talk at Chalke Valley History Festival on Thursday 28th June 2018.
Cnut, or Canute, was King of England for nearly 20 years, dying in Dorset in 1035. A formidable figure, Cnut is one of the great ‘what ifs’ in English history. Ryan Lavelle, one of this country’s leading experts on Viking England, gives a fascinating account of a powerful nation builder whose Viking Empire could have permanently shifted 11th century England’s orbit to Scandinavia.
Speaking at CVHF in 2017, Helen Rappaport looks at the Russian Revolution from an entirely new perspective – that of a wide range of foreign nationals living in Petrograd in 1917 who witnessed history being made on the streets. Through their eyes we see Russian history in the making, revealing the unravelling of the revolution over the course of one single year in the heart of the war-torn capital.
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